David Brooks goes for the meritocracy’s jugular
On Saturday, David Brooks’ NYT op-ed discussed what’s been lost with the decline of noblesse oblige and the WASPocracy: Unlike today’s top schools, which are often factories for producing Résumé Gods, the WASP prep schools were built to take the sons of privilege and toughen them into paragons of manly virtue. Rich boys were sent ...
On Saturday, David Brooks' NYT op-ed discussed what's been lost with the decline of noblesse oblige and the WASPocracy:
On Saturday, David Brooks’ NYT op-ed discussed what’s been lost with the decline of noblesse oblige and the WASPocracy:
Unlike today’s top schools, which are often factories for producing Résumé Gods, the WASP prep schools were built to take the sons of privilege and toughen them into paragons of manly virtue. Rich boys were sent away from their families and shoved into a harsh environment that put tremendous emphasis on athletic competition, social competition and character building. As Peter W. Cookson Jr. and Caroline Hodges Persell write in “Preparing for Power: America’s Elite Boarding Schools,” students in traditional schools “had to be made tough, loyal to each other, and ready to take command without self-doubt. Boarding schools were not founded to produce Hamlets, but Dukes of Wellington who could stand above the carnage with a clear head and an unflinching will to win.” As anyone who has read George Orwell knows, this had ruinous effects on some boys, but those who thrived, as John F. Kennedy did, believed that life was a knightly quest to perform service and achieve greatness, through virility, courage, self-discipline and toughness. The Protestant Establishment is dead, and nobody wants it back. But that culture, which George Bush and Howard Dean were born into, did have a formula for producing leaders. Our culture, which is freer and fairer, does not.
Needless to say, this poke at the meritocracy has prompted some vigorous reactions in the blogosphere, particularly from David Adesnik, Greg Djerejian, Innocents Abroad, and Adesnik yet again. As someone who’s generation is roughly between Brooks and these bloggers, let me chip in my two cents:
That’s a seriously debatable point. But it is an interesting debate.
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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