https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opinion/the-case-against-meritocracy.html

In my particular case the provocation was a column about the phenomenon of George H.W. Bush nostalgia, which I suggested reflected a general nostalgia for some of the aristocratic virtues of the old WASP establishment and a disappointment with the meritocracy that has risen in its place.

This argument was read by certain readers (and a few social media non-readers) as a paean to white privilege, even a brief for white supremacy. In these misreadings, there was an assumption that to praise, in any way, the elite that predated the modern meritocracy is to reject racial diversity, minority and female advancement, in favor of permanent white rule.

That’s not my view. Rather I think ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other.

And I would separate them. I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

But I think that same upper class was unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one. On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy’s vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.

Here it’s important to stress that a WASP was not just any white Protestant or upper-crust American of the pre-1960s past. The term properly refers to a specific kind of American elite, mostly from the Northeast, mostly high-church Protestants, concentrated in a few cities (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, plus some Midwestern and Californian outposts), generally associated with the Republican Party (with occasional defectors like FDR), who dominated a particular set of fields (academia, finance, foreign policy) and shared the code of service and piety and manners that defined the elder Bush’s career.

The WASPs were distinct from other white elites — including the planter class that ruled the South, the regional elites that emerged as the frontier moved westward, the immigrant tycoons who challenged WASP power in the East. Their importance rested, to borrow from a WASP acquaintance’s email this week, on being “primus inter pares” — first among equals, with a particular kind of power in a particular set of institutions, and an ability to set a tone for the American upper class that was adopted by other groups when they ascended.

And ascend they often did, because the older American system was both hierarchical and permeable, with room for actual merit even without a meritocratic organizing theory.

Those advancing groups included non-Anglo-Saxons, and eventually non-Protestants and non-whites. In the middle of the 20th century, you could find elite Catholics who imitated WASPishness — think of William F. Buckley Jr. or the Kennedys. You could even find WASPish African-Americans: The oldest summer colony for black Americans, and not coincidentally a place where the somewhat WASPy Barack Obama liked to hang out in the summer, sits on the shores of the WASP isle of Martha’s Vineyard.

These imitations existed in the shadow of racial apartheid and residual anti-Catholicism. But their example suggested that an aristocratic spirit was transferable to a more diverse elite, that there could be Catholic and African-American and Jewish aristocrats — like, say, the family that has long stewarded this newspaper — who could adopt the WASP establishment’s upper-class virtues without the ethnic and religious chauvinism.

But then the WASPs themselves decided to dissolve their own aristocracy, and transform their once-Protestant universities into a secular mass-opportunity system — a more democratic way of education, in which anyone with enough talent could climb the ladder, and personal achievement and technical expertise would be prized above all else.

This was meritocracy, the system that we now take for granted. And for several reasons it didn’t work as planned.

First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.

Second, the meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve.

But even as it restratifies society, the meritocratic order also insists that everything its high-achievers have is justly earned. “He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple,” Ann Richards famous quipped of George H.W. Bush; well, the typical meritocrat is born on third base, hustles home, and gets praised as if he just hit a grand slam.

This spirit discourages inherited responsibility and cultural stewardship; it brushes away the disciplines of duty; it makes the past seem irrelevant because everyone is supposed to come from the same nowhere and rule based on technique alone.

As a consequence, meritocrats are often educated to be bad leaders, and bad people, in a very specific way — a way of arrogant intelligence unmoored from historical experience, ambition untempered by self-sacrifice. The way of the “best and the brightest” at the dawn of the technocratic era and the “smartest guys in the room” decades later, the way of the arsonists of late-2000s Wall Street and the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley.

Or even to some extent the way of Donald Trump, who is white and technically a Protestant but not, not any kind of WASP, combining instead the worst of meritocratic self-deception (the rich kid with a Wharton degree posturing as a self-made man) and the worst of the populist reaction that it summons up.

Diversity, despite what many liberals want to think, does not provide a solution to this problem. A diverse elite may be good in its own right, as a matter of justice and representation. But nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy’s ruthless solipsism. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes or the slipping-from-grace Sheryl Sandberg, exceptions to the Silicon Valley boys’ club whose trajectories prove the meritocratic rule.

Which is why it’s worth looking backward and forward at the same time as we contemplate what’s wrong with our elite. I don’t want to bring back the WASPs; if I had the magic wand to conjure a different elite, it would be a multiracial, multilingual Catholic aristocracy ruling from Quebec to Chile. (Hey, you asked.)

But I do want to raise the possibility that an aristocracy that knows itself to be one might be more clearsighted and effective than an aristocracy that doesn’t, and that the WASPs had at least one clear advantage over their presently-floundering successors: They knew who and what they were.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opinion/the-case-against-meritocracy.html" id="cb924af0-30cf-3de0-ad4d-a8890f24656c">The New York Times</a>.

This week I briefly trended on Twitter — a bracing experience for any columnist because it means you’ve done your job of provocation a little bit too well.

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The Case Against Meritocracy