It will become more obvious, as the last of the twentieth century’s major political figures pass away, that we are witnessing not only the end of a generation but the slow end of an age. Already, dutiful undertakers are hard at work primping it for burial. In the Times last Wednesday, the columnist Ross Douthat attributed the sombre mood surrounding the death of former President George H. W. Bush to angst about the passing of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from power. Douthat wrote, “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.”The writer Fareed Zakaria, eager to skirt the hostility that greeted Douthat’s piece—“Ross Douthat Dreams of White (Anglo-Saxon Protestant) Supremacy,” one headline read—framed a similar column in the Washington Post, last Thursday, almost apologetically. “For all its faults—and it was often...
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