Meritocracy’s Selective Moralism Surrounding Bigotry and Prejudice: A Selection from Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019)

“On the one hand, meritocratic elites make prejudice that has no meritocratic gloss—based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality—into a cardinal and unforgivable sin that must be suppressed absolutely and without regard for the cost. Widely embraced norms that govern elite life in the everyday therefore require a degree of caution and moralism around identity politics that has no analog for the other parts of morality. Elite society forgives (and even ignores) selfishness, intemperance, cruelty, and other long-recognized vices, but bigotry and prejudice, if exposed, can end a career. Such moralism seems selective, out of sympathy with life’s complexities and confusions, and sometimes out of proportion to the harms at stake. Decent people outside the elite recognize that bigotry is wrong, but they tend to regard prejudice as an ordinary vice, like greed or meanness, to be condemned but also met with an apt indulgence for human frailty. Bigotry does cause immense individual and social harm, and charges that elite institutions—especially universities—succumb to political correctness can be politically motivated and are often made in bad faith. But they capture the important truth that elite denunciations of prejudice can be excessively hard and, partly for this reason, unduly brittle.

The elite’s intense concern for diversity and inclusion also carries an odor of self-dealing. Unlike other vices, prejudice attacks meritocracy’s moral foundations, raising the specter that advantage more broadly follows invidious privilege rather than merit. Meritocracy demands extreme vigilance against prejudice in order to shore up the inequalities it seeks to legitimate against their increasing size and instability. The elaborate and fragile identity politics that govern elite life follow inexorably from the elite’s meritocratic foundations.

On the other hand, meritocracy inclines elites to chauvinistic contempt or even cruelty regarding inequalities that cannot be cast in terms of identity politics. Political correctness does not denounce calling rural communities ‘backward,’ southerners ‘rednecks,’ Appalachians ‘white trash,’ and the bulk of the United States ‘flyover country.’ Indeed, considered elite opinion as commonly rationalizes as condemns these slurs: a widely read essay in the National Review, for example, recently attacked white working-class communities as ‘economically . . . negative assets,’ as ‘morally . . . indefensible,’ and as ‘in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles,’ before concluding that ‘they deserve to die’; and a columnist for the New York Times, after observing that immigrants outperform native-born Americans in meritocratic competitions, called native-born citizens ‘the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning’ and proposed (now tongue-in-cheek) that only mass deportations of the native-born could save America. Even politicians—in spite of all the costs of giving offense—show open contempt for the middle and working classes: Paul Ryan divided the world into ‘takers’ and ‘makers’; Mitt Romney similarly complained that Americans who ‘are dependent upon government’ oppose ‘tak[ing] personal responsibility and car[ing] for their lives’; Barack Obama suggested that ‘bitter’ working-class conservatives ‘cling’ to guns, religion, and prejudice in order to preserve their self-respect in the face of failing to hold their own in economic (read meritocratic) competition; and Hillary Clinton branded half of Donald Trump’s supporters a bigoted ‘basket of deplorables.’ . . .

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.’ . . .

Progressives cannot answer because they remain under meritocracy’s thumb. They are captives who embrace their captor, through a sort of ideological Stockholm syndrome. As a result, progressives exacerbate problems that they do not even see.

When they focus on identity politics and poverty relief, progressives dismiss middle-class discontent as special pleading. For progressives, middle-class longing for the affluence and security that St. Clair Shores provided at midcentury—for unchallenged abundance—is just nostalgia for a form of life that is no longer viable, or even for lost (white, male) privilege. In effect, this tells the middle class that it cannot measure up.

And by focusing on purifying elite institutions of nonmeritocratic biases—on diversity and inclusion—progressives dismiss elite discontent as luxury’s disappointment. For progressives, hypercompetitive admissions tournaments or Stakhanovite work hours become really wrong only when they discriminate against minorities or working mothers, or mask the operation of insider networks and cultural capital, rather than because they are simply, directly, and generally inhumane. In effect, this tells the elite to keep its nose to the grindstone in order to validate its privilege.

Both responses double down on meritocracy’s most insulting and alienating elements. And progressives thereby drive the middle class into the arms of demagogues and the elite to resort to ineffectual gimmicks. When benevolent forces cannot see the despair that stares them in the face, politics turns dark.”—Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019)