In the end, Trump carried key traditionally Democratic states, drawing decisive strength from a group of voters who had supported Barack Obama. Obama’s 2012 triumph seemed to belong to another era. And the “silliness” that elites mocked over the summer of 2015 matured into a winter of discontent, with no spring in sight.
The whiplash between 2012 and 2016 baffles the elite. Trump’s victory leaves observers who found it unimaginable feeling as if they inhabit a different world from the one they thought they lived in. Trump’s censorious inaugural address reduced the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, to a confused curse: “That was some weird shit,” he reportedly said. To comfort themselves, elites focus on idiosyncrasies of Trump’s person and treat him as an exception to ordinary politics.
But the whiplash deceives, and Trump reflects rather than defies the laws of politics. Presidents Obama and Trump owe their elections not to unrelated forces, drawing strength from separate worlds, but rather to a balance of interlocking and closely matched forces in a single world. Both presidencies spring from the same source—an American meritocracy that preceded Obama’s arrival on the political scene and will endure long after Trump departs. Indeed, both Obama and Trump are less causes and more consequences—specifically of meritocracy. Obama—a superordinate product of elite education—embodied meritocracy’s triumph. Trump—“a blue-collar billionaire” who announces “I love the poorly educated” and openly opposes the meritocratic elite—exploits meritocracy’s enduring discontents.
Trump rode rather than raised the wave of anger that elected him. His repudiationist campaign unmasked meritocracy’s false hopes and channeled its profound discontents. The precarious middle class that meritocratic inequality most disadvantages was also hungriest for a candidate who “under[stood] the depth of [their] disillusion with [the] country.” These voters, as J. D. Vance observes, “believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them,” and they resent elite meritocratic opinion—for example, Michelle Obama’s parenting advice about good nutrition—“not because [they] think she’s wrong but because [they] know she’s right.”
When these voters heard the bipartisan elite condemn Trump as boorish or unfit for office, they knew that the elite thought the same of them. Sixty-four percent of Trump voters agreed with the statement, “Over the past few years, average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.” At the same time, just 12 percent of Trump voters agreed that “over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.” (Fifty-seven percent of Clinton voters agreed with both statements.) A journalist who interviewed countless Trump supporters in Ohio reports that they all shared a “profound contempt for a dysfunctional, hyper-prosperous Washington that they saw as utterly removed from their lives.” Trump’s political supporters, that is, distinctively feel mistreated and believe that undeserving others are treated better. They seize the chance to rescue a longed-for past—in Trump’s words, to “Make America Great Again.”
Trump eventually won white voters without college degrees by 39 percentage points. He also won his largest vote shares among voters of all races with some college but no degree and among voters with annual incomes between $50,000 and $100,000—precisely the precarious middle class that meritocratic inequality most disadvantages. Trump won the fifty least educated counties by nearly 31 percent (beating Romney’s 2012 vote shares in these counties by 10 percent), while he lost the fifty most educated counties by a 26 percent margin (a drop of nearly 9 percent over Romney’s 2012 results). Whereas educated professionals embraced Clinton as one of their own and disparaged Trump as a buffoon, the middle class found her elaborate qualifications off-putting and sympathized deeply with Trump’s rejection of expertise. A Trump-supporting businesswoman in St. Clair Shores, reacting to a refutation of the common claim that he was first in his class at Wharton, said simply, “Of course he wasn’t; he’s so normal.”
Work influenced voting as powerfully as education. Workers whose jobs required routine labor dramatically favored Trump, while those whose jobs required creativity and expert analysis equally dramatically favored Clinton: Trump won counties in which over 50 percent of jobs are routine by over 30 percent, while he lost counties in which under 40 percent of jobs are routine by roughly the same amount. When it exalts elite jobs and degrades middle-class ones, meritocracy creates a new partisan politics of work—setting elites who derive their self-worth from work against a middle class that derives its self-worth outside of (and even in opposition to) work. Clinton’s professionalism plugged into one side of the politics, while Trump’s unprofessionalism plugged into the other.
The outward anger that elected Trump unsurprisingly also tracked the inward anger behind rising middle-class mortality. Trump recorded many of his biggest advances over Mitt Romney’s vote shares from 2012 in counties worst hit by the opioid epidemic. St. Clair Shores, which in 1960 delivered Kennedy an optimistic 25 percentage point landslide, gave Trump an angry 10 percentage point victory in 2016.
Finally, Trumpism—and Trump’s own rise—exposes the incumbent elite’s meritocratic contempt for ordinary citizens and its own disenchanted weakness. Although elites resolutely opposed Trumpism, they lacked the vitality needed to sustain an alternative, more sanguine vision of American politics writ large. The effort, anxiety, and conceit of meritocratic success tempt the rich to sanctimony and blind them to middle-class concerns and resentments. When Hillary Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” she said aloud what the broad elite, regardless of party, had long thought in private. Indeed, Trump’s rise not only reconfirmed but redoubled the condescension that elites feel toward the Americans whom meritocracy excludes. The National Review essay that called white working-class communities “economically . . . negative assets” added that “Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.” Trump won the presidency in spite of capturing the smallest share of college-educated voters of any winning candidate since 1980. Palo Alto went for Hillary Clinton by nearly 70 percentage points.
In all these ways, meritocratic inequality inverts the midcentury relationship between economics and politics—between capitalism and democracy.
At midcentury, equality in each sector reinforced equality in the other: democratic citizens, acting as political equals, insisted on government policies that promoted economic equality and the common good; and widely dispersed and roughly equal private ownership checked private power and in this way preserved democratic political equality. This was Thomas Jefferson’s dream, captured in his 1776 draft for the Virginia Constitution, which combined widespread suffrage with constitutionally guaranteed land grants for all potential voters.
Today, by contrast, inequalities in each sector compound inequalities in the other. The meritocratic mechanisms that drive economic inequality forward also generate a comprehensive and politically empowered elite. Louis Brandeis, commenting on an earlier era of economic inequality, is said to have insisted that “we can have a democratic society or we can have concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.” Jefferson’s dream is being displaced by Brandeis’s nightmare, as an American past born out of the hope for combining political and economic equality rapidly converges on an American future that achieves neither.
MERITOCRACY UNMASKED
The meritocracy trap has no single face. A genuine but unwinnable competition excludes working- and middle-class adults from the charismatic center of economic life, denies them the income and dignity that come with earning a good living, and blocks working- and middle-class children from the educations required to get the jobs that their parents are denied. A brilliant vortex of training, skill, industry, and income holds elites in thrall, bending them from earliest childhood through retirement to an unrelenting discipline of meritocratic production that alienates superordinate workers from their labor, so that they exploit rather than fulfill themselves and eventually lose aut
hentic ambitions that they might ever fulfill. And a web of disaffection and mistrust isolates the rich from the rest and entangles both classes in a callous and vengeful politics, in which each side seeks to dominate the other and goodwill surrenders to bad faith. In all these ways, meritocratic inequality produces pervasive discontent and deep-seated anxiety.
These observations collectively recast meritocracy in a new and revelatory light. They see through meritocracy’s pretenses—to promote the common good and apportion advantage according to desert—and expose a corrupt core.
A comprehensively isolated elite monopolizes not just status and income but also political power. The elite transmits its caste to its children, to create dynasties that extend across generations. Moreover, feedback loops connect elite education and superordinate labor—the mechanisms through which the meritocratic elite both sustains and justifies its advantage. Super-educated innovators restructure work and production to favor the elite skills of superordinate workers; these workers deploy their immense incomes to make exceptional investments in their children’s educations; the children become the next generation of innovators and superordinate workers; and the cycle continues without end. The feedback loops both create elite skills and sustain the conditions that make elite skills so productive and superordinate workers who possess them so highly paid.
The qualities that meritocracy designates and rewards as merit are therefore neither natural nor necessary virtues. The skills possessed by a banker at Goldman Sachs, or an executive at Viacom, or a lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton were worth virtually nothing in an agrarian economy. They were worth much less at the middle of the last century than they are today. And they are so valuable today largely on account of developments—a financialized economy, delayered management, and an active, heavily legalized market for corporate control—that are themselves products of economic inequality (and, in some cases, were directly invented by the firms that the workers now serve). Superordinate labor, that is, produces economic value and qualifies as meritorious only in the shadow of a highly complex, profoundly contingent set of social and economic conditions—with prior economic inequality at their core.
American meritocracy has become precisely what it was invented to combat: a mechanism for the concentration and dynastic transmission of wealth, privilege, and caste across generations. A social and economic hierarchy with these comprehensive, dynastic, and self-referential qualities has a name: an aristocracy. And meritocracy does not dismantle but rather renovates aristocracy, fashioning a new caste order, contrived for a world in which wealth consists not in land or factories but rather in human capital, the free labor of skilled workers.
Industry displaces breeding as the ground of privilege, and meritocratic education displaces aristocratic inheritance as the central dynastic technology. Elite skills are hard-won in the new order, and superordinate workers’ industry is real, just as breeding and manners once set aristocrats genuinely apart. Like aristocracy, moreover, meritocracy purports to construct a social order that is not simply unequal but justly unequal. And as aristocracy’s ideals once did, so meritocracy’s claims about virtue and desert today persuade not just the privileged elite but also—ambivalently and unhappily, to be sure—the many whom meritocracy excludes.
But merit’s allure is an illusion. Because the meritocrat’s skills are valuable only against a backdrop of prior economic inequality, efforts to justify inequality based on the value, or merit, of these skills succumb to the fallacy of circular reasoning. Like the aristocratic values that it replaces, merit is not a natural or universal virtue but rather the upshot of prior inequalities. Merit is an artificial construction, built to valorize the exploitation of human capital, and, in this way, to launder an otherwise offensive distribution of advantage.
Part Two
How Meritocracy Works
FOUR
THE WORKING RICH
In the Roaring Twenties, in the aristocratic world of P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, the affable gentleman Bertie Wooster is asked if he works. “What, ‘work’? As in honest toil, you mean,” he answers, bemused. “Hewing the wood and drawing the old wet stuff and so forth? Well, I’ve known a few people who’ve worked. Absolutely swear by it, some of them.” In Wooster’s and Wodehouse’s world—set mostly in London (although some in New York)—it was essential to wear just the right suit, grown men devoted their greatest energies to cultivating newts or collecting porcelain cows, and nobody worked. The elite had transformed work itself into a hobby—an eccentric resort cure, taken up as recreation. Actual industry was unimaginable.
Meanwhile, ordinary people toiled without reward. Poverty—grinding, inhumane, absolute deprivation—dominated life outside the elite. In the 1920s, widespread poverty made the aspiration to put “a chicken in every pot,” modest as it sounds, into a political rallying cry. The Great Depression produced breadlines, and reasonable estimates suggest that in the early 1930s, more than half and perhaps as many as three-quarters of Americans suffered absolute poverty. And although the Second World War and the postwar economic recovery improved conditions for many Americans and built mass affluence in places like St. Clair Shores, poverty remained widespread, even pervasive, at midcentury. By one estimate, the poverty rate in 1949 was 40.5 percent.
Our world differs dramatically on both counts. The rich now work harder and more industriously than ever before, and they owe most of their income (comprising the bulk of rising inequality) to their labor. Values follow facts, and the new elite self-consciously embraces industry and understands itself as hardworking. Today, it is Bertie Wooster’s unapologetic unemployment that is difficult to imagine. Furthermore, economic inequality’s center of gravity has moved up the income scale. At midcentury, an urgent crisis led President Lyndon Johnson to declare a War on Poverty. Today, even as inequality increases, poverty is both rarer and less severe (although it of course endures). And whereas in the past, including at midcentury, inequality centered on the wretchedness and social exclusion of the poor, it now centers on the extravagance and privilege of the elite. Today, inequality isolates the rich from everyone else, not just the poor but also the middle class. Economic inequality now distinctively concerns not poverty but wealth.
The old rich—lazy rentiers who deployed inherited wealth and power to exploit subordinate labor—gave champions of economic justice an easy target. Widespread, grinding poverty gave egalitarian sympathies a compelling focus. And meritocracy offered egalitarians a powerful and effective cure for aristocratic inequality.
But arguments against exploitation lose their power when aimed at the hundred-hour-per-week lawyer, whose industry and exhaustion inoculate her against charges of inherited and unearned advantage, and who also exploits herself. Humanitarian concern loses force when poverty is reduced and the main claims of economic justice are made on behalf of the middle class. And when progressives embraced meritocracy as a remedy for hereditary privilege, they fired the engine that now drives inequality’s increase. The familiar arguments that once defeated aristocratic inequality simply do not apply to an economic system based on rewarding effort and skill.
Meritocracy’s rise over the past half century has opened a new frontier in human experience, with no historical precedent. At the same time, meritocracy has pulled the rug out from under economic equality’s champions. The past no longer provides a reliable guide to understanding the present, as received moral principles and new economic stocks simply do not align. Traditional diagnoses of economic injustice misfire at every turn, and meritocracy, which was supposed to cure inequality, has itself become the source of the disease.
Indeed, it is almost as if meritocratic inequality were specifically designed to defeat the arguments and the policies that once humbled the leisure class and declared war on poverty. The meritocratic transformation entails, bluntly put, that equality’s champions must justify redistribution that takes from a more industrious elite in order to give to a less ind
ustrious middle class. This makes meritocratic inequality difficult to resist.
Difficult, but not impossible. A clear-eyed understanding of meritocracy unmasks its claim to tie advantage to desert. The first steps on the path to understanding come from studying the working rich: who they are, and how they make their money.
FROM LEISURE TO INDUSTRY
The great sociologist Thorstein Veblen puts the working rich into historical context. Veblen was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and died in the summer of 1929, literally on the eve of the Great Depression, which would eventually destroy the order he so shrewdly described. He made the old elite the subject of his acidly observed sociology of wealth from the turn of the twentieth century, The Theory of the Leisure Class.
The Meritocracy Trap Page 11
