Meritocrats v the people
An important essay by Adrian Wooldridge on how meritocracy has created one of the most important divisions in modern life.
The biggest division in modern society is not between the owners of the means of production and the workers, as Karl Marx posited. It is not between the patriarchy and women or the white races and non-white races, as the post-modernists posit. It is between the meritocracy and the people, the cognitive elite and the masses, the exam-passers and the exam-flunkers. The winners are becoming intolerably smug. The losers are turning in on themselves, with an epidemic of suicides and drug addiction reducing the life-expectancy of working-class Americans for the first time in a century. And the tumbrils are beginning to operate.
The global establishment is, above all, a meritocratic establishment: it consists of people who have done well at school and university and who have gravitated to jobs that require both intellectual skills and evidence of those intellectual skills in the form of credentials. There are various sub-divisions within this elite: people who work for universities and NGOs like to snipe at people who work for business and banks, but in fact all members of the global elite have more in common than they like to think.
They routinely marry other members of the meritocratic elite: the marriage announcements in the New York Times read rather like marriage announcements between blue-blooded families in the high Victorian age, with the lists of university degrees (Harvard and Yale marries Brown and Columbia!) replacing lists of family pedigrees. Only two out of every thousand marriages are between a partner with a university degree and a partner with primary qualifications only. They usually share a common outlook. They pride themselves on their cosmopolitan values partly because they live in a borderless world – they are forever hopping over borders, in their business trips and foreign holidays – and partly because liberal immigration policies provide them with all the accoutrements of a cash-rich and time-starved lifestyle, cleaners, baby-sitters and exotic restaurants. They like to demonstrate their sympathy with racial and sexual minorities: businesses are now busily importing affirmative action schemes and gay-friendly policies from universities. But they don’t give much of a damn for the old-fashioned working class: whether they will admit it or not, many exam-passers think that those left behind deserve their dismal fate not just because they are less intelligent than the exam-passers but because they are less enlightened as well.
The populist movement that is sweeping the world is, more than anything else, a revolt against meritocracy. The groups that are driving the rise of populism have disparate material interests: they consist of traditional working-class people, Main Street business people such as real-estate agents and old-line manufacturers, and older voters who came of age before the great university expansion of the 1960s. But they are united by their common opposition to the meritocratic elite with their cosmopolitan values and habit of valuing intellectual achievement over physical skills.