Seeing meritocratic ways of thinking about success as the moral companion to finance-driven globalization helps us understand the political backlash against credentialed elites. For four decades, the market faith and the meritocratic faith, taken together, formed the defining project of mainstream American politics. Neoliberal capitalism made some people rich and others poor, but meritocracy created the divide between winners and losers. And it is this divide, not income inequality alone, that gave rise to the humiliation that Trump and other authoritarian populists were able to exploit.
