Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
By Christopher Hayes
Paperback, Broadway publishing
304 pages
$16.00
June 2013
Over the last thirty years our commitment to this parody of democracy has facilitated accelerating and extreme economic inequality of a scope and scale unseen since the last Gilded Age. There are numerous reasons for the explosion of inequality—from globalization, to technology, to the corruption of the campaign finance system, to the successful war on organized labor—but the philosophical underpinning for all of this, the fertile soil in which it is rooted, is our shared meritocratic commitment. Fundamentally we still think that a select few should rule; we've just changed our criteria for what makes someone qualified to be a member in good standing of that select few.
What George Packer's
The Unwinding explored on an individual narrative level, Chris Hayes' masterful
Twilight of the Elites, which just came out in paperback after last year's hardcover edition, takes on at the authoritative level, looking at the failures of our once-respected institutions to create and maintain national stability that would enable Americans to pursue with confidence their personal versions of the American dream.
Institutional failure across the board has landed us in modern America, where wages are falling, fraud and corruption in the banking industry are flourishing, jobs are lost, and everyone—correctly, cynically—believes the game is rigged against the little guy. This failure leaves us all feeling insecure and unmoored. As Hayes puts it, "It is precisely because of our expectation of routine competence that government failure is so destabilizing."
And as he points out, over and over again, it's not just government. It's … well, everything. Major League Baseball. Wall Street. The Catholic Church. Enron. College athletic programs. If an institution has been big and respected, it's a pretty sure bet it's been corrupted and exposed in the past decade or so. The reason? Follow beneath the fold to discover it ….
Meritocracy. Meritocracy institutionalized, unquestioned and accepted as our underlying national ethos with no exceptions or examination.
At first blush, it seems silly to think there's a problem with having the best and the brightest, the smartest guys in the room, in charge of everything. After all, this is America, damn it! The cream rises to the top! We all have an equal chance at the brass ring, and those who work the hardest, apply themselves the most, study and strive and grind, should be the ones running things.
Only that doesn't work out so well in practice.
Under the guidelines of the American meritocratic ethos, vastly unequal outcomes are fine, so long as the process that produces them is fair—as long as the rules of the game create a "level playing field" such that everyone is subject to the same rewards and sanctions, regardless of station.
Most Americans have internalized the general sense that there's a more or less proportional relationship between what you put into life and what you get out of it.
There are various reasons why the "best and brightest" argument breaks down so quickly upon examination. Perhaps the most basic is that while the first generation of the chosen and meritable
might be the smartest and the hardest-working, subsequent heirs are born with a huge institutional advantage—access to the best schools, the best test preparation services, immersed early in life in the upper class with its assumptions, advantages, connections and culture. And whether it's first-generation meritocracy or seventh, it still creates a problem for a democracy. "It is precisely our embrace of inequality," Hayes writes, "that has produced a cohort of socially distant, blinkered, and self-dealing elites."
(To his credit, Hayes realizes he's of this "elite" class himself, a product of Hunter College's tested-up-the-hind-end elementary school. Perhaps it takes an insider to realize just how insidious the system is.)
A problem as bad as the initial inequality for entry to the ruling class is the fact that it works to strip our working and middle classes of its natural leaders. When there's a universal agreement that an Ivy League education, for example, is the ticket to the future, even noble efforts to funnel lower-income children into the great Ivy maw creates a disproportion, instills an acceptance of the idea that there's only one measure of success, and that it begins and ends with admission to elitedom, the earlier the better.
Traditional left politics, the kind that powered the Labour Party in Britain and the labor movement in the United States, depend on class-consciousness, a kind of solidarity that the meritocracy subverts. The select group of young bright stars of the working class and the poor is taught an allegiance to their fellow meritocrats. They come to see their natural resting place as atop a vastly unequal hierarchy. Those on the bottom who make it to the top rise from their class rather than with it. It is a fundamentally individualistic model of achievement.
And once atop this vastly unequal system—whether through being born into or "lifted" into it via IQ tests—there's the very human temptation to see yourself as, well, above it all. Above all those still laboring, poor unenlightened ones, for their bread at the bottom. The insider glow takes over, and one of the hallmarks of this self-congratulatory elitism becomes jokes and cycnicsm about those existing outside the magic bubble who just
don't get it, who are so hopelessly naive they can't see when they're being taken, the foolish rubes. Think of the Enron trader joking about the rolling blackouts artificially induced by the company in California, on tapes obtained by
CBS:
"Just cut 'em off. They're so fucked. They should just bring back fucking horses and carriages, fucking lamps, fucking kerosene lamps." That's a prime example of insider bubble humor, the same as the kind that haunted the MLB when dope-taking players ridiculed those on the outside, developing their own creative lingo for their drug-taking and staying ahead of dope-testers.
Meritocracy also leads to toxic competition, says Hayes, where corners get cut, cheating is rewarded and whoever outfrauds the next guy is the champion. He points to the whole financial meltdown as typical of this problem. "In fact," Hayes writes, "one of the lessons of the decade is that intensely competitive, high-reward meritocratic environments are prone to produce all kinds of fraud, deception, conniving, and game rigging." In other words, cheaters do win in our system, nearly all the time.
In the end, Hayes maintains, society is not divided between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, even rural dwellers and city dwellers. The real divide is between the insiders and insurgents, or, as he calls them, institutionalists and insurrectionists. "Ultimately," he writes, "whether you align yourself with the institutionalist or the insurrectionist side of the debate comes down to just how rotten you think our current pillar institutions and ruling class are. Can they be gently reformed at the margins or must they be radically overhauled, perhaps even destroyed and rebuilt?"
Indeed, so deep, yet so hidden is this divide, that to Hayes, it pretty much explains all the problems liberal have with Barack Obama, and whether you completely agree with his assessment or not, it's worth noting:
Barack Obama seemed to suggest he was on the side of those who favored radical overhaul, but he has governed as a man who believes in reform at the margins. This is the heart of why his presidency has been so frustrating for so many: he campaigned as an insurrectionist and has governed as an institutionalist. And how could he do anything but? He is, after all, a product of the very institutions that are now in such manifest crisis. The central tragic irony of the presidency of Barack Obama is that his election marked the crowning achievement of the post-1960s meritocracy, just at the moment that the system was imploding on itself.
So what's the answer? How do we restore some semblance of trust in our institutions, some accountability, some regulation and more equality? Well, it's certainly not through the education system, Hayes says, which has been forced for a century to bear the burden of being just about the
only game in town when it comes to short-sighted solutions:
As inequality has grown, as its negative consequences have become harder and harder to ignore, our response has been to put more and more weight on the educational system, to look to school reform as the means of closing the "achievement gap" and of guaranteeing the increasingly illusory promise of equal opportunity. We ask the education system to expiate the sins of the rest of the society and then condemn it as hopelessly broken when it doesn't prove up to the task. Because education lies on the opportunity side of the opportunity/outcome divide, it is the only place where we see sustained and genuine bipartisan consensus on domestic policy. From Ted Kennedy cosponsoring No Child Left Behind, to Mitt Romney praising President Obama's Race to the Top, there is an elite consensus that education, and specifically a certain vision of education reform, can provide the equality of opportunity that is so scandalously absent at present.
So, okay. Putting all our efforts and hopes into the education basket won't solve this, according to Hayes. What will?
First off, don't throw out meritocracy wholesale. After all, he argues, we do want great people in positions of authority. But by relying solely on one type of merit, usually obtained through testing, we have blinkered ourselves to other types of talent and experience—so our current system of meritocracy needs to be tempered. We will be a stronger country when we are as concerned with equality of outcome as we are with equality of opportunity; this clear premise makes the solution equally as clear for Hayes: "Make America more equal."
We achieve that, first, by convincing the American public that in the current system of meritocracy, our elites have failed us (not too hard a sell of late). Then we look to what we know worked in the past: a tax system that (gasp!) taxes the wealthy more and invests the money in programs for non-wealthy. Specifically, reinstitute the estate tax and raise the top marginal tax rate. Of course, that means changing public opinion on the whole loathed "redistribution" idea, but, Hayes argues, we've been there before, we've done it before and we can get there again.
Given the unrest on both the left and right (Occupy and the tea party), Hayes argues that the time is now for pressing for change.
It really should be, in other words, twilight for the current crop of elites.