Thread by @DouthatNYT

Quick Saturday thread on this entertaining Michael Lind exercise in explaining the recent arc of liberalism as the return of the WASPs:
tabletmag.com/sections/news/…

Lind stresses continuities; I would tell a somewhat similar story but stress disjunction more. I think the WASPs really did abolish themselves in the 1960s, and what has returned in social justice is an inheritor but not a resurrection.

You can under the transition from Yankee aristocracy to national meritocracy as mid-century WASPdom deciding that it had to die as a culture so that its institutions - the Ivy League above all - could not only sustain themselves but expand their power.

That move worked, and while it didn't do away with every trace of WASPdom, it was a bigger rupture than Lind's narrative suggests. The Social Register and the Presbyterian Church died or diminished so that Harvard could live:
amazon.com/Privilege-Harv…

That rupture also created a very materialist post-WASP elite culture, a shallow cosmopolitanism and a thin secularism, that in a period of crisis was ripe for re-theologization - which is what you're seeing happen, to some extent, with the Great Awokening:
nytimes.com/2020/07/07/opi…

But if that re-theologization includes a partial return of the repressed, a reanimation of impulses once contained in the Protestant Mainline, it's still much more post-Protestant, post-WASP, than a full revival of either tendency.

With apologies to Voltaire, it's hard to say that woke Ivy League progressivism is just WASPdom come again when it's neither white, nor Anglo-Saxon, nor Protestant.

Better to see it as bearing the relationship to the old Yankee order that liberalism bears to Christianity: There's a lineage there, common ideas and impulses, but the new thing is still different. The rupture in the 1960s was real. /end