There are not many contemporary phenomena that have one-word explanations, and even fewer that have one-word explanations that are not “gravity” or “whiskey.” But if you want a one-word explanation for the ugly, stupid, vicious populism that has overtaken our politics, try this one: meritocracy.
It should not surprise us that the people at the top believe very strongly in meritocracy. The well-off already enjoy the best of everything, and the feeling of virtue is one more exclusive pleasure for elite consumption. It is not enough to settle into a nice first-class seat and enjoy a glass of champagne — for the most exquisite satisfaction, one must also feel that one deserves it.
The believers in meritocracy are in many cases very serious about the –ocracy part. They believe that they are entitled to rule, and they intend to act in the interests of the less-able classes whether the less-able classes like it or not. Their resentment by the intellectual proletariat is the radar screen upon which this can be most easily observed. Those on the populist left rail against billionaires and oligarchy, as though they’d be somehow better off if Jeff Bezos were worse off, and they are permanently committed to the belief that the ultra-rich are somehow putting one over on everybody else. Those on the populist right, in turn, seethe at elite institutions and, especially, at elite experts and credentialed expertise, most recently in the matter of epidemic control.
An institutional title and a high seat and a doctoral dissertation and years of scholarship do not entitle one to rule — but, in our age of celebrity and media magnification, the right to advise and to be listened to is very close to the power to rule per se. That doesn’t make celebrities into scientists — it makes scientists into celebrities, vulnerable to all the temptations that come with that status. The conflation of voice and power is the source of the attraction of cancel-culture mob politics: Social media have extended the opportunity for petty cruelty to people who do not have real power, and it is easy for them to mistake petty cruelty for real power.
It takes a nation of millions to . . . slightly inconvenience Dave Chappelle.
They would do worse if they could, but they usually can’t, and so they are very angry on both sides of the aisle.
In fact, the populist Left and the populist Right tell more or less the same story, rehearsing more or less the same complaints: Big business, especially multinational business, is against them, as are big money, big media, and big institutions of most kinds. Each side believes that it is the plucky representative of We the People, set upon from all directions by the vampires of profit, globalization, and capital. Each sides believes it lost a critical presidential election because of hostile actors in Silicon Valley and shadowy forces in the federal bureaucracy, assisted by a malevolent media.
This leaves the people who occupy the top tier of the meritocracy defensive. The top people at Facebook and Twitter want to believe that these platforms are a force for good in the world, because they want to believe that they are a force for good in the world. Embedded in their moral thinking is the assumption that it is good for the world for them to occupy the places they occupy, that their lives and their careers are not only economically valuable but morally necessary — that such merit as exists in the social order is their merit.
What if there is no meritocracy?
Without relitigating arguments that have been made at great length by Charles Murray and others, there is good reason to believe that socioeconomic status is very strongly correlated with IQ, or with a relatively small set of generally interrelated mental qualities that are in large part hereditary, that are not evenly distributed, and that are not easily acquired when they can be acquired at all. Murray wrote of a “cognitive elite” before the world “elite” had become so thoroughly a term of abuse. It is useful to think of the underlying relationship less as a system of perfect gradations than as a floor and a ceiling. With certain obvious exceptions, a relatively high IQ (or an unusually generous dollop of whatever it is that IQ measures) is an entry requirement for elite universities, other elite institutions, elite occupations, and, to some extent, elite tastes and elite interests. If you don’t meet the cognitive minimum, you are forever on the wrong side of the velvet rope.
. . .
Facebook-style politics is really, at heart, a hobby, only very vaguely connected to real citizenship, and I can’t help but think that those captivated by it would be happier building model trains or collecting stamps. Politics cannot give them what they want. Nothing can.
We have angry populism mainly because factors such as technology and trade have laid bare a certain fundamental unfairness in our social life. We have less control than we had thought — and less than we want. But if our lives are a little more narrowly bounded than the optimists of the 19th and 20th centuries had thought, understanding that situation should make us less proud and more charitable. It should make us more sensitive to the practical limitations of bootstraps politics, even as we continue to acknowledge the necessity of private effort and individual responsibility. It should also point us toward other sources of meaning and scales of value that cannot be measured in dollars or social-media followers, toward the understanding that there is more goodness and more dignity in being a good father or a good neighbor than there is in being a Kardashian even if there is less money in it. Understanding our limitations should make us mindful of the Power that exceeds all limitations.
But I somehow doubt that it will.
Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
