Philip Weiss, whom I once described as “a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them,” has a Mondoweiss column commenting on the collapse of WASP America (“WASP society is disintegrating“). It starts out with one of his WASP inlaws commenting on the decline his tribe. Weiss asked him if he “grieve[d] for its passing?”

No, he said. Things change. Orders change all the time. It’s the nature of society. And besides, we had a good run.

How broad-minded of him. “Oh, well. We lost fair and square. Life goes on.” I am sure he takes great pride in being known far and wide as tolerant, principled, and fair-minded–a moral paragon; an upstanding member of his community with an excellent reputation for honesty and fair play; an example to one and all; a virtual saint. Just the sort of guy you would want in your hunter-gatherer band of non-relatives during the Ice Age.

The bloodless (so far) coup made possible by valuing principles more highly than power comes to its fruition. In this he reminds me of Justice Paul Stevens‘ “strong sense of principle–even to the extent of making decisions that could not possibly be seen as helping his ethnic group.”

Such people do not think of the power of their ethnic group as a vital necessity in a world still fraught with ethnic conflict–including, most relevantly, the conflict between the new elite and the people they rule over. They don’t think of their loss of power as a catastrophic blow that will make them vulnerable to non-White ethnic coalitions with festering historical grudges against people like them. One of the characteristic flaws of WASPs, as noted by Eric Kaufmann, was to think that other peoples are “just like them,” so that the people who replace them will be just like them in the sense that they will uphold the same ideals. The republic will live on but with different faces–a utopian idea, to say the least.

An implicit (actually, often explicit) conceit of the Jewish ascendancy is that Jews created a meritocracy and thus elbowed out the WASPs who were given to snobbish networking and had little talent. Here Weiss discusses an English professor who had the misfortune to come along at a time when talent mattered. “The rules changed for academic advancement, the meritocracy came in, my friend was completely intimidated by that new way, and he absented himself. He frittered his life away,” but at least he was good a quoting Shakespeare.

Weiss mentions Elena Kagan as a symptom of the new, predominantly Jewish elite. During the her confirmation process, Prof. Noah Feldman sounded the meritocracy theme–as well as the theme of WASP dedication to principle:

Satisfaction with our national progress [by having 3 Jews on the Supreme Court and no WASPs] should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its greatest triumph. (See here.)

But this leads to the ultimate irony: Kagan is remarkably unqualified to be a Supreme Court Justice in terms of the usual standards: judicial experience, academic publications, or even courtroom experience–the Harriet Miers of the left; described by Senator Jeff Sessions asthe least experienced nominee “at least in the last 50 years.” Rather, all the evidence is that Kagan owes her confirmation to her Jewish ethnic connections (see also here). It must be nice to be appointed dean of Harvard Law by the egregiously corrupt and stridently Jewish Larry Summers after failing to show sufficient commitment to scholarship to be able to return to her position at the University of Chicago. Ethnic connections indeed.

The new elite is at least as corrupt as the old elite, and there is no reason at all to suppose that they are principled like their WASP forebears. In fact, from the standpoint of the universalist principles trumpeted by the Left, strong ethnic identifications so rampant among our Jewish elite are the very antithesis of principle—what’s good for the Jews and all that.

Weiss provides his theory of the rise of the Jews in the 1960s, openly challenging the WASP elites:

Much of the 60s rebellion had a political character, but some of it was social, too, against the WASP elite. At Columbia during the 60s rebellion, the students had researched their professors to find out how much of their income came out of the defense contractors. And a lot of those rebellious students were Jewish, their parents ran candy stores or other small businesses, and as SDS leader Mark Rudd said a few years ago (in this piece on Why there were so many Jews in the SDS), the administration offices at Columbia were “dripping with goyishness.” So there was a social component to that too, it wasn’t just about power.

Right. It was about power and about eradicating the culture of the old elite. It was ethnic displacement, decapitating American society and replacing its elite with a Jewish elite. (I made the same point citing the same Mark Rudd article in recounting my experiences on the left in the 1960s. A citation would be cool.)

Weiss goes on:

I wonder when people will begin to describe the new elite. We shy away from doing so because it engages issues of anti-semitism, but if you think of that self-contained WASP society, the only thing to contend with it, in term of social cohesion, is affluent Jewish society, the Jewish mandarins of New York and Washington. No one has given us a name– the media industrial complext? Writers like David Brooks avoid the subject because it would involve talking about the Israel lobby.

Well, I have been trying to describe the new elite–my usual phrase is Jews as a “hostile elite“–hostile to the traditional people and culture of America in a way that was completely foreign to the WASPs. It is also an elite that is absolutely dedicated to the welfare of a foreign country to which they have ethnic ties. The old elite may have had an attachment to England, but, after all, they represented a substantial percentage of the population; this attachment was rooted in the entire history of the US. The new elite is promoting the ethnic interests of a tiny percentage of the population with only a marginal role to play in American history until the early decades of the 20th century.

Weiss notes that the new elite has a “war under our belt”–casually and almost flippantly. It is common knowledge at this point that the war in Iraq was the work of the Israel Lobby, a war that has cost nearly a trillion dollars and thousands of (non-Jewish) dead and severely wounded. It is a true measure of the power of the new elite that Jewish involvement in this war remains in the nether world of the Internet, with even the book by two professors at elite academic institutions consigned to political irrelevance as Congress vacations in Israel and presidential candidates spar on the basis of who is more pro-Israel.

David Gerlernter provided a classic description of the old elite and its relationship to the country it ruled:

The old elite used to get on fairly well with the country it was set over. Members of the old social upper-crust elite were richer and better educated than the public at large, but approached life on basically the same terms. The public went to church and so did they. The public went into the army and so did they. The public staged simpler weddings and the elite put on fancier ones, but they mostly all used the same dignified words and no one self-expressed. They agreed (this being America) that art was a waste, scientists were questionable, engineering and machines and progress and nature were good. Some of the old-time attitudes made sense, some did not; but the staff and their bosses basically concurred.

I will quickly pass over the part about art and scientists which I think is at best oversimplified. The old elite revered science (e.g., establishing our great universities and lavishly funding scientific and medical research that enabled the modern world). If it disliked art, it was because art had become a squalid sinkhole long before the decline of the WASPs (e.g., Michael Colhaze and Lasha Darkmoon)–what one might term a leading cultural indicator of the preferences of the new elite and quite in tune with their hostility toward the traditional peoples and cultures of the West.

But Gerlertner is certainly right that “today’s elite loathes the nation it rules.” (Gerlertner mentions Jews as contributing to the new elite, but only as a marker [a symptom], nothing more. He conforms to the Jewish mantra that it’s all about meritocracy: “Jews are a dye marker that allows us to trace a new class of people as it moves into the system–a new class distinguished by intellect and not social standing.” One wonders why the new elite is hostile if it has nothing to do with the proclivities of its Jewish component and its long history of antipathy toward the non-Jewish world. Hostile elites are quite unlikely in a democratic, European-derived society that is basically ethnically homogeneous.)

And unlike the old elite which was the subject of innumerable Hollywood satires and the explicit hostility of Jews like Rudd, this new elite cannot say its name. Even describing it as predominantly Jewish is to invite inquisitions from powerful anti-White Jewish activist organizations with ominously close ties to the government and law enforcement–the ADL and the SPLC.

Weiss concludes:

But I can tell you from my own life’s arc, from Harvard and New York media/politics, that my Jewish world has the cohesion that my friend remembers about that self-contained WASP society. We have geography and manners (liberal voting, the Hamptons, Paul Krugman’s latest column, Tom Friedman, the Upper West Side, brunches and book clubs), we have a politics (abortion rights, gay rights, Elena Kagan writ large), we have culture (I could go on and on), and yes we have money (hedge funds). And a war under our belt too.

So we have a highly networked new elite (which claims that networking has nothing to do with their elite status) with its leftist culture and huge wealth. In the ideal world as imagined by Weiss’s inlaw, it doesn’t matter that this new elite is predominantly Jewish. The problem is the hostility thing–the result of traditional Jewish fear and loathing of Europeans and their cultures, itself resulting from the long history of conflict between Jews and non-Jews in Europe and in its descendant cultures. That makes the new elite very dangerous for White America, the main object of its loathing.

Returning to the quixotic inlaw, the attitudes of a very large number of like-minded Whites will cast a long, deadly shadow as we head into the future. All the research shows that ethnically divided societies are prone to conflict and have less of a civic sense — for example, people in ethnically divided societies are less likely to contribute to public goods like health care. The new elite is much more likely to act out their historical grudges against the White majority than to uphold WASP ideals and principles. Ethnicity matters.