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Let’s Get Back to the Good Olde Days, When White Men Were Chosen Entirely on Merit

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You may remember Joseph Epstein as the purveyor of right-wing identity politics for people who consider Roger Kimball too nuanced and unrepetitive. You may also be aware of the conservative idea that there is only one objective standpoint, that of the white heterosexual straight male. So it may not surprise you to know that Epstein is the man to distill the latter idea into 180-proof self-parody:

Now have we come to the point where we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities but because of the accidents of their birth: because they are black, or women, or, one day doubtless, gay, or disabled—not, in other words, for themselves but for the causes they seem to embody or represent, for their status as members of a victim group?

This is the kind of thing that doesn’t really require refutation. Ditto his whining about the fact that people have the temerity to criticize an essay in which he wrote that “I have said that I think homosexuals curse, and I am afraid I mean this quite literally, in the medieval sense of having been struck by an unexplained injury, an extreme piece of evil luck, whose origin is so unclear as to be, finally, a mystery.” (It should go without saying that the essay is also larded with sub-Allan Bloom complaints about relativism on college campuses that Epstein, like so many others, has already written innumerable times.) But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Chait stepping up to the pinata:

Yes, that’s right. America used to elect presidents on “intrinsic qualities” rather than “accidents of their birth.” And this process resulted in the election of forty-three consecutive white men, an outcome Epstein must regard as an extreme coincidence. The last president to be elected on the basis of intrinsic qualities rather than accidents of birth was George W. Bush, whose birth circumstances, Epstein apparently believes, had no bearing upon his career trajectory.

[…]

In a larger sense, of course, the very existence of Epstein’s piece serves to disprove its thesis. If it is still possible for a white man to write an incoherent farrago of self-pity whose only shred of evidence directly undercuts its thesis, and have such drivel thrown onto the cover of a national magazine, then white men are probably still doing okay.

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