WASPs: A Case of Stolen Identity

By the late Sixties, American opinion leaders openly encouraged the wholesale expropriation of WASP culture. Time magazine, for example, pointedly unhooked WASP identity from any particular race, religion, or ethnicity. In fact, America's leading newsweekly issued, in its most magisterial manner, a journalistic dispensation authorizing collective identity theft on a mass scale. "Ultimately," its middle class readers were informed, "Waspism may be more a state of mind, a pattern of behavior, than a rigid ethnic type." Since some "non-Wasps display all the characteristics normally associated with the most purebred Wasps," being "white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant" is not enough to make someone a Wasp in spirit." Signalling the final collapse of Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony, the magazine consigned the ethnoreligious signifier in an already "mildly offensive" ethnonym to lower-case orthography. "Waspism" was defined not as an ethnicity but as an upper-middle class lifestyle, the product not of British blood but of the "right education, style, social position, genealogy, achievement, wealth, profession, influence or politics." From the commanding heights of the corporate media, Time extended its blessing to a rapidly expanding class of "Waspirants" altogether bereft of ancestral ties to England.

The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race, Andrew Fraser (2011)

WASPs: People of Plenty

For more than two centuries, Americans were a people of plenty. They cast off the corruption of the Old World for a future of boundless abundance. That future is now receding into the past. The American Dream is fast becoming an air-conditioned nightmare complete with power outages. The long boom is over, America is browning, and the long emergency is unfolding. Dazed, disoriented, and increasingly despondent, homo Americanus now represents the senile face of defeat and decay. Americans who trace their bloodlines back to Britain now walk with the living dead, stranded in an alien nation far removed from their ancestral homeland.

The power and prestige once attached to old-stock Americans as the founding race of the Constitutional Republic ebbed away, leaving behind little more than an acronym conceived in acrimony, then sugar-coated and dressed as an empty Brooks Brothers suit--the WASP. Coined sometime in the 1950s as a snide epithet aimed at the patrician products of Ivy League colleges, the term can be stretched to include anyone anywhere descended from the indigenous peoples of Britain. As a collective noun, WASP refers to a mechanical aggregation of individuals rather than an organic social whole; ethnic solidarity is all but unknown among WASPs, especially those safely ensconced in the upper reaches of the mangerial-professional class. Not even the most highly-educated WASPs care that their own children remain ignorant of Anglo-Saxon ethnohistory. At best, the epigonal snobbery sustains the infant ethnoancestry industry tracking Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA back to the British Isles and beyond. Upper-class WASPs in America have presided "over the dissolution of their own dominion," leaving their less priviliged co-ethnics to face a future of public denigration and deliberate degredation. The language and institutions of the merely middle class WASP--his biocultural capital, indeed, the whole set of what a biologist might call his extended phenotype, a patriot his country, or a priest his faith--was socialized, commercialized and not infrequently vandalized by free riders of all colors and creeds.

The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race, Andrew Fraser (2011)

Imperial Closets: Studied Oldness (3)

'For the Bush inner circle of advisers, men such as Budget Director Richard Darman, Treasury Secretary Nick Brady and White House Counsel Boyden Gray, the look is Studied Oldness. This is the "This-sportcoat-was-handed-down-to-me-by-my-grandfather-when-I-was-at-Harvard" crew. The model here is Claiborne Pell, the blue-blooded Rhode Island senator who, at age 71, still wears suits that once belonged to his father. As Jim Pinkerton, an official in the White House domestic-policy office, describes the noblesse-oblige approach to dressing, "The trick is to wear an originally good-quality shirt until it falls off you and the sweat stains become like tree rings. You might even use a length of rope from your yacht as a belt. None of this upwardly mobile thing for you. You come from ten generations  of money, and now you're doing a little public service. You don't give a damn."'

'Read My Hips', GQ, August 1990

Imperial Closets: A Tall, Fit, Very American Kind of Build (2)

'President John Kennedy once joked that Washington is a city of northern charm and southern efficiency. The stereotypical image of the capital is that of the old, fat southern senator wearing his ice-cream suit on a hot summer day and fanning himself with a straw hat. Washington was built on a swamp, and there's still more seersucker here than anyplace outside Calcutta. The Dixie influence can also be observed among presidential aides at play, wearing their Alabama State or University of Virginia sweaters tucked into their sharply creased jeans.

But George Bush, who boasts a tall, fit, very American kind of build, wears the clothes of his class--and well. In an essay in The New Republic, Alessandra Stanley dubbed Bush's administration the Ralph Lauren Presidency, claiming Bush's imagemakers had exploited the value of a large and attractive Connecticut clan brimming with the WASP aesthetics and pseudo-English gentility that Lauren has been selling to middle-class Americans for over a decade. Crested blazers, polo shirts, tennis sweaters, faded natural fibres. "The Bushes came by their subdued fashion sense the old-fashioned way," Stanley wrote. "They inherited it."

So while the president scorns fashionable duds--he still picks up running suits at Sears--he does have a classic eastern-Establishment look that suits the office he holds. Bush picked up a snappier look during his 1988 run for the White House. Desperately trying to shake his elitist-preppy-wimp label, he shed his buttondown collars, half-rimmed glasses and striped watchband. Now he favours shirts of solid blue or of blue vertical stripes with white spread collars, and shops for himself at J.Press and, until recently, at Arthur A. Adler. (It is a frightening thought that, since J.Press is owned by Kashiyama, a Japanese manufacturing-and-distributing company, even the president of the United States has been taken over by the Japanese.)

With the exception of a certain pair of lime green golfing pants, the president looks his best when he sports Abercrombie & Fitch-style rugged wear. It's hard sometimes to tell which he likes best, the fishing and the hunting or the costumes that such hobbies require. The president never looks happier than when quail hunting in Beeville, Texas, as he does every Christmas, wearing snake-resistant boots, camouflage pants and a baseball cap from the local dog kennel, and toting a shotgun. This look appeals to his "kick-a-little-ass" self-image, the same side that likes beef jerky and pork rinds slathered in Tabasco sauce.

It must have been Bush's flair for colorful layering that inspired the look of a photo spread of the Bush family at Kennebunkport in the March issue of Paris Match, "le plus populaire de Presidents." In a shot in the living room, Bush is wearing black cowboy boots, cuffed gray trousers, a red T-shirt, a green polo shirt and a gray tweed sport coat with a burgundy stripe. In a shot in the kitchen, where he is helping Paula Rendon, the cook, make "un gâteau traditional," the president has changed to a blue-striped work shirt and a gray herringbone jacket over a red turtleneck. In a third shot, on his speedboat, the Ralph Lauren president is wearing a rust-colored polo shirt and a white Nike pullover with dark-green chinos.'

'Read My Hips', GQ, August 1990

Imperial Closets: Washington Sartorial Standards (1)

Power Preps

'Washington, D.C., knows a lot about power but very little about clothes. Dedicated to the conservative business of politics and devoid of any bohemian quarter to provide inspiration otherwise, the capital breeds conformity. Year after year, decade after decade, the uniform for men remains basically the same: a gray or navy single-breasted three-button suit, a white buttondown shirt and a red tie. The mainstream here is J.Press, Brooks Brothers and Garfinckel's. Hickey Freeman and Hart Schaffner & Marx are getting out on the edge. Flusser, Armani and Boss are still considered the domain of gigolos and New York investment bankers.

"Anyone who shows any individuality is deemed a fop, eccentric or dangerous," says John Buckley, a Republican political consultant. "The Brooks Brothers dress code that wouldn't be to the minimum standards of Wall Street is the outer envelope of what they wear in Washington. There are entire categories of buttons for buttondown shirts earmarked just for the Washington market. Pleats didn't hit this town until 1987.

Roger Stone may be the only man in Washington with enough chutzpah to mix politics with high fashion. The political consultant, an aficianado of double-breasted suits and an investor in the pricey new Alan Flusser made-to-measure boutique in the District, takes a harsh view of Washington sartorial standards: "We're talking high-water pants, too tight in the crotch, black socks down around the ankles with a lot of skin showing, jacket sleeves that come down and almost cover the knuckles--the sort of look that's big with Chinese leaders."

Designer Flusser, who's based in New York and who franchised the shop in Washington, defines the difference between the two cities more diplomatically. While New York and Washington are both in the Eastern Corridor, he says, New York has been influenced by the international trends and Washington by the "Virginia Ivy League" look. Just as the women wear what one wag calls "contrived Virginia"--outfits from Neiman Marcus, patent-leather flats with bows, gold Chanel jewelry, black velvet headbands and  Hermès scarves--so the men who work in the capital lean toward a Dixie interpretation of the preppy look. "In the southern influence, there is a bit more of the Fifties idea of traditional business garb,' Flusser says, adding compassionately, "I would have to call Washington a single-vented town."'

'Read My Hips', GQ, August 1990

The WASP Question (Andrew Fraser)

'The WASP Question is a groundbreaking contribution to the project of synthesizing Anglo-American constitutional and legal history with the evolutionary biology of ethnicity and a Christian ethno-theology. Fraser adds a new aspect to the modern ethno-pathology that now infects the Anglo-Saxon bioculture: “Civic patriotism cannot be sustained in multi-racial societies.” His radical critique of American constitutionalism exposes a major threat to the ethnic interests of America’s founding race—the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants who have since degenerated into an “invisible race” of deracinated WASPs.

Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and its modern deconstruction are intertwined with excursions into history and genetics. Fraser explores the religious dimension of ethnic group strategies in a plausible historical and evolutionary frame. Evolutionary biology lends this book a magisterial view looking back to ethnogenesis in the England of Alfred the Great, and looking forward to a world made human by postmodern tribal solidarity, including that of the scattered Anglo-Saxon nation. The result is a fresh analysis of the ethno-religious foundations of the English people.

The WASP Question is valuable for focusing attention on the plight of Anglo-Saxon societies assailed by runaway materialism and imposed diversity. The book articulates a role for national religions in defending populations of ethnic kin. For Anglo-Saxons, that role is fulfilled by the orthodox Christian doctrine of nations. Fraser’s appeal to a patriot king who can restore Anglo-Saxons’ biocultural identity and ethno-religious autonomy is a provocative alternative.

Agree or disagree with Andrew Fraser’s prescriptions, his combination of originality and scholarship deserves to find a place in literature dealing with ethnicity, nationalism, constitutional history, biosocial science, and advocacy for Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity and biocultural continuity. Be prepared to read, reread and ponder.'

Confessions of a Young WASP

Undying WASPs

Joseph Palmi: "We Italians have family. The Jews have tradition. What do you people have?"

Edward Wilson: "We have the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting."

The Good Shepherd (2006)