Nearly ten years ago, Colin Kaepernick sat, then knelt, for the national anthem for the first time. Fast-forward ten years, and the once-iconic athletic apparel brand that embraced him is also on its knees.

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Wednesday on NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Florida’s Democratic nominee for governor, David Jolly, said he rejects “the left-right spectrum.” Jolly said, “The 6 or 7 years I spent as an independent was the most informative part of my life. I’m in a

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North Carolina Democrat Senate candidate Roy Cooper benefited substantially from healthcare companies while serving eight years as the state's governor. Records show state-awarded contracts went to companies who made donations to entities connected to Cooper while he also owned stocks in investment funds featuring those same companies.

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Philosopher Nathan Cofnas has been suspended as his university after the death of former Professor Jason Arday.

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U.S. — The United States of America plunged into collective sorrow and mourning yesterday upon learning the devastating news that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle would be moving back to England.

Oscar-winning actor Tim Robbins has a warning for Democrats. He hopes they will stop acting like fools.

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Widespread use of the word “meritocracy” may only be possible in the world it describes. British sociologist and former Labour Party official Michael Young coined the term in a 1958 satire as a sly alternative to aristocracy, clumsily mixing Latin (mereo: to deserve) with Greek (kratos: power, rule). Young’s friend, a classicist, warned he would be “laughed to scorn” for employing such a barbarism. Her caution was, sadly, optimistic.

Nonetheless, meritocracy’s advocates have attempted to supply it with a noble lineage. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio and former presidential candidate, is convinced the 20th-century term is central to the American experiment going back to 1776. Palantir’s Jordan Chandler Hirsch likewise argues that America was “born meritorious,” defining meritocracy as when government and society operate through objective measures of “quality and talent, open competition based on fair play, and ruthless disinterest in any other factor.”

Yet by Hirsch’s own definition, today’s “objective” meritocracy has little to do with the founding generation’s ideas. As his own source, historian Joseph Kett, describes, “The Founders viewed a man’s public character, his reputation among his peers, as the outward measure of his essential merit…. Nothing would have astonished the Men of Merit more than to be told to take an examination to measure their character.” Indeed, in the founding era there were no standardized examinations, grades, or entrance exams for public service. When Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “natural aristocracy,” he meant one distinguished by “virtue and talents,” not paper credentials and background checks.

The advocates of meritocracy also often appeal to free-market economics, which would shock most of their favorite economists. Adam Smith recognized that “honourable professions…are generally under-recompensed,” while Friedrich Hayek argued that material rewards do not generally “correspond to what men recognize as merit.”

The economic flaw with meritocracy is that it implies a labor theory of value. Markets reward scarcity and demand, not deservingness. As George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok explains, “A wage is a price”—it does not signify moral worth but guides action. Forcing markets to become genuinely meritocratic therefore would require a powerful administrative state to direct the economy, much like China’s own allegedly meritocratic system.

To ignore these objections and tell young people that America is a meritocracy does little to stem the tide of socialism. Instead, it only sets them up for disappointment. As Iain Murray put it, “Meritocracy leads people to expect certain results in exchange for qualifications. The fact that the world doesn’t work like that leads to resentment at how the world actually works.” It is no accident that the Democratic Party’s most radical constituency consists of post-grads with relatively modest incomes.

If meritocracy is not a core tenet of the American creed and has little to do with America’s economic system, what explains its recent rise? The most plausible reason is that the Right needed an alternative to affirmative action and DEI. And meritocracy, despite its historical and philosophical weaknesses, seemed to fit the bill.

Liberal Priors

The Right’s embrace of meritocracy is built on a fundamental misunderstanding. Workplace meritocracy is not the opposite of the modern civil rights regime but rather its sibling. Both emerged directly following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as sociologist Frank Dobbin has shown.

Opening employment to broader populations carried definite economic, political, and moral benefits. The intent was noble, the problems real. And yet, the new civil rights regime also came with significant downsides. In Dobbin’s words, “Most employers responded to the [civil rights] law by making the hiring and promotion processes more bureaucratic, in order to make them more meritocratic.” Civil rights legislation was poorly written and vague, opening up space for activist judges, human resources managers, and the administrative state to effectively write their own laws.

Courts soon began to challenge unintentional “discrimination,” not just clear-cut cases of deliberate discrimination. To comply, corporations had to go out of their way to prove the negative—that they were not discriminating, nor even using racially neutral selection processes when other, more egalitarian alternatives were available. Corporations had to justify their selection processes according to “business necessity.” It all required a bureaucracy to manage the personnel, processes, and data.

This meant not only racial preferences in hiring, as commonly recognized, but also a narrowing of the permitted scope for prudence. Subjective human judgment had become suddenly perilous. The new system of meritocracy thus increasingly discouraged the very methods of assessing merit that America’s founding generation practiced.

The human resources industry expanded rapidly in the second half of the 20th century. Dobbin notes that it “more than doubled in size” in the 1970s alone and grew tenfold by the close of the century. Much of that growth followed the Civil Rights Act, as the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power and Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust increased employers’ compliance obligations. Over the following decades, Dobbin writes, corporations witnessed large increases in “formal job descriptions and job requirements,” “open bidding systems for jobs,” “salary classification systems,” “performance evaluations,” and “centralized hiring and firing.” The HR industry’s success has obscured the fact that the spread of these practices ultimately traces back to civil rights law.

Human resources managers promised that this era of “equal opportunity” would lead to better productivity and efficiency. Unfortunately, that did not happen. As summarized by economist Robert J. Gordon, “[L]abor productivity experienced a half-century of rapid growth between 1920 and 1970, then slowed markedly after 1970.” Some fields such as construction and manufacturing even experienced lengthy periods of decline. One of the only bright spots in America has been in oil and gas extraction, not a field known for scrupulous compliance with the whims of the progressive vanguard.

If meritocracy is supposed to end the tyranny of over-aggressive civil rights law and human resources managers, it will surely backfire.

In 2022, Vivek Ramaswamy co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed proposing to expand civil rights laws “to protect employees from discrimination on the basis of political beliefs.” This would, of course, create another protected class, requiring more human resources managers and leading to more civil rights litigation. It would even empower, say, DSA members to force banks to employ them.

Once you accept the Left’s premises, the logic points in only one direction.

Meritocracy U

The Right has also used meritocracy as its alternative to progressivism in higher education. But here again, it risks merely conserving progressivism.

Clark Kerr and James Bryant Conant, presidents of the University of California and Harvard, were the architects of American meritocracy, as chronicled in Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test. Their efforts capped a century-long, radical transformation of the American university.

At the time of the American founding, colleges were overwhelmingly denominational and religious, and required prospective students to accumulate a tremendous body of knowledge and culture before they could be admitted. Historian Forrest McDonald has noted that entrance exams to King’s College (now Columbia) required applicants to translate selections from Tully’s Select Orations and Virgil’s Aeneid from Latin into English and the first ten chapters of John’s Gospel from Greek into Latin. Once accepted, students followed a set curriculum and often were required to attend chapel daily.

American colleges and universities in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th gradually abandoned this model. They removed Latin and Greek entrance requirements, began hiring secular faculty and presidents, dropped their sectarian affiliations, and stopped requiring chapel attendance. Increasingly, they modeled themselves after German research universities: directing attention away from teaching undergraduates and toward producing new research, adopting Ph.D. programs, professionalizing the professorship, minimizing the classics, and much more.

By the mid-20th century, everything at Harvard had changed except for the student body. President Conant, concerned about the rise of socialism and the challenge of assimilating millions of new immigrants, sought to replace the existing, largely WASP student body with new “American Radicals.” His instrument of choice was the SAT—designed not to test achievement but natural aptitude—which would open admissions beyond the elite prep schools that had prepared students for the old entrance requirements. Conant hoped to engineer a new elite, and he did so by lowering the bar of specific knowledge required to enter college.

With the support of Harvard and the Carnegie Foundation, the SAT eventually became a standard entrance requirement, replacing the College Board’s achievement-based written tests on specific subject matter. This too was a choice—it was not an outcome determined by the need to modernize American universities.

Meanwhile, Clark Kerr unveiled his master plan for California’s university system, ensuring universal access while developing an elite upper tier of UC campuses that selected only the top applicants. They had the primary responsibility for academic research and nearly the sole authority within California’s public system to award Ph.D.s.

As with workforce meritocracy, the sharp distinction between racial preferences and meritocracy breaks down in higher education as well. The same institutions that promoted meritocracy—most prominently Carnegie and Harvard—also promoted racial preferences for many of the same reasons. They recognized no contradiction between those two methods of elite selection, because, as Lemann recently explained, “they had in common a large institutional ambition and an insistence on autonomy.”

But contrary to the meritocrats, academic excellence and intelligence can both be assessed through achievement tests. France, for example, has long relied on such testing, which encourages a bare minimum of shared cultural awareness.

The WASPs of yesteryear were replaced by elites whose most salient characteristics seem to be grievance, natural aptitude, and trauma. Call them GNATs. Once natural potential became the object of selection, the same score could be made more or less impressive by listing the obstacles under which it was achieved. And it helped, of course, if the applicant’s trauma connected to a politically correct grievance narrative. In this context, adult authority figures are viewed mainly as obstacles to the expression of natural aptitude rather than as shapers of character or transmitters of knowledge and wisdom. Merit, meanwhile, comes to imply entitlement instead of duty or obligation.

Admissions officers invited applicants to engage in a process of “competitive victimhood.” Even the majority in SFFA v. Harvard reinforced this trend. While ruling against affirmative action, the Supreme Court decision explicitly allowed applicants to highlight in their admissions essays “how race affected his or her life.” With explicit racial preferences now off the table, this option will surely gain favor.

Conant and Kerr’s meritocratic vision required blurring the lines between public and private institutions in higher education. They justified this change by the supposed moral imperative to ensure that each American with natural aptitude had equal access, while minimizing the advantages of place and family. Federal support for student loans soared as the students selected by aptitude testing had to be able to afford tuition. Federal research funding was funneled through universities as opposed to individual researchers (at least until recently). And Title IX gave Washington further leverage over nearly every campus.

All of this followed the logic of meritocracy.

Conant’s hope that meritocracy would help beat back socialism came at a steep price. His “American Radicals” saw family-transmitted advantages, except for natural intelligence, as illegitimate. Meritocratic logic would lead, as Conant recognized, the radicals to demand the confiscation of “all property once a generation” through inheritance taxes and other constitutional means.

This same logic appears in Vivek Ramaswamy’s book, Nation of Victims, which perhaps unwittingly evokes Conant—and positively cites the “participatory socialist” Thomas Piketty—in supporting a minimum 59% inheritance tax: “We shouldn’t allow people to become billionaires just by having rich parents.” Such confiscatory taxation is necessary, Ramaswamy writes, “to preserve the meritocratic system.” After all, “the goal of creating a hereditary dynasty is an illegitimate one in a meritocracy.”

But this is the wrong impulse for conservatives, who should be starting dynasties and building institutions for both economic (families, after all, are the source of all human capital) and cultural reasons. T.S. Eliot recognized that the family is the “primary vehicle for the transmission of culture.” The preservation of culture, and thereby civilization itself, is incompatible with the logic of meritocracy, which poses a grave threat to the American way of life.

If natural aptitude confers a right to rule, this justifies an expansive class of unelected experts who help manage our lives. And it supplies no justification in principle for limiting this group to American meritocrats. Citizenship, after all, tells us little about an individual’s natural aptitude or work ethic. National sovereignty would seem to be just another prejudice to be cast aside in pursuit of meritocracy.

These are not merely academic questions. American elites increasingly propose new global governance regimes and whole-of-society policymaking to respond to “existential” risks such as artificial intelligence and climate change. Elites in China are apparently considering Confucianist “meritocracy” as an ideological replacement for Marxism. Advocates also present Chinese meritocracy as “a viable alternative to Western democracy.” Clinging to meritocracy makes Americans more vulnerable to such ideological campaigns.

Moreover, under the logic of meritocracy, what possible objection could one raise against recognizing the political rights of artificial intelligence? If intelligence and work are what constitute merit and merit is the title to rule, then perhaps machines should begin to rule in the place of humans. This points to a deeper problem with aristocracy that John Adams identified in his response to Thomas Jefferson’s notion of “natural aristocracy”: “Your distinction between the aristoi and pseudo aristoi, will not help the matter. I would trust one as soon as the other with unlimited Power.” Supposedly “natural” aristocrats could become just as tyrannical as conventional ones, Adams recognized.

What is the alternative to meritocracy? There does not need to be a single word that explains how every college admissions or personnel office ought to make decisions. Nor can there be a simple formula for making money in America or gaining political power. The alternative to meritocracy is not any one ideological term, but rather a restoration of human judgment, prudence, distributed authority, and a deeper notion of American citizenship that places duty over desert.

The post The Meritocracy Machine appeared first on The American Mind.

The far-left Washington Post is panicking over AI and seems pretty sure that the government will have to redistribute wealth if we’re to avoid societal collapse.

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Two college team cyclists were tragically killed during a training ride on Wednesday morning in Carter County, Tennessee.

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During her Wednesday broadcast monologue, Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham called Angie Nixon's upset win over her Democrat primary challenger, Alexander Vindman, in Tuesday's Florida Democratic U.S. senatorial primary good news for Republicans.

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