Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: il declino dei WASP e' il loro trionfo

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28feldman.html
FIVE years ago, the Supreme Court, like the United States, had a
plurality of white Protestants. If Elena Kagan — whose confirmation
hearings begin today — is confirmed, that number will be reduced to
zero, and the court will consist of six Catholics and three Jews.
It is cause for celebration that no one much cares about the nominee’s
religion. We are fortunate to have left behind the days when there was a
so-called “Catholic seat” on the court, or when prominent Jews
(including the publisher of this newspaper) urged President Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1939 not to nominate Felix Frankfurter because they worried
that having “too many” Jews on the court might fuel anti-Semitism.
But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget
its authors: the very Protestant elite that founded and long dominated
our nation’s institutions of higher education and government, including
the Supreme Court. Unlike almost every other dominant ethnic, racial or
religious group in world history, white Protestants have ceded their
socioeconomic power by hewing voluntarily to the values of merit and
inclusion, values now shared broadly by Americans of different
backgrounds. The decline of the Protestant elite is actually its
greatest triumph.
Like any ethno-racial or religious group, the population of white
Protestants is internally diverse. It would be foolish to conflate the
descendants of New England smallholders with the offspring of
Scandinavian sod farmers in the Middle West, just as it would be a
mistake to confuse the Milanese with the Sicilians, or the children of
Havana doctors with the grandchildren of dirt farmers from Chiapas, Mexico.
So, when discussing the white elite that exercised such disproportionate
power in American history, we are talking about a subgroup, mostly of
English or Scots-Irish origin, whose ancestors came to this land in the
17th and 18th centuries. Their forebears fought the American Revolution
and wrote the Constitution, embedding in it a distinctive set of beliefs
of Protestant origin, including inalienable rights and the separation of
church and state.
It is not as though white Protestants relinquished power quickly or
without reservation. Catholic immigrants, whether from Ireland or
Southern Europe, faced a century of organized discrimination and were
regularly denounced as slavish devotees of the pope unsuited to
democratic participation.
And, although anti-Semitism in America never had anything like the
purchase it had in Europe, it was a persistent barrier. Protestants like
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, a great president of Harvard in the early 20th
century, tried to impose formal quotas to limit Jewish admissions to the
university. The Protestant governing elite must also bear its own share
of responsibility for slavery and racial discrimination.
Yet, after the ideals of meritocratic inclusion gained a foothold,
progress was remarkably steady and smooth. Take Princeton University, a
longtime bastion of the Southern Protestant elite in particular. The
Princeton of F. Scott Fitzgerald was segregated and exclusive. When
Hemingway described Robert Cohn in the opening of “The Sun Also Rises”
as a Jew who had been “the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton,”
he was using shorthand for a character at once isolated, insecure and
pugnacious. As late as 1958, the year of the “dirty bicker” in which
Jews were conspicuously excluded from its eating clubs, Princeton could
fairly have been seen as a redoubt of all-male Protestant privilege.
In the 1960s, however, Princeton made a conscious decision to change,
eventually opening its admissions to urban ethnic minorities and women.
That decision has now borne fruit. Astonishingly, the last three Supreme
Court nominees — Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — are
Princeton graduates, from the Classes of 1972, ’76, and ’81,
respectively. The appointments of these three justices to replace
Protestant predecessors turned the demographic balance of the court.
Why did the Protestant elite open its institutions to all comers? The
answer can be traced in large part to the anti-aristocratic ideals of
the Constitution, which banned titles of nobility and thus encouraged
success based on merit. For many years, the Protestant elite was itself
open to rising white Protestants not from old-family backgrounds.
Money certainly granted entrée into governing circles, but education was
probably more important to the way the Protestant elite defined itself,
which is why the opening of the great American universities has had such
an epochal effect in changing the demographics of American elites.
Another key source was the ideal of fair play, imported from the
ideology of the English public schools, but practiced far more widely in
the United States than in the class-ridden mother country.
Together, these social beliefs in equality undercut the impulse toward
exclusive privilege that every successful group indulges on occasion. A
handful of exceptions for admission to societies, clubs and colleges —
trivial in and of themselves — helped break down barriers more broadly.
This was not just a case of an elite looking outside itself for
rejuvenation: the inclusiveness of the last 50 years has been the
product of sincerely held ideals put into action.
Interestingly, this era of inclusion was accompanied by a corresponding
diffusion of the distinctive fashion (or rather anti-fashion) of the
Protestant elite class. The style now generically called “prep,”
originally known as “Ivy League,” was long purveyed by Jewish and
immigrant haberdashers (the “J.” in the New Haven store J. Press stands
for Jacobi) and then taken global by Ralph Lauren, né Lifshitz. But
until the Protestant-dominated Ivy League began to open up, the wearers
of the style were restricted to that elite subculture.
The spread of Ivy League style is therefore not a frivolous matter.
Today the wearing of the tweed is not anachronism or assimilation, but a
mark of respect for the distinctive ethnic group that opened its doors
to all — an accomplishment that must be remembered, acknowledged and
emulated.
Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard and the author of the
forthcoming “Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of F.D.R.’s Great
Supreme Court Justices.”

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Bell'articolo, grazie.
PP

 zero, and the court will consist of six Catholics and three Jews.
La via da seguire.
-- 
*Sunspot*
No, I don't have a solution but I certainly admire the problem.

 > zero, and the court will consist of six Catholics and three Jews.
Manca un pirla e poi la Corte Suprema diventa IPI
PP

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Obama aveva proposto Persio ma gli altri non lo facevano entrare...
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