Louis Auchincloss, chronicler of high society, tells it like it is:

[T]he one criticism that rankles is that his subject matter represents a vanished world. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly,” he says, “and I’m still living in one! The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs – all the old clubs – are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbours are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today. Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about? I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”

“It is a myth,” he continues, that a once great and powerful class of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants has been pushed aside; the ruling class has simply eliminated the ethnic and religious bars to entry, and expanded. “Proust studied this very carefully,” he says. “He understood that society would take in anybody it wants.”

Yep—and it leaves out the rest of us so we can live in peace. Thank heavens!

Nick Gillespie falls for “the last remaining specimen of the WASP” meme here. But he can be forgiven: his father’s mother worked as a cook and servant for the Auchincloss family.