It will become more obvious, as the last of the twentieth century’s major political figures pass away, that we are witnessing not only the end of a generation but the slow end of an age. Already, dutiful undertakers are hard at work primping it for burial. In the Times last Wednesday, the columnist Ross Douthat attributed the sombre mood surrounding the death of former President George H. W. Bush to angst about the passing of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from power. Douthat wrote, “Put simply, Americans miss Bush because we miss the WASPs—because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.”

The writer Fareed Zakaria, eager to skirt the hostility that greeted Douthat’s piece—“Ross Douthat Dreams of White (Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Supremacy,” one headline read—framed a similar column in the Washington Post, last Thursday, almost apologetically. “For all its faults—and it was often horribly bigoted, in some places segregationist and almost always exclusionary,” he wrote, “at its best, the old WASP aristocracy did have a sense of modesty, humility and public-spiritedness that seems largely absent in today’s elite.” By contrast, he argued, the products of today’s nominal meritocracy run on a “treadmill of achievement, so they are constantly moving, looking out for their own survival and success.” In his Sunday column, Douthat agreed, writing, “On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy’s vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.”

It may well be true that today’s meritocracy is largely illusory—a veil we’ve cast over structural inequities to flatter and comfort ourselves. It does not follow that Wasp rule was better. For starters, pinning down what precisely the “old WASP aristocracy” is or was is rather difficult. The Kennedys, a family of wealthy patricians and politicians with a home on the Cape and all the rest of the cultural signifiers of the Wasp élite, were Irish Catholics. The Roosevelts were of Dutch descent. Do the Dutch count? The Rockefellers were of German descent. Do Germans count? If so, the Trumps are Wasps as well, which, to put it mildly, complicates the picture.

What gave Wasps claim to the particular characteristics that Douthat and Zakaria ascribe to them? Douthat argues that the Wasp ruling class, at its peak, was animated by “a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety.” Zakaria says that they were defined by “modesty, restraint, chivalry, [and] social responsibility.” But these are qualities, as Douthat acknowledges, also embodied by non-Wasps like Barack Obama, a product of the meritocracy Douthat criticizes. Both Douthat and Zakaria resolve this problem by insisting that although what Douthat calls the “WASP virtues” meaningfully defined the Wasps as a class, they can also be emulated or “imitated” by other people. There is, of course, another possibility: that Anglo-Saxon blood and Protestantism are not necessary or meaningful prerequisites for public-mindedness or a moderate disposition, and that these qualities have been possessed by many kinds of people for thousands of years, well before the first English Protestants set foot in what would become the United States.

The Wasp record has been decidedly mixed. “Today, chief executives and other elites pay themselves lavishly, jockey for personal advantage and focus on their own ascendancy,” Zakaria complains in his column, in contrast to the noble and fading Wasp ruling class. But the period of American history in which the northeastern Wasps of popular convention exercised the most control over American political and economic life was the wildly unequal Gilded Age, defined by the naked and unrestrained avarice of comically venal politicians and robber barons, whose major contributions to civic life were borne out of guilt and the need to manage public relations. And, as Douthat and Zakaria know, African-Americans, Native Americans, Eastern and Southern Europeans, the Chinese, Catholics, Jews, and downtrodden workers of all stripes were repressed, not infrequently through violence. Wasps were overrepresented in public life not because they possessed a unique capacity to lead well but because they shut out everyone else.

There is nothing especially special about the Wasps; their demise is itself proof of this. In their infinite wisdom and hereditary prudence, they themselves created the flawed meritocracy that Douthat and Zakaria believe has led us astray. They have fared poorly in the contests for public approval that have ensued—if Americans truly “missed” Wasps, one imagines, they would be electing more rather than fewer of them to office—and have lost much of their grip on America’s back rooms and boardrooms. But their legacy endures. We live fully within the grand ruling consensus that the Wasps forged—under liberal democracy, capitalism, and a global order umpired by the United States. If it is true that the Wasps’ successors do not govern us well, it seems relevant that they are governing us by the rules the Wasps wrote.

It is true, though, that the tone of those deeply mourning Bush, and John McCain before him, has something to do with the diminished place not only of Wasps but of moderate American élites, who genuinely do seem wistful about their reign. They are beset on their left and right by those who want to see them overthrown. And yet those élites share with the populist right, which they claim to abhor, certain fundamental premises and attitudes—chiefly a deep reverence for our collective past and the white Americans who shaped it. What are lamentations about the overthrow of the Wasp ruling class, really, beyond calls for us to “Make America Great Again”—to invest in restoring something of what once was, rather than imagining what could be?

It may be the case that moderate élites have been pleading so fervently for empathy and understanding for the populist right in part because they, too, fear being set aside by a new moral and demographic status quo: the phrase “white racial anxiety” describes columnists quaking over minority activism at a handful of American colleges just as well as it does Trump voters eager for updates on the migrant caravan. Obsolescence would be a sorry fate for a class that convinced itself that it had constructed the best and the last sociopolitical regime. But the fact that moderate élites could not conceive of a better world never meant that one wasn’t possible. And the fact that they cannot imagine better leaders than the Wasps doesn’t mean that history will not produce them.