waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind... Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Starting around 1910, state after state adopted sterilisation laws targeting the non-WASP ethnic strains. Other legislation sought to beat back genetic attrition. The Racial Integrity Act of Virginia rendered it illegal for blacks and whites to marry and reproduce.

By the 1920s, 39 states had adopted legislation prohibiting the marriage of feeble-minded people. There was a building boom in institutions designed to house the insane and feeble-minded around the country. The Minnesota Institute for Defectives had the responsibility "to keep the persons entrusted to our care until they are past the reproducing age".

Between 1880 and 1929, on one historical account WASP eugenicists were able to increase the number of unfit segregated in asylums four-fold; from 31,973 to 272,527 people. Hitler and his associates followed the WASPs' diligent efforts at ethnic cleansing with keen attention and delightedly studied the statutes WASPs rammed through Congress, most notably the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively barred immigrants from eastern and southern Europe.

Now we have just one lonely WASP sitting on the Supreme Court bench

In 1927, the United States became the first eugenic nation when the Supreme Court, led by that quintessential WASP, William H Taft, upheld the decision to sterilise the unfit in Buck v Bell by an 8-1 majority.

It was the high-water mark, even though compulsory sterilisation continued for many decades. But 80 years later we have just one lonely WASP, Stevens, in the Court and the incoming replacement for Souter (a childless WASP, generally assumed to be a closet case) a Hispanic woman, admittedly divorced and childless and living alone (thus allowing gays to infer hopefully that Judge Sotomayor replaces Souter as a representative of their orientation.)

The shock jock right-wing radio commentators furiously quote Sotomayor’s remark in a speech in Berkeley in 2001 that: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life".

Sotomayor also took a direct potshot at WASP eugenicist hero Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case."

The right is trying to claim that Sotomayor is a reverse racist, but this, like almost everything the right says these days, is not gaining any traction with the general population. What the right can't do is claim that Sotomayor is any sort of radical. She's not.

Her decisions have generally been pro-business and she owes her career on the federal bench to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who nominated her to the Appeals Court. Moynihan was of Irish descent, but he famously adhered to the WASP belief that an inherent "pathology" disfigured the black family in America.

WASP dominance is on the way out - but their social priorities are safe in the hands of the Catholics and Jews on the Court and Ms Sotomayor is no boat-rocker.