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Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.61
Too strenuous a notion of personal responsibility for our fate makes it hard to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes.
This is due to a distinctive feature of center-left political argument in the 1990s and since: Rather than challenge the premise of Thatcher and Reagan’s market faith, political figures such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton accepted it and sought to soften its harshest features.
The more thoroughgoing our responsibility for our fate, the more we merit praise or blame for the way our lives turn out.
The Reagan-Thatcher critique of the welfare state argued that people should be held responsible for their own well-being, and that the community owed help only to those whose misfortune was not their own fault. “We will never abandon those who, through no fault of their own, must have our help,” Reagan declared in a State of the Union address. “But let us work to see how many can be freed from the dependency of welfare and made self-supporting.”4 “Through no fault of their own” is a revealing phrase. It begins as a trope of generosity; those who are needy “through no fault of their own” have a
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responsibility now refers to “our responsibility to take care of ourselves—and to suffer the consequences if we fail to do so.”
According to Google Ngram, which tracks the frequency of words and phrases in books, the use of the phrase “you deserve” more than tripled from 1970 to 2008. In The New York Times, “you deserve” appeared more than four times as often in 2018 as it did in the year Ronald Reagan took office.18
In the 1960s and 1970s, the leading Anglo-American philosophers rejected meritocracy on the grounds that what people earn in the market depends on contingencies beyond their control, such as demand for one’s talents and whether one’s talents are common or rare. But by the 1980s and 1990s, an influential group of philosophers, perhaps reflecting the “rhetoric of responsibility” prevalent in the politics of the day, revived the case for merit. Known as “luck egalitarians,” they argued that society’s obligation to help the disadvantaged depends on figuring out who among the needy are responsible
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John F. Kennedy never used the term “you deserve.” That changed with Reagan, who used “you deserve” more often than his five predecessors combined.
Not all populist grievances against the established order were reactions against meritocratic hubris. Some were entangled with xenophobia, racism, and hostility to multiculturalism. But the populist backlash was provoked, at least in part, by the galling sense that those who stood astride the hierarchy of merit looked down with disdain on those they considered less accomplished than themselves.
Trump supporters resented liberals’ rhetoric of rising, not because they rejected meritocracy, but because they believed it described the prevailing social order. They had submitted to its discipline, had accepted the hard judgment it pronounced on their own merits, and believed others should do the same.
First, under conditions of rampant inequality and stalled mobility, reiterating the message that we are responsible for our fate and deserve what we get erodes solidarity and demoralizes those left behind by globalization. Second, insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans those who have not been to college; and third, insisting that social and political problems are best solved by highly educated, value-neutral experts is a technocratic conceit that corrupts
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When politicians reiterate a hallowed verity with mind-numbing frequency, there is reason to suspect that it is no longer true.
When the richest 1 percent take in more than the combined earnings of the entire bottom half of the population,30 when the median income stagnates for forty years,31 the idea that effort and hard work will carry you far begins to ring hollow.
According to global public opinion surveys, most Americans (77 percent) believe that people can succeed if they work hard; only half of Germans think so. In France and Japan, majorities say hard work is no guarantee of success.32
Asked what factors are “very important to getting ahead in life,” Americans overwhelmingly (73 percent) put hard work first, reflecting the enduring hold of the Protestant work ethic. In Germany, barely half consider hard work very important to getting ahead; in France, only one in four does.
The majority of Americans (57 percent) disagree with the statement “success in life is pretty much determined by forces outside our control.” By contrast, majorities in most other countries, including most European countries, view success as determined mainly by forces outside our control.
Of children born in the 1940s, almost all (90 percent) earned more than their parents. Of children born in the 1980s, only half surpassed their parents’ earnings.
Although the exact numbers vary from one study to the next, very few Americans live out the “rags to riches” story celebrated in the American dream.
Danish and Canadian children, it turns out, are far more likely to rise from poverty to affluence than U.S. children.39 By these measures, the American dream is alive and well and living in Copenhagen.
This tendency to move from fact to hope and back again is not a slip of the tongue or philosophical confusion but a characteristic feature of political rhetoric. It plays out with special poignance in the rhetoric of rising. Its commingling of hope and fact muddies the meaning of winning and losing. If meritocracy is an aspiration, those who fall short can always blame the system; but if meritocracy is a fact, those who fall short are invited to blame themselves.
A study of presidential word choice found that he spoke at a fourth-grade vocabulary level, the lowest of any president in the past century; his own secretary of state reportedly described him as a “moron,” and his secretary of defense said his understanding of world affairs was that of a fifth or sixth grader.
deserve their success and the rewards it brings. This was the meritocratic promise. It was not a promise of greater equality, but a promise of greater and fairer mobility.
We live in a 21st-century global economy. And in a global economy, jobs can go anywhere. Companies, they’re looking for the best-educated people, wherever they live … Now you’ve got billions of people from Beijing to Bangalore to Moscow, all of whom are competing with you directly … If you don’t have a good education, then it is going to be hard for you to find a job that pays a living wage.14
If equality of opportunity was the primary moral and political project, expanding access to higher education was the overriding policy imperative.
[It] isn’t really an answer at all; it’s a moral judgment, handed down by the successful from the vantage of their own success. The professional class is defined by its educational attainment, and every time they tell the country that what it needs is more schooling, they are saying: Inequality is not a failure of the system; it is a failure of you.
adults has graduated from a four-year college.20 When meritocratic elites tie success and failure so closely to one’s ability to earn a college degree, they implicitly blame those without one for the harsh conditions they encounter in the global economy. They also absolve themselves of responsibility for promoting economic policies that heighten the wage premium a college degree commands.
Obama’s fondness for the highly credentialed persisted throughout his presidency. By the middle of his second term, two-thirds of his cabinet-rank appointees had attended an Ivy League college, and thirteen of twenty-one had attended Harvard or Yale. All but three held advanced degrees.23
Having well-educated people run the government is generally desirable, provided they possess sound judgment and a sympathetic understanding of working people’s lives—what Aristotle called practical wisdom and civic virtue.
Alter saw a similarity between Kennedy’s team and Obama’s, who “shared the Ivy League as well as a certain arrogance and a detachment from the everyday lives of most Americans.”
The Wall Street fiction that certain financial executives were preternaturally gifted supermen who deserved every penny of their staggering paychecks and bonuses was firmly ingrained in Treasury’s psyche. No matter that the financial crisis had demonstrated just how unremarkable the work of those executives had turned out to be, that belief system endured at Treasury across administrations. If a Wall Street executive was contracted to receive a $6.4 million “retention” bonus, the assumption was that he must be worth it.29
In recent decades, as meritocratic modes of thinking have gained ascendance, the reigning evaluative contrast has become smart versus dumb.
Until recently, the adjective “smart” mainly described persons. In American English, to call someone “smart” is to praise his or her intelligence. (In British English, “clever” conveys this meaning.) As the digital age dawned, “smart” came to describe things—high-tech devices and machines such as “smart cars,” “smart phones,” “smart bombs,” “smart thermostats,” “smart toasters,” and so on. But the digital age arrived in tandem with the age of meritocracy; it is therefore not surprising that “smart” also came to describe ways of governing.
Both Clinton and Obama frequently argued that their favored policy was “not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do.” This rhetorical tick suggested that, in a meritocratic age, being smart carried more persuasive heft than being right.
Obama invoked this double-barreled appeal to ethics and smarts on issues ranging from immigration reform to extending unemployment insurance.
Even before ascending to the national political stage, Obama saw political choices in terms of smart versus dumb. “I don’t oppose all wars,” the young state senator told the anti-war rally in Chicago. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”35
at a time when racism and sexism are out of favor (discredited though not eliminated), credentialism is the last acceptable prejudice. In the United States and Europe, disdain for the poorly educated is more pronounced, or at least more readily acknowledged, than prejudice against other disfavored groups.
In a series of surveys conducted in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Belgium, a team of social psychologists found that college-educated respondents have more bias against less-educated people than they do against other disfavored groups. The researchers surveyed the attitudes of well-educated Europeans toward a range of people who are typically victims of discrimination—Muslims, people of Turkish descent living in Western Europe, people who are poor, obese, blind, and less educated. They found that the poorly educated were disliked most of all.39
First, they challenge the familiar notion that educated elites are morally more enlightened than people with less education, and therefore more tolerant.
Moreover, the elites are unembarrassed by their prejudice. They may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less-educated.41
Elites dislike those with lesser educations more than they dislike poor people or members of the working class, because they consider poverty and class status to be, at least in part, due to factors beyond one’s control. By contrast, they consider low educational achievement to represent a failure of individual effort, and therefore the fault of those who do not make it to college.
“There are no indications that less educated people resist the negative attributions made about them.” To the contrary, they “even seem to internalize” these adverse judgments. The “less educated are seen as responsible and blameworthy for their situation, even by the less-educated themselves.”
This makes people more willing to accept inequality and more likely to believe that success reflects merit.
Over the past half decade, Congress has become more diverse with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class.45
In the U.S., about half of the labor force is employed in working-class jobs, defined as manual labor, service industry, and clerical jobs. But fewer than 2 percent of the members of Congress worked in such jobs before their election. In state legislatures, only 3 percent come from working-class backgrounds.
In the United Kingdom as a whole, about 70 percent do not have a university degree; in Parliament, only 12 percent do not. Nearly nine of ten MPs have degrees; one-fourth of MPs went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Over the past four decades, Britain’s Labour Party has undergone an especially striking shift in the educational and class background of its MPs. In 1979, 41 percent of Labour MPs were elected to Parliament without having received a university degree; by 2017, only 16 percent managed to do so.
“Such changes in MPs’ occupational background have made parliament much less representative of the broader British population, and the Labour party much less representative of the working class whose interests it was traditionally supposed to represent.”
In Angela Merkel’s 2013 cabinet, for example, nine of the fifteen ministers had PhDs, and all but one of the others had master’s degrees.
This changed in the twentieth century, when universal suffrage and the rise of socialist and social democratic parties democratized the composition of parliaments. From the 1920s to the 1950s, MPs without college degrees served in substantial numbers, accounting for one-third to one-half of legislators. Beginning in the 1960s, the portion of degree holders began to climb, and by the 2000s, non–college graduates were as rare in national legislatures as they were in the days of aristocrats and landed gentry.