In all these ways, at wholesale and at retail, meritocracy empowers the elite to dominate politics. Rather than responding to citizens “considered as political equals,” government dictates to the middle class and defers to the meritocratic elite. Meritocracy undermines democracy, elevating the working rich into a ruling class.
CORRUPTED BY MERIT
In addition to distorting the political process, meritocratic inequality also corrupts political ideals and debases the citizens who practice democratic politics. The moral insult implicit in meritocratic inequality haunts political life, making the rich complacent and the rest resentful. Elites detach from a society whose political support they no longer need and become immodestly sure of their own virtues. Meanwhile, the working and middle classes embrace populist anger and nativist resentment, rejecting expertise and institutions and assailing things foreign and unfamiliar. Inequality that is recognized as unjust can chasten those who enjoy its benefits and ennoble those who bear its burdens, as when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. answered bigotry with the lesson that “hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” But today, inequality that appears justified degrades both sides of the meritocratic divide.
Meritocracy most obviously corrupts elite values by encouraging the view, as Dryden wrote, “that he, who best deserves, alone may reign.” Less obviously but no less consequentially, meritocracy also makes elites at once defensive and complacent: excessively sensitive to harms associated with unmeritocratic discrimination, and numb to the harms produced by meritocracy itself.
On the one hand, meritocratic elites make prejudice that has no meritocratic gloss—based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality—into a cardinal and unforgivable sin that must be suppressed absolutely and without regard for the cost. Widely embraced norms that govern elite life in the everyday therefore require a degree of caution and moralism around identity politics that has no analog for the other parts of morality. Elite society forgives (and even ignores) selfishness, intemperance, cruelty, and other long-recognized vices, but bigotry and prejudice, if exposed, can end a career. Such moralism seems selective, out of sympathy with life’s complexities and confusions, and sometimes out of proportion to the harms at stake. Decent people outside the elite recognize that bigotry is wrong, but they tend to regard prejudice as an ordinary vice, like greed or meanness, to be condemned but also met with an apt indulgence for human frailty. Bigotry does cause immense individual and social harm, and charges that elite institutions—especially universities—succumb to political correctness can be politically motivated and are often made in bad faith. But they capture the important truth that elite denunciations of prejudice can be excessively hard and, partly for this reason, unduly brittle.
The elite’s intense concern for diversity and inclusion also carries an odor of self-dealing. Unlike other vices, prejudice attacks meritocracy’s moral foundations, raising the specter that advantage more broadly follows invidious privilege rather than merit. Meritocracy demands extreme vigilance against prejudice in order to shore up the inequalities it seeks to legitimate against their increasing size and instability. The elaborate and fragile identity politics that govern elite life follow inexorably from the elite’s meritocratic foundations.
On the other hand, meritocracy inclines elites to chauvinistic contempt or even cruelty regarding inequalities that cannot be cast in terms of identity politics. Political correctness does not denounce calling rural communities “backward,” southerners “rednecks,” Appalachians “white trash,” and the bulk of the United States “flyover country.” Indeed, considered elite opinion as commonly rationalizes as condemns these slurs: a widely read essay in the National Review, for example, recently attacked white working-class communities as “economically . . . negative assets,” as “morally . . . indefensible,” and as “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles,” before concluding that “they deserve to die”; and a columnist for the New York Times, after observing that immigrants outperform native-born Americans in meritocratic competitions, called native-born citizens “the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning” and proposed (now tongue-in-cheek) that only mass deportations of the native-born could save America. Even politicians—in spite of all the costs of giving offense—show open contempt for the middle and working classes: Paul Ryan divided the world into “takers” and “makers”; Mitt Romney similarly complained that Americans who “are dependent upon government” oppose “tak[ing] personal responsibility and car[ing] for their lives”; Barack Obama suggested that “bitter” working-class conservatives “cling” to guns, religion, and prejudice in order to preserve their self-respect in the face of failing to hold their own in economic (read meritocratic) competition; and Hillary Clinton branded half of Donald Trump’s supporters a bigoted “basket of deplorables.”
Indeed, meritocracy extends these insults even to the few middle-class Americans whom elite institutions admit into their caste. The groups of “first-generation professionals” that middle-class students at top universities form frame themselves as “affinity groups” on the model of identity politics based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. But the middle class stands in a starkly different identity relation to the elite from any of these other groups. A genuine embrace of diversity and inclusion allows an elite institution to tell black, or female, or gay students that while its culture is not perfect, it is committed to welcoming them on their own terms and supporting their authentic selves. But top universities cannot say anything like this to their middle-class students. Rather, they say the reverse: their meritocratic ideals and their business models require elite universities to overwrite their middle-class students’ original identities and make them elite. It would be offensive almost beyond belief for Yale Law School to tell its black students, “Come study with us, and we will make you white.” But Yale—for structural reasons that it cannot avoid—openly proposes to erase its first-generation professional students’ middle-class identities.
Meritocratic exclusion now approaches, in its statistical effects, the racial exclusion that scars American life. Yet when meritocracy declares its inequalities just, it licenses elites simultaneously to worry endlessly about identity politics and to embrace attitudes that, in myriad ways, flatly insult the idled working and middle classes.
NATIVISM AND POPULISM IN THE MIDDLE CLASS
Meritocratic inequality also corrupts political values outside of the elite, by generating resentments whose danger matches the elite’s complacency. Americans who do not enjoy the benefits that meritocracy confers on the elite nevertheless remain subject to meritocracy’s charisma. They succumb to the meritocratic embrace of skill and effort and the meritocratic association between industry and honor, only now as a frontal assault on their self-worth. Every meritocratic innovation confronts the middle class as another instrument of its abandonment, and every meritocratic embrace of diversity and inclusion confronts the middle class as reconfirming its exclusion.
A wounded dignity corrupts working- and middle-class values in ways that almost perfectly mirror the moral corruption of the elite. Where elites overdo the politics of personal identity, Americans outside the elite embrace nativism. And where elites valorize the credentials and institutions that constitute meritocratic success, Americans outside the elite lash out against the establishment and embrace populism.
When it frames inequality as justified, meritocracy deprives those at the bottom of an oppressor against whom to assert high-minded claims to justice. Moreover, the meritocratic elite’s admiration for identity politics, coupled with its open contempt for mid-skilled labor, inflames resentment against minority groups among disrespected whites. Malignant nativism follows inexorably from this pattern, capturing the ideological position occupied by those trapped at the bottom end of rising meritocratic inequality and made by meritocracy to feel rejected, in favor of strangers, by their own land. Nat
ivism is, like every ressentiment, an “anesthesia” or “narcotic.” It deadens the internalized shame of nominally justified social and economic exclusion.
To make matters worse, meritocracy—precisely because it justifies economic inequalities and disguises class—denies ordinary Americans any high-minded language through which to explain and articulate the harms and wrongs of their increasing exclusion (and feeds into white racial anxieties whose roots reach all the way back into the slave-owning settler society of the colonial era). They become “victims without a language of victimhood.” Those who cannot succeed in meritocratic competition therefore give their complaints the only frame that meritocracy permits, by constructing an identity politics of their own. Rising nativist assertions of white, male, heterosexual, or Christian identities—and rising complaints that the elite discriminates against these identities—follow inexorably from meritocratic inequality’s economic structure and ideological limitations.
Meritocracy makes the whites whom it leaves behind into nativists by allowing them literally no place else to go. A white middle-class voter in Indiana, reflecting on Donald Trump’s appeal, recently explained that “the whole idea” of white privilege irritates whites outside the elite “because they’ve never experienced it on a level that they understand. You hear privilege and you think money and opportunity and they don’t have it.” The meritocratic suggestion that a white man who cannot get ahead must be in some way deficient stokes this anger (not least because meritocracy’s charisma makes those who are left out feel deficient). And the meritocratic fixation on diversity and inclusion channels the anger into nativist, sexist identity politics. The Indiana voter continued, “And you’ve got people calling them stupid and deplorable. Well how long do you think you can call people stupid and deplorable before they get mad?” When pressing needs are blocked from expressing themselves as claims of justice, they express themselves as claims of injustice.
Furthermore, meritocracy naturally produces not just nativism but also populism—a deep and pervasive mistrust of expertise and institutions. Because meritocracy identifies skill and expertise with elites, it condemns middle-class workers who accept the value of knowledge and training to internalizing their own exclusion and degradation. Resistance against meritocratic inequality—and even self-respect in the face of meritocratic exclusion—requires rejecting the institutions and the expertise through which meritocracy operates.
This logic receives a concrete expression in the fact that class resentments in America aim at the professional classes rather than at the entrepreneurial or even hereditary super-rich: not at oligarchs but rather at the doctors, bankers, lawyers, and scientists that working- and middle-class Americans feel, in the words of a much-discussed essay, “are more educated” and “are often looking down on them.”
This focus mystifies professionals but in fact accurately reflects meritocratic inequality’s economic and social structure. The professional class, together with the institutions (schools and firms) that train and deploy professionals, administers the meritocratic system that excludes the working and middle classes from income and status. The professional class reconstructs work and production to enforce idleness on all but superordinate workers, even as it also (and in the same breath) valorizes industry. Elite education therefore does not just advantage those who get it but also harms those who do not, by making middle-class training and skills unproductive. The gloss on the glossy jobs accounts for the gloom over the gloomy ones.
Ordinary citizens stand in a very different relationship to the super-rich. The super-rich may of course become rich without desert (as when they inherit) or even through nefarious means (as by exploiting the vulnerable). But any burdens that their wealth imposes remain idiosyncratic. Oligarchs may as it happens exploit the middle class, but they do not embody the norms and practices that underwrite the systematic domination by the rich over the rest. And ordinary citizens encounter the super-rich only in the fantasy lands of lifestyle magazines and reality television. One might even say that the super-rich escape working- and middle-class resentment precisely because they approach meritocracy at a skew angle: their privilege is not justified by the meritocratic order that sustains inequality generally, so that ordinary people can object in a more dispassionate or high-minded register, or decide simply to let the matter go. The rule that meritocratic inequality generates angry and low-minded resistance precisely on account of claiming to be justified does not apply to oligarchs. Indeed, starting a business permits economic success outside of elite institutions, and without class betrayal. Small wonder, then, that the middle-class ideal of prosperity is not to become a professional but rather to own a company.
Meritocratic inequality leads to mistrust not just of particular professions or institutions, but also the general idea of the rule of law and the associated idea that both private and public life should be regulated impersonally, by institutions and their officials, rather than by the personal authority of a charismatic leader. Due process and the rule of law underwrite the scale-blind approach to property that meritocratic income and wealth defense so successfully exploit, including to frustrate democratic efforts to redistribute through generally applicable taxes and regulations. Advanced meritocratic inequality therefore makes the meritocratic elite itself a political special interest and transforms due process and the rule of law into political tools wielded by elites, effectively as instruments of class warfare. Once again, for the rest to elevate rule-of-law institutions above democratic self-government is effectively to accept the legitimacy of their own disempowerment. Populism is not a spontaneous eruption of malevolent resentment but rather a natural and even apt reaction to extreme meritocratic inequality.
Meritocracy is therefore far from innocent in the recent rise of nativism and populism. Instead, nativism and populism represent a backlash against meritocratic inequality brought on by advanced meritocracy. Nativism and populism express the same ideological and psychological forces behind the epidemic of addiction, overdose, and suicide that has lowered life expectancy in the white working and middle class. The analogy takes the measure of the present political risk. These forces will lash out no less virulently than they turn in.
THE CLASS WAR HEATS UP
The politics of the moment puts meritocratic inequality’s democratic pathologies vividly on display.
An overconfident elite and a demoralized population, in a vain effort to abate rising meritocratic inequality, embraced decades of financialized production and debt-financed consumption, culminating in the recent financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession. Meritocracy also led President Barack Obama to address the crisis through technocratic excellence and without a political reckoning—without assigning blame through criminal prosecutions and, more important, without subduing the financial sector or suppressing meritocratic inequality. Indeed, the Obama administration’s internal composition embodied the meritocratic ideal: Obama rose from modest origins, yet he is not self-made but was rather propelled to success by a series of elite institutions, including Columbia College and Harvard Law School; and his all-star first cabinet, dominated by Ivy Leaguers, included Rhodes and Marshall scholars and even a Nobel laureate. These credentials, moreover, signaled real capabilities. The administration, playing to its meritocratic strengths, steadied the economy and restored economic growth (including, although more slowly, employment growth).
President Obama won reelection, and an elite whose hubris and greed were widely blamed for the crisis appeared, by recommitting to its core principles, to have redeemed itself. The recession ended, prosperity returned, and the nation’s mood rebounded, to reassert America’s familiar optimism. Even the opposition against Obama, which had threatened, through Sarah Palin’s place on the 2008 Republican presidential ticket and the rise of the Tea Party, to open a populist front in American politics, seemed to recommit to the meritocratic status quo. The Romney-Ryan ticket that Obama defeated to win reelecti
on presented the country with alternatives that, familiar partisan disagreements aside, could hardly have been more congenial to the incumbent ruling class. In all these ways, Barack Obama’s 2012 victory set a high-water mark for American meritocracy.
The crisis had not passed, however, and meritocracy’s redemption proved illusory. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—openly populist candidates who campaigned aggressively against the status quo—seized the initiative in both primaries leading up to the 2016 presidential election. When defensive political insiders dismissed the populist uprisings as a “summer of silliness,” they betrayed their own wrong-footed confusion. Even after Trump became the Republican nominee, the establishment that he defined himself against remained in denial over his rise. Elites insisted that Trump could not possibly assemble a winning coalition of general election voters. The director of the Princeton Election Consortium declared (in the week of the election, no less) that Trump would not win more than 240 electoral votes and vowed to “eat a bug” if he did. But political professionals proved blind to the approaching upheaval, and an inward-looking and disenchanted elite could not stop the populist wave that elected Trump president.
Trump’s repudiation of the incumbent elite set the election’s master narrative. He struck stridently nativist and populist chords throughout his campaign, and he concluded with a widely televised advertisement taking aim at “a failed and corrupt political establishment.” Trump’s repudiationism succeeded by shifting the political frame—by winning the election’s argument, to create a new politics.
On the eve of Trump’s victory, the U.S. military remained unmatched and effectively unchallenged; American diplomats and businesses dominated the world’s legal and economic order; the poverty rate approached historic lows; the labor market neared full employment; crime remained below historic levels; and the country’s standard of living neared an all-time high. Even if not booming, America remained tolerably healthy, comparing favorably to other countries in the present and also, in important ways, to its own past. Nevertheless, Trump relentlessly attacked the society that he sought to lead. He lamented the depletion of American military might and denounced undefended borders. He accused government of squandering American wealth and dissipating the nation’s treasure across all the rest of the world. He portrayed a country ravaged by poverty, industrial decline, failing schools, and epidemic crime. Improprieties—subplots concerning computer hacking and foreign interference—may have swung an essentially tied election Trump’s way. But this required his achieving the tie to begin with. The most remarkable thing about Trump is not that he did win but that he could have won—that he successfully imposed this dark vision on the political imagination of the most powerful and prosperous nation in the world, often against conventional wisdom, common sense, and objective facts.
The Meritocracy Trap Page 10
