It seems like meritocracy could go the way of free speech, as a bedrock principle that
the left allows the right to claim as its own. By Jay Caspian Kang
I
n his nightly monologue this past Monday,Tucker Carlson gave his assessment
of what caused the meltdown at Silicon Valley Bank. He began by noting that,
after the 2008 financial crash, the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice,
led by Eric Holder, instituted “D.E.I.”—diversity, equity, and inclusion—standards
for the financial sector. According to Carlson, this meant that women and
minorities, who, in his estimation, were clearly incompetent, now worked in
pivotal positions in the banking industry.“Ideologues used the 2008 bank bailout
to kill American meritocracy,” Carlson concluded. Andy Kessler, an opinion
columnist at the Wall Street Journal, published a similar take in that day’s paper,
speculating that the bank’s leadership may have faltered because it was “distracted
by diversity demands.”
In Carlson’s and Kessler’s imagining, meritocracy has always been the foundation
of American prosperity, and “normal people”—read: none of the people who
would benefit from diversity-hiring initiatives at a bank—are being guilted or even
strong-armed into giving up the fruits of their labor.Women, immigrants, the
L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, and Black Americans, in this story, are trying to create a
rigged system in which people receive jobs, plaudits, and wealth for having
marginalized identities.
Carlson’s and Kessler’s “anti-woke”interpretations of the bank collapse provoked a
predictable outrage cycle online.The usual progressive counter-argument is to
point out that the conservative vision is ahistorical—that the U.S. has never been a
meritocracy, and that race- and gender-conscious remediations are the only way to
address the country’s legacies of slavery, disenfranchisement, and exclusion. But
I’ve always been a bit unsettled, or at the very least dissatisfied, by this response,
even if I agree with its basic tenets.It’s true that the U.S. isn’t a country where
every person starts at the same spot, and makes their way by some combination of
talent and grit. Still,I worry that progressives’ hesitation to defend meritocracy
may actually work against progressive aims.It seems like meritocracy could go the
way of free speech, as a bedrock principle that the left allows the right to claim as
its own, even if it matters to a great number of Americans. Just as suppressing free
speech will never be popular—I wrote on Tuesday about Ron DeSantis’s doomed
crusade to punish teachers and remove books from libraries—leaving behind the
idea of meritocracy is a losing proposition.
Carlson’s and Kessler’s “anti-woke”interpretations of the bank collapse provoked a
predictable outrage cycle online.The usual progressive counter-argument is to
point out that the conservative vision is ahistorical—that the U.S. has never been a
meritocracy, and that race- and gender-conscious remediations are the only way to
address the country’s legacies of slavery, disenfranchisement, and exclusion. But
I’ve always been a bit unsettled, or at the very least dissatisfied, by this response,
even if I agree with its basic tenets.It’s true that the U.S. isn’t a country where
every person starts at the same spot, and makes their way by some combination of
talent and grit. Still,I worry that progressives’ hesitation to defend meritocracy
may actually work against progressive aims.It seems like meritocracy could go the
way of free speech, as a bedrock principle that the left allows the right to claim as
its own, even if it matters to a great number of Americans. Just as suppressing free
speech will never be popular—I wrote on Tuesday about Ron DeSantis’s doomed
crusade to punish teachers and remove books from libraries—leaving behind the
idea of meritocracy is a losing proposition.
For the past five years or so,I’ve reported on the rightward shift among immigrant
voters, which, in many parts of the country, has been influenced by concerns about
public safety and educational merit.There have been signs of an emerging
conservative Asian American movement that galvanizes around schooling issues,
in both big cities and in affluent suburbs with competitive public-school systems.
In New York City, majority-Asian precincts shifted twenty-three points to the
G.O.P.In San Francisco, the temporary elimination of merit-based admissions at
Lowell High School—a magnet school where more than half of the student body
is Asian American—prompted political mobilization that led to the removal of
three members of the city’s school board, and spilled over to the recall of Chesa
Boudin, the city’s progressive district attorney.These fights have resonated with
Asian Americans across the country—especially Chinese Americans—who believe
that equity reforms in education, and moves like the elimination of standardized
testing, are all engineered to diminish their academic accomplishments and
squeeze off their children’s access to class mobility.
These developments, combined with a similar shift among Latino voters in the
past two Presidential elections, and the Democratic Party’s failed attempts to
reach its imagined coalition of “voters of color,” has led to a lot of theorizing about
a multiracial future for the Republican Party. Ramaswamy’s strategy,I imagine, is
to broadcast a vision of meritocracy that, outside of establishing his culture-war
bona fides, also appeals to immigrants who are anxious about their children’s
educational and economic prospects.The possibility of a multiracial right that
flips states like Virginia, Georgia, and Arizona into Republican strongholds may
sit with those voters. Ramaswamy will almost certainly fail in his political
ambitions because he cannot tell a story without veering into screeds about
wokeness and comically dense monologues about banking law and bureaucratic
legal ideas. His conservatism, clearly designed for bankers and tech workers who
are worried their kids won’t get into the Ivy League, is both weird and off-putting.
But that doesn’t mean he is wrong to see that the idea of meritocracy resonates
with most Americans, that a perceived abandonment of it would make many of
those people nervous.
What would it look like for progressives to embrace the idea of American
meritocracy? There is an argument to be made that the equity model pushes a
vision of merit in which disadvantaged people are finally given a fair chance to
compete with the privileged. But its expression—whether in attempts to scale
back standardized testing, diversify corporate boardrooms, or place D.E.I.
infrastructure into storied institutions—only really exists in the same élite,
educated spaces where DeSantis and the like have waged their war against
wokeness. But the promise of meritocracy can be found elsewhere; it can be found
in supporting public schools and community colleges, providing broad economic
protections for families, and taxing the super-wealthy.These policies, which are
already popular among Democrats, might advance a better story of meritocracy—
one that could appeal to voters who worry about the overreaches of the equity
approach, and one that doesn’t abandon an ideal that very few Americans, of any
political leaning, would ever leave behind.