The death of the WASP elite is greatly exaggerated.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is using the death of President George H. W. Bush to mourn the caste the late president belonged to. Bush, Douthat argues, was an exemplary member of the old WASP elite whose rule has been replaced by a grasping and often incompetent meritocracy. “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,” Douthat asserts.

The WASP ascendency, he argues, faced a crisis of faith in the 1960s, surrendering to meritocracy. It would have been better if that ruling class had held on to power, albeit with a greater acceptance for diversity. Douthat lays out an hypothetical scenario:

... it’s possible to imagine adaptation rather than surrender as a different WASP strategy across the 1960s and 1970s. In such a world the establishment would have still admitted more blacks, Jews, Catholics and Hispanics (and more women) to its ranks … but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy, rather than under the pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit.” At the same time it would have retained both its historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism) and its more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism).

Douthat’s article makes little sense as history.

It’s true that the American elite is slightly more diverse than it was when George H. W. Bush went to Yale in the 1940s, but that change has only been at the margins. Bush’s own career (the son of Senator who became both president and the father of another president) shows that WASP power is alive and well. Members of the Bush family still occupy positions of power, as detailed in coverage of their patriarch’s funeral.

The term WASP—standing for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—is a bit anachronistic, since white Catholics are now very assimilated into white culture. If we recognize that white Catholics are now equal partners in WASP culture, then America remains a land overwhelming ruled by WASPs.

Ivy League schools—which still function to some extent as social gatekeepers in the United States—still have legacy admissions, giving a leg up to families like the Bushes. In 2017, a third of the incoming Harvard class falls under the “legacy” category. Nor, in an age of increasing inequality and stagnant social mobility, are members of the white working class more able to join the elite than in the past. The current ruling class is hardly characterized by openness to outside talent. Even though the incoming Congress is described as the most diverse ever, people of color only make up 102 members (or 19%) in a body of 535. The Trump White House is notoriously lacking in diversity. There is no black senior advisor in the current administration. There are only three black CEOs running Fortune 500 companies.

WASP power hasn’t disappeared, nor are the cultural developments Douthat decries all that new. He complains about the “exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism.” But Jane Addams, an uber-WASP, adhered to the Social Gospel tradition more than a century before Bush died. Henry Wallace, the WASP vice-president Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps the WASPiest of all Presidents, was an adherent to New Age spiritualism in the 1940s.

The proper response to Douthat’s column is not simply to list the genuine faults of the WASP elite, but also to note that this elite is still in charge: