Meritocracy and Our Political Predicament

From "How Meritocracy and Populism Reinforce Each Other's Faults," by Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Dec. 18, 2018.

[In the Atlantic Monthly recently,] Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum…portrayed populism as…a revolt by the resentfully unsuccessful against “meritocracy and competition.” …In “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” written in 1958, British civil servant Michael Young coined “meritocracy” as a term of praise for a system of elite formation that…promised rule by the most intelligent rather than the well-bred.

But Young had something more dystopian in mind. His book…envisioned a world whose classes were increasingly segregated by talent and intelligence, in which the meritocratic elite became an increasingly intolerable version of the old aristocracy… Meritocracy essentially co-opts the talented people who in a *different* world would be leaders in their local communities, their regions, their social classes...

…The evidence…suggests that…when meritocracy loses credibility and legitimacy, the result is a political impasse. The…elite becomes too arrogant and self-deceiving…, but the populist alternative is…susceptible to snake-oil salesmen and vulnerable to manipulation by … the upper class.

… [Today,] meritocrats have no mandate and no sense of why the public hates them — believing, …their governance [is] wise and just and there’s nothing wrong with meritocracy that can’t be fixed with more of it. But the populists have no competence and no coherent program, so all their revolt can win is stalemate.

Different versions of this impasse exist in Britain, France and the United States. …In the United States the populists theoretically hold the White House, under a president who promised to be a traitor to his class—except that these promises were mostly just a con job, the Trump inner circle is a parliament of opportunists, and his administration’s policy agenda has been steered by the Republican Party’s business elite rather than by the voters who elected him.

… [The result is] a governing class [with] vaulting self-confidence and dwindling credibility, locked in stalemate with populist movements that are easily grifted upon and offer more grievances than plans.

Can the system we have really produce such a statesman?

The next one we find will be the first.