Every once in a while, a white male who has made his living
as a “responsible conservative” or a conservative parading as a centrist
produces an article bemoaning the fact that we are now ruled by a meritocracy. Through
the years, George Will, Irving Kristol and William Buckley Jr. can count
themselves among the many so-called public intellectuals who have bemoaned the coming
of the meritocracy.
The latest is Joseph Epstein, a long-time equater of civic
virtues with the rights of the privileged, in a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Late, Great American WASP.”
Like most of predecessors, Epstein contrasts the current meritocracy with the former system in which the most powerful people were likely to be male,
Protestant, of British descent, from wealthy and well-established families with
many connections to business opportunities and attended an Ivy League school. Epstein defines WASP as the ruling class that dominated politics, economics (by
which I think he means business) and education until it was gradually replaced
by a meritocracy starting after World War II. By putting a right-wing slant on
carefully-selected anecdotes, Epstein hopes to prove that when WASPs ruled we
muddled through pretty well and that now that we have a meritocracy, as
witnessed by the Clinton and Obama presidencies, we are pretty much going to
hell in a hand basket.
The problem is that we do not have a real meritocracy, and
certainly not in politics, business or education. Epstein can’t make his
argument without this assumption, which is patently false.
In the days of WASP ascendancy, the most powerful people in
most fields did go to an Ivy League or Ivy-type schools, and that’s still the
case. If you don’t believe me, pick any field outside sports, even
entertainment, and start investigating the backgrounds of the most powerful
people in it. In all cases you’ll find an inordinate percentage and often a
majority came from wealthy families or went to a top echelon school, be it Harvard,
Yale, Duke or Stanford.
In the old days, mostly rich and well-connected kids—kids
from the ruling elite—got to go to these handful of schools, and that’s still the case. As many researchers have noted, legacies get bigger breaks in admissions decisions at Ivy League schools than do
athletes and minorities. That’s what got
our second president Bush into Yale (and his opponent in the 2000 election, Al
Gore, too), a fact that Epstein ignores in substantiating his side argument
that Bush II turned himself into a non-WASP.
There is a very good reason that so many kids who get into
the top schools are wealthy: they have all the advantages. The latest research shows that kids from the poorest of backgrounds lose from 10-13 IQ points because they have to dedicate too much of their
brains to thinking about their next meal. That point spread spans the
difference between being a smart kid and a genius. The wealthy have an edge
over the middle classes because they can afford to spend more in the
ever-escalating race to prepare children: The more money the family makes, the
more likely the child will get special classes, travel abroad, summer camps
with intellectual enrichment, SAT tutors, SAT prep courses, educational
consultants, subject tutors. The wealthy parents are more likely to make large
contributions to the university.
Take a look at the statistics: the U.S. currently has less
mobility between the classes and less upward mobility than at any time in more
than a century. The social mobility in today’s United States is lower than that
of any other westernized industrial or post-industrial nation. Poor people move up to the middle or upper classes less frequently here than in any of the nations that had royalty and a rigid class system for centuries.
Parts of our American society do operate as a meritocracy.
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden all prove that the brightest and most
talented do achieve positions of power. Harvard, Yale and Stanford do accept
the “best and the brightest” alongside the merely good who come from money. But
that was always the case when the WASPs ruled as well. Even in the days of European royalty, even
in the bad old slave days of ancient Rome, if you had a near photographic
memory, could compute large sums instantaneously or displayed perfect musical
pitch, the rich folk were going to find you and make sure you could help them
run their society. That hasn’t changed one bit. But despite what you may have
heard from your parents or may think about your own children, those extremely
talented people are so rare as to be statistically irrelevant when discussing
whether or not we have a meritocracy.
What has changed is that it’s not just the white males
anymore in the positions of power. An increasingly ethnically and racially
diverse ruling elite has emerged, but it is an elite based more on money and
connections than on true merit.
Epstein’s argument fails both in its logic and in its
details. He calls Laura Bush a “middle class librarian.” It’s true that Laura’s
profession was/is librarian, but I would not call her background middle class
by any means: Her father was a home builder and successful real estate
developer, two professions that lead to both wealth and power in the local
economy. In his latest book, The Myth of
Liberal Ascendancy, William Domhoff documents the enormous political
influence that real estate interests have had on local and regional
politics. By the way, Laura’s maiden
name was Welch and her mom’s was Hawkins. She was raised as Methodist. Sounds
like an upper class (for Midlands, Texas society) WASP to me.
Later in the article, Epstein claims that the two strongest
presidents since 1950 are Truman, who never attended college, and Reagan, who
went to the antithesis of Ivy—a small Christian college. Epstein states Truman
and Reagan’s greatness matter-of-factly as if it’s common knowledge and readily
accepted by most people. In the case of Reagan, believing that he was a great
or a detestably awful president is a litmus test for political views:
right-wingers and right-wingers-in-centrist-clothing rate him highly; progressives
rate him as one of our worst presidents. Now most people do rate Truman highly, but I
personally consider him the worst president in American history by virtue of
his having approved dropping two atom bombs on civilian targets. The larger
point is that Epstein pretends that his own opinion is evidence that the
meritocracy doesn’t work as well as the old WASPocracy did.
Articulate and well-bred conservatives railing against the
so-called meritocracy reflect the broader anti-intellectualism that the ruling
elite imposes on American society via the mass media. But whereas the reason for the
anti-intellectual message in movies and ads remains hidden, it stands out
crystal clear in arguments such as Epstein’s: It’s about power. In a true
meritocracy, the most talented are in charge in whatever the field, not the
rich and connected. In even the least complex of agrarian societies, talent
manifests itself as knowledge and the ability to accumulate and use knowledge. Conservatives represent traditional society in
which the wealthy rule. They fear a society in which the most capable for each
job gets that job as opposed to keeping themselves and their offspring in the
best and best-paying positions. So when the wealthy aren’t busy buying up the
best and the brightest to do their bidding and justify their hold on power,
they try to disparage intellectual activity.
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