The Meritocracy Trap

by Daniel Markovits

  “bitter” working-class conservatives: See Jeff Zeleny, “Opponents Call Obama Remarks ‘Out of Touch,’” New York Times, April 12, 2008, accessed July 23, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/politics/12campaign.html?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article. Obama later said he had expressed himself badly. See Katharine Seelye and Jeff Zeleny, “On the Defensive, Obama Calls His Words Ill-Chosen,” New York Times, April 13, 2008, accessed July 23, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13campaign.html.

  “basket of deplorables”: See Amy Chozick, “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P. Pounces,” New York Times, September 10, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables.html. Clinton also expressed regret for what she said. See Dan Merica and Sophie Tatum, “Clinton Expresses Regret for Saying ‘Half’ of Trump Supporters are ‘Deplorables,” CNN, September 12, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, www.cnn.com/2016/09/09/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-basket-of-deplorables/.

  by their own land: The phrase recalls Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016). Hereafter cited as Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land. Hochschild narrativizes white nativism in terms of what she calls a “deep story” that white working- and middle-class people construct to explain their lives: they have waited patiently in line for prosperity, but others—blacks, women, immigrants—are joining the line, and elites, flying flags of civil rights, feminism, multiculturalism, and always meritocracy, use government handouts to help the others cut to the front. See Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 136–37. Earlier studies of white working-class discontent confirm this interpretation. In 1985, Stanley Greenberg surveyed white UAW workers and retirees in Macomb County, Michigan, and found that the almost all of his subjects attributed their lack of personal advancement to “discrimination against whites” and the “special status of blacks.” See Stanley Greenberg, Middle Class Dreams: The Politics and Power of the New American Majority (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 40, 47. Another 1985 study of working-class white voters by the marketing and polling firm CRG similarly concluded that these voters believed that the Democratic Party was “not helping them” and was “helping blacks, Hispanics, and the poor” instead, and that “they feel betrayed.” The CRG study was never published because Democratic leaders worried about its depiction of “controversial sources of dissent from liberal orthodoxy,” but it is quoted in Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, “When the Official Subject Is Presidential Politics, Taxes, Welfare, Crime, Rights, or Values, the Real Subject Is Race,” Atlantic, May 1991, accessed July 23, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/race/edsall [inactive]. The deep story casts the white working and middle class as “stay-at-home migrants,” whose values remain constant even as the world around them shifts. See Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 49.

  “anesthesia” or “narcotic”: Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), III:15, 93. Nietzsche says that, for the proponent of slave morality, “the release of emotions is the greatest attempt at relief, or should I say, at anaesthetizing on the part of the sufferer, his involuntarily longed-for narcotic against pain of any kind.”

  slave-owning settler society of the colonial era: See Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

  “victims without a language of victimhood”: Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land, 131.

  “the whole idea”: Jamie Walsh, quoted in Gary Younge and Laurence Mathieu-Léger, “The View from Middletown: ‘Trump Speaks to Us in a Way Other People Don’t,’” Guardian, October 2, 2016, accessed October 23, 2018, www.theguardian.com/membership/2016/oct/27/middletown-trump-muncie-clinton [inactive]. Hereafter cited as Younge and Mathieu-Léger, “The View from Middletown.”

  “And you’ve got people”: Jamie Walsh, quoted in Younge and Mathieu-Léger, “The View from Middletown.”

  as claims of injustice: Other, more subtle meritocratic logics are also at play. When meritocracy associates learning with elites, it casts intellectualism outside of the elite as class betrayal. Religiosity becomes an acceptable outlet for intellectually inclined but loyal middle-class people. As one intellectual raised middle-class reflects on her childhood society, “Learnedness itself was suspect, and making a display of learning was simply not done; in school as elsewhere, the worst failure of character was to get ‘a swelled head.’ You could do intellectual work, though, if you called it something else. We called it religion.” Suzanne Lebsock, “Snow Falling on Magnolias,” in Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections, ed. John Boles (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 291.

  “are more educated”: See Joan Williams, interview with Curt Nickisch, “Why the White Working Class Voted for Trump,” Harvard Business Review, November 18, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, https://hbr.org/ideacast/2016/11/why-the-white-working-class-voted-for-trump. Hereafter cited as “Why the White Working Class Voted for Trump,” interview with Joan C. Williams. See also Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  to own a company: Joan Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017), 26. Hereafter cited as Williams, White Working Class.

  the epidemic of addiction, overdose, and suicide: See Case and Angus, “Rising Morbidity,” Table 1.

  Columbia College and Harvard Law School: David Mendell, Obama: From Promise to Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 59–63, 83–92.

  his all-star first cabinet: In 2009, nearly half of Obama’s confirmed executive and judicial nominees had a degree from the Ivy League and nearly one-third of all degrees earned were from an Ivy League school. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997; several members of the administration received Rhodes and Marshall scholarships. See “Obama Cabinet Nominations,” United States Senate, accessed July 28, 2018, www.senate.gov/reference/Obama_cabinet.htm#1; “About the Governor,” Governor Gary Locke, accessed July 28, 2018, www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/governorlocke/bios/bio.htm; “Attorney General: Eric H. Holder, Jr.,” United States Department of Justice, accessed July 28, 2018, www.justice.gov/ag/bio/attorney-general-eric-h-holder-jr; “Secretary Tom Vilsack,” Feeding America, accessed July 28, 2018, http://www.feedingamerica.org/about-us/leadership/Secretary-Tom-Vilsack.html; “Dr. Robert M. Gates,” Department of Defense, accessed July 28, 2018, www.defense.gov/About/Biographies/Biography-View/Article/602797/; “Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education—Biography,” U.S. Department of Education, accessed July 28, 2018, www2.ed.gov/news/staff/bios/duncan.html; “Dr. Steven Chu,” Energy.gov, accessed July 28, 2018, www.energy.gov/contributors/dr-steven-chu; “Bio,” Sebelius Resources, accessed July 28, 2018, www.sebeliusresources.com/welcome-1/; “Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security 2009–2013,” Homeland Security, accessed July 28, 2018, www.dhs.gov/janet-napolitano; “Shaun Donovan,” White House blog, accessed July 28, 2018, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/author/Shaun-Donovan; “Ken Salazar,” WilmerHale, accessed July 28, 2018, www.wilmerhale.com/en/people/ken-salazar; “Biography,” Supervisor Hilda L. Solis, accessed July 28, 2018, http://hildalsolis.org/biography/ [inactive]; “About Hillary,” Office of Hillary Rodham Clinton, accessed July 28, 2018, www.hillaryclinton.com/about/; “Ray LaHood,” DLA Piper, accessed July 28, 2018, www.dlapiper.com/en/us/people/l/lahood-ray/?tab=credentials; “Timothy F. Geithner,” Warburg Pincus, accessed July 28, 2018, www.warburgpincus.com/people/timothy-f-geithner/; and “Class of 1951 Leadership Chair,” West Point, accessed July 28, 2018, www.usma.edu/bsl/sitepages/the%20honorable%20eric%20k%20shinseki.aspx.

>   “summer of silliness”: See Governor Bobby Jindal on Fox News, America’s Newsroom, “Rove Predicts GOP Race Will Be ‘Unsettled for a Long Time,’” August 31, 2015, accessed November 18, 2018, http://video.foxnews.com/v/4454547303001/?#sp=show-clips.

  “eat a bug”: Sam Wang, “Sound Bites and Bug Bites,” Princeton Election Consortium, November 4, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, http://election.princeton.edu/2016/11/04/sound-bites-and-bug-bites/.

  “a failed and corrupt political establishment”: See Team Trump, “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” advertisement, November 4, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vST61W4bGm8.

  neared an all-time high: For poverty, see Chapter 4. For unemployment, see Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unemployment Rate, https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000. For consumption, see Chapter 8. For crime, see Matthew Friedman, Ames Grawert, and James Cullen, Crime Trends: 1990–2016 (New York: Brennan Center for Justice, 2017), accessed July 24, 2018, www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/Crime%20Trends%201990-2016.pdf.

  He portrayed a country: Trump, “The Inaugural Address.” “[We’ve] Subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we’ve defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own; . . . We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon”; “The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world”; and “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”

  voters who had supported Barack Obama: See Nate Cohn, “The Obama-Trump Voters Are Real. Here’s What They Think,” New York Times, August 15, 2017, accessed July 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/upshot/the-obama-trump-voters-are-real-heres-what-they-think.html?_r=0, and “Democrats Will Struggle to Win Back Obama-Trump Voters,” The Economist, November 2, 2017, accessed July 24, 2018, www.economist.com/united-states/2017/11/02/democrats-will-struggle-to-win-back-obama-trump-voters.

  “That was some weird shit”: Yashar Ali, “What George W. Bush Really Thought of Donald Trump’s Inauguration,” New York Magazine, March 29, 2017, accessed July 24, 2018, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/what-george-w-bush-really-thought-of-trumps-inauguration.html.

  “a blue-collar billionaire”: Sharon Galicia quoted by Arlie Russell Hochschild, “I Spent 5 Years with Some of Trump’s Biggest Fans. Here’s What They Won’t Tell You,” Mother Jones, September/October 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blue-collar-supporters/, adapted from Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land.

  “I love the poorly educated”: See Edward Luce, “The End of American Meritocracy,” Financial Times, May 8, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.ft.com/content/c17d402a-12cf-11e6-839f-2922947098f0?mhq5j=e1.

  “under[stood] the depth”: See “Why the White Working Class Voted for Trump,” interview with Joan C. Williams.

  “believe that the modern”: See J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (New York: Harper, 2016), 191.

  thought the same of them: See Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump’s Appeal Was Just Perfectly Summed Up by Chris Matthews,” Washington Post, September 30, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/30/chris-matthews-just-nailed-donald-trumps-appeal/?utm_term=.24ba2184ad30.

  agreed with both statements: The survey was conducted by the Huffington Post in conjunction with YouGov. See Michael Tesler, “Trump Voters Think African Americans Are Much Less Deserving Than ‘Average Americans,’” Huffington Post, December 19, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-tesler/trump-voters-think-africa_b_13732500.html. See also Victor Tan Chen, “The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy,” Atlantic, December 21, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/spiritual-crisis-modern-economy/511067/. Hereafter cited as Tan Chen, “The Spiritual Crisis of the Modern Economy.”

  “profound contempt”: See Alec MacGillis, “Revenge of the Forgotten Class,” ProPublica, November 10, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, www.propublica.org/article/revenge-of-the-forgotten-class.

  by 39 percentage points: See Thomas Edsall, “The Not-So-Silent White Majority,” New York Times, November 17, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/the-not-so-silent-white-majority.html.

  between $50,000 and $100,000: Jon Huang et al., “Election 2016: Exit Polls,” New York Times, November 8, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html. For a largely congruent analysis of the sources of Trump’s support using a massive data set of preelection Gallup surveys, see Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell, “Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump,” SSRN working paper (November 2, 2016), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822059.

  over Romney’s 2012 results: See Nate Silver, “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote for Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, November 22, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/. For a similar analysis, see Neera Tanden et al., “Towards a Marshall Plan for America,” Center for American Progress, May 16, 2017, accessed July 24, 2018, www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2017/05/16/432499/toward-marshall-plan-america/.

  “Of course he wasn’t”: Anonymous resident in conversation with the author, St. Clair Shores, Michigan, May 2, 2018.

  roughly the same amount: See Jed Kolko, “Trump Was Stronger Where the Economy Is Weaker,” FiveThirtyEight, November 10, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-was-stronger-where-the-economy-is-weaker/. Moreover, the shift from Obama to Trump was greatest where routine jobs were most prevalent. See Neera Tanden et al., “Towards a Marshall Plan for America,” Center for American Progress, May 16, 2017, accessed July 24, 2018, www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2017/05/16/432499/toward-marshall-plan-america/.

  outside of (and even in opposition to) work: See Michèle Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 19–20; Williams, White Working Class, 16–17, 20, 31, 37.

  worst hit by the opioid epidemic: See Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan, 2018), 263–66.

  25 percentage point landslide: See Board of County Canvassers, Canvass of Votes Cast at the General Election Held on Tuesday, the 8th Day of November, A.D. 1960, November 8, 1960, accessed July 24, 2018, http://clerk.macombgov.org/sites/default/files/content/government/clerk/pdfs/electionresults/1960-11-08-GENERAL-ELECTION.pdf. St. Clair Shores voted about 62 percent Kennedy-Johnson and 37 percent Nixon-Lodge.

  10 percentage point victory in 2016: Michigan Department of State, Michigan Election Precinct Results, 2016 General Election, President of the United States, St. Clair Shores City, accessed July 24, 2018, http://miboecfr.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/cfr/precinct_srch_res.cgi. St. Clair Shores voted 53 percent Trump-Pence and 42 percent Clinton-Kaine.

  “Donald Trump’s speeches”: See Kevin Williamson, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction,” National Review, March 17, 2016, accessed July 23, 2018, www.nationalreview.com/article/432876/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump. See also Edward Luce, “The New Class Warfare in America,” Financial Times, March 20, 2016, accessed July 24, 2018, www.ft.com/content/63b061be-ecfc-11e5-bb79-2303682345c8.

  any winning candidate since 1980: See American National Election Studies
, “Time Series Cumulative Data File” (2012), www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_timeseries_cdf/anes_timeseries_cdf.htm; American National Election Studies, “2016 Time Series Study” (2016), www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_timeseries_2016/anes_timeseries_2016.htm.

  nearly 70 percentage points: See “Past Election Results,” Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, www.sccgov.org/sites/rov/Resources/Pages/PastEResults.aspx (see “Statement of Vote” for the November 8, 2016, Presidential General Election).

  This was Thomas Jefferson’s dream: See “The Virginia Constitution: First Draft by Jefferson,” The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, volume 1, 1760–1776, ed. Julian Boyd, Lyman Butterfield, and Mina Bryan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 337. Jefferson’s guarantees were, of course, limited to free white men. The contemporary version of Jefferson’s ideal universalizes them.

  “we can have a democratic society”: It is not clear that Brandeis ever said this. Scott Campbell, the librarian at Brandeis Law School in Louisville, reports that Brandeis’s scholars and biographers have not found a source for the quote. See Ronald Smith, Thomas Ewing, Jr., Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 307 n.59.

  Chapter Four: The Working Rich

  “What, ‘work’?”: The precise lines are from Stephen Fry’s and Hugh Laurie’s television adaptation of Wodehouse’s story “Jeeves Takes Charge,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post, November 1916. See Jeeves and Wooster, “In Court After the Boat Race,” ITV, April 22, 1990, written by Clive Exton, directed by Robert Young.

  “a chicken in every pot”: The slogan is commonly attributed to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign, but it appears that Hoover himself never used it. Rather, it was first used by King Henry IV of France in the sixteenth century and eventually made the title of a 1928 Republican campaign flyer. Democrats then mocked Republicans for delivering, instead, the deprivation of the Great Depression. As late as 1960, John F. Kennedy used this line of attack at a rally in Bristol, Tennessee, saying, “It is my understanding that the last candidate for the presidency to visit this community in a presidential year was Herbert Hoover in 1928. President Hoover initiated on the occasion of his visit the slogan, ‘Two chickens for every pot,’ and it is no accident that no presidential candidate has ever dared come back to this community since.” See “chicken in every pot,” William Safire, Safire’s Political Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 115.