Ross Douthat is both malignant and a fool. I am not going near this article. However, I’m going to try to redeem a sliver of his apparent argument. Buckle up, though, because I’m asking you to entertain a notion that we would each prefer to reject out of hand if not some other anatomical idiom.
First, let’s clear Whiteness and Anglo Saxonness and Protestantness from the thesis. All three of these adjectives are granfaloons. The argument to follow could just as easily apply to any X Y Z. Fill in your own preferred granfaloons to make a comforting mental image. Wait, you pictured Donald Glover too? Remarkable!
I assume the thing Douthat has gotta be trying to do, no doubt in his trademark inept, click-baity manner, is harken back to Ye Olden Days of public-spiritedness in the first half of the 20th C American (as a self-conscious extension of the second half of the 19th C British) Ancien Regime. The thing that Fitzgerald alludes to when opening Gatsby:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
…
I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
More bluntly, Warren Buffett:
“If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”
In light of actual history, this seems a (1) obvious but (2) face-punch-worthy assertion. The Privileged, like every other cross-cut of humans, is rife with assholes, with the difference that when they are assholes their position allows them to do tremendous harm. But, again like every other sub-population of humans, there are gems among them, and the cover story of those Ol’ Timey American and British Aristos was they aimed to cultivate noblesse oblige in their offspring to Do Right. A sort of “Take Up the Rich Man’s Burden.”
Spoiler... in practice this often did not work out so well.
But sometimes it did, and I would place it as the textbook example of a noble sentiment within extremely ignoble parameters. As aspiration, it was about as laudable as one can get in defending a brutally unfair and dehumanizing class structure.
The basic idea is quite familiar to us through Doc Savage, James Bond, Batman, Ironman, or Buckaroo Banzai. Posit a Shining Yet Perhaps A Bit Fucked Up hero so privileged, talented, educated, and disinterested they are incorruptible. Release them into the world as free agents of The Good. Angels of our better nature, but in really spiffy clothes and at Ascot. Find a way to turn privilege into a virtue by weaponizing its invulnerability to the political and financial predators who plague the rest of humanity. Plato recommended the same strategy in his (extraordinarily tyrannical and not for a moment to be recommended) Republic. It is not a new idea.
Now, in actuality this was almost always more conceit than reality since most elites, like most non-elites, are mediocrities (80%), while some are outright cretins (10%). But… some (10%) actually walked the walk.
I personally don’t count GHWB among them. The guy who actively worked to let Saint Ronnie skate on Iran-Contra isn’t even barely minimally compliant with either patriotism or Constitutionalism. And therein lies Douthat’s partisan blindness. I’m sure he would likewise take exception to my textbook example of laudatory silver spoonery, FDR, for ideological reasons.
But the aspiration… well, as the popularity of our comic book heroes attests, it’s still very attractive. Infuse that spirit into those who emerge as leaders, but from a fully meritocratic and inclusive system, and I dare say we may have a winning idea.