Whither the WASP?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, April 25, 2021

 

So much for the abortive “America First Caucus” and the associated Republican rally for “unique Anglo-Saxon traditions.”

 

I am almost sad to see the project go, because I am damned curious which “unique Anglo-Saxon traditions” Tweedledum and Tweedledeeffinstupid had in mind. Thatched roofs, maybe?

 

The great traditions I can think of at the nexus of Anglo-Saxon people and the Republican Party mostly involve penny loafers and badminton rackets, martini shakers and quiet desperation. Granted, that all came rather late in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, around the time that great scholar of the American country-club set Digby Baltzell popularized the acronym WASP — “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” — as a shorthand for the ruling caste of his time.

 

That kind of Anglo-Saxon tradition was mostly associated with the clenched-jawed, Ivy League-educated epigones of New England Puritans rather than with beady-eyed peckerwood trash from below the gnat line, but we are living in upside-down times, when the self-appointed champions of the political and cultural traditions of the English-speaking peoples can barely speak the damned language themselves. They’ll give you an earful about Magna Carta, which, as a number of gigglesome commentators point out, was written in Latin for the benefit of a French-speaking aristocracy whose members, if asked, would have characterized Anglo-Saxon traditions as taking unspeakable liberties with sheep.

 

(And, of course, “Anglo-Saxons” and “Anglo-Saxonism” are in no small part an invention of the French political imagination.)

 

There are a few of those old-school WASPs out there, lurking in the shadows around the Merion Cricket Club, but the society they built is as dead as Stonehenge. The mood of the Republican Party is not so much Anglo-Saxon as Celtic, with every would-be member of the House of Representatives doing his best impersonation of William Wallace . . . as imagined by Mel Gibson.

 

These are lonely times for an Eisenhower man.

 

The United States was, at its founding, something new in the world, and it has never stopped trying to link itself to ancient traditions, whether in the form of the crypto-monarchical spectacle of the State of the Union address or in the ridiculously bombastic pseudo-classical architecture of our hideous capital city, with its looming phallic all-father monument in the Egyptian style and its assortment of knock-off Pantheons and Panthéons and Romanesque porticos and colonnades, a nouveau riche style for a nouveau riche nation. (“It’s the riche that counts.”) That regurgitative tendency has echoes even in our own contemporary private life, with moneyed Americans play-acting at royalty in the suburban Tudor palaces surrounding New York City and the Tuscan “estates” on the fringes of Austin.

 

It is not as though Americans do not have a grand architectural style of our own — I am writing this a few blocks from the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal, the parts of New York City I hope the alien archeologists will uncover when they land here and try to figure out whether there once was intelligent life on Earth. (I fear they will encounter only humanoid rats wearing fleece vests emblazoned with the McKinsey & Company logo.) A Midcentury Modern house in Southern California will tell you more about what actually made America great than any ten federal buildings in Washington or the monuments between them.

 

We love an Old World-style military parade, but the 1957 Bel-Air speaks better of us than an M1 Abrams tank does. Every little pissant country has a flag; we have the Fender Stratocaster, neon motel signs, Las Vegas, Run-DMC, Harley-Davidson, checkered Vans, and the Empire State Building. Our tradition is no less glorious for not being carved in marble.

 

But traditions are a funny thing, especially in a society such as ours, which is always unsure of itself when it comes to “the democracy of the dead,” fearful of violating our ever-more-ruthlessly enforced egalitarian norms. The same people who lecture AM-radio audiences about “Anglo-Saxon” traditions would start shrieking about “elitism” if you tried to make them read Beowulf.

 

If you speak earnestly of tradition, you can expect to hear the huffy and half-bright response: “Whose tradition?” Americans can’t consciously comprehend the nation’s roots for the same reason fish don’t know they’re wet. But we are, of course, as steeped in tradition as the archbishop of Canterbury.

 

It is perhaps the word “tradition” that presses all those sensitive buttons.

 

I recently saw a menu describing chicken cordon bleu as a “traditional French” dish, which is wrong on both counts: Cordon bleu is of Swiss origin and dates only to the 1940s, while chicken cordon bleu almost certainly was first cooked up in the United States — the earliest reference to it is in a 1960s New York Times advertisement for United Airlines (back when the words jet set unironically communicated glamour and airlines promoted their menus) and the dish shows its early postwar pedigree with its slap-some-cheese-on-it approach.

 

Tradition! It makes everything taste better. Traditional is used to mean respectable — even if the “tradition” in question is three minutes old.

 

In 2021, it is easy to forget just how poor Americans were within the lifetimes of many people now living, yet the evidence is everywhere to be seen, including in dishes such as chicken cordon bleu and Texas’s traditional chicken-fried steak, both of which are recipes built around disguising the low quality of the available protein. Your grandmother didn’t think Jell-O was funny at all — she thought it was a wondrous modern innovation, which it was, in its way. It probably did not occur to her to try to situate it within the span of Anglophone civilization — she knew how to be happy.

 

Just slather some melted Velveeta on it — that’s part of the “Anglo-Saxon” tradition, too, I suppose.  And that would make the proposed America First Caucus the chicken cordon bleu of political factions, perfectly suited to a Republican Party that at the moment insists on alternating between the hammy and the cheesy while fraudulently presenting itself as the heir of some grand, timeless European patrimony that turns out to be a gussied-up airline entrée, a TV dinner with pretensions.

 

Republicans are always accused of wanting to “turn back the clock” to the 1950s. (Except for the Catholic “integralists,” who want to turn back the clock to the 1450s, bless their pointy little heads.) And the Age of Pan Am did have some good things going for it, including a sense of style — one that emphasized just how far we had come from the mud huts of our Anglo-Saxon forebears. It was an unusual and unusually fruitful moment in which the exuberance of modernism mixed with the residual stoicism of the wartime experience, creating a culture that was oriented toward the future but sufficiently mindful of the past to be grateful for the present and its extraordinary blessings. Don’t get carried away, calm down, enjoy the chicken cordon bleu, have a Coke and a smile, or maybe a martini, and we’ll be landing at JFK in two hours.

 

The WASPs had certain civic virtues — thrift, crippling emotional repression — which they stirred into their gin. The Republican Party could do worse than to rediscover them.