Why Progressives Shouldn’t Give Up on Meritocracy

In his nightly monologue this past Monday, Tucker Carlson gave his assessment of what caused the meltdown at Silicon Valley Bank. He began by noting that, after the 2srcsrc8 financial crash, the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice, led by Eric Holder, instituted “D.E.I.”—diversity, equity, and inclusion—standards for the financial sector. According to Carlson, this meant that women and minorities, who, in his estimation, were clearly incompetent, now worked in pivotal positions in the banking industry. “Ideologues used the 2srcsrc8 bank bailout to kill American meritocracy,” Carlson concluded. Andy Kessler, an opinion columnist at the Wall Street Journal, published a similar take in that day’s paper, speculating that the bank’s leadership may have faltered because it was “distracted by diversity demands.”

In Carlson’s and Kessler’s imagining, meritocracy has always been the foundation of American prosperity, and “normal people”—read: none of the people who would benefit from diversity-hiring initiatives at a bank—are being guilted or even strong-armed into giving up the fruits of their labor. Women, immigrants, the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, and Black Americans, in this story, are trying to create a rigged system in which people receive jobs, plaudits, and wealth for having marginalized identities.

Carlson’s and Kessler’s “anti-woke” interpretations of the bank collapse provoked a predictable outrage cycle online. The usual progressive counter-argument is to point out that the conservative vision is ahistorical—that the U.S. has never been a meritocracy, and that race- and gender-conscious remediations are the only way to address the country’s legacies of slavery, disenfranchisement, and exclusion. But I’ve always been a bit unsettled, or at the very least dissatisfied, by this response, even if I agree with its basic tenets. It’s true that the U.S. isn’t a country where every person starts at the same spot, and makes their way by some combination of talent and grit. Still, I worry that progressives’ hesitation to defend meritocracy may actually work against progressive aims. It seems like meritocracy could go the way of free speech, as a bedrock principle that the left allows the right to claim as its own, even if it matters to a great number of Americans. Just as suppressing free speech will never be popular—I wrote on Tuesday about Ron DeSantis’s doomed crusade to punish teachers and remove books from libraries—leaving behind the idea of meritocracy is a losing proposition.

At the very least, the left’s hesitation to defend meritocracy has given conservatives a chance to monopolize the conversation around it, albeit to varying degrees of success. Last month, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Harvard- and Yale-educated entrepreneur who is running for President on the Republican ticket, announced his candidacy with a video that felt, more than anything, like it had been produced by some ambitious entry-level employees at a consulting firm who had been given access to the A.V. room. “We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy narrates in a voice that sounds like Ben Shapiro impersonating Barack Obama. “Patriotism, hard work, and family have disappeared. We now embrace one secular religion after another. From COVIDism to climatism, and gender ideology.” He goes on to say that the basic tenets of “the woke left” have created “psychological slavery” in the United States, which has “completely replaced our culture of free speech in America.” At first blush, his message doesn’t seem all that out of line: he says “most Americans” agree on the core values of the country, which include basic, if somewhat abstract, freedoms and the promise of meritocracy. In his speeches and social-media posts, Ramaswamy has clarified a bit what all that means for him. He wants to eliminate the United States Department of Education and eliminate affirmative action because of its inherent “anti-white & anti-Asian racism.”

For the past five years or so, I’ve reported on the rightward shift among immigrant voters, which, in many parts of the country, has been influenced by concerns about public safety and educational merit. There have been signs of an emerging conservative Asian American movement that galvanizes around schooling issues, in both big cities and in affluent suburbs with competitive public-school systems. In New York City, majority-Asian precincts shifted twenty-three points to the G.O.P. In San Francisco, the temporary elimination of merit-based admissions at Lowell High School—a magnet school where more than half of the student body is Asian American—prompted political mobilization that led to the removal of three members of the city’s school board, and spilled over to the recall of Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive district attorney. These fights have resonated with Asian Americans across the country—especially Chinese Americans—who believe that equity reforms in education, and moves like the elimination of standardized testing, are all engineered to diminish their academic accomplishments and squeeze off their children’s access to class mobility.

These developments, combined with a similar shift among Latino voters in the past two Presidential elections, and the Democratic Party’s failed attempts to reach its imagined coalition of “voters of color,” has led to a lot of theorizing about a multiracial future for the Republican Party. Ramaswamy’s strategy, I imagine, is to broadcast a vision of meritocracy that, outside of establishing his culture-war bona fides, also appeals to immigrants who are anxious about their children’s educational and economic prospects. The possibility of a multiracial right that flips states like Virginia, Georgia, and Arizona into Republican strongholds may sit with those voters. Ramaswamy will almost certainly fail in his political ambitions because he cannot tell a story without veering into screeds about wokeness and comically dense monologues about banking law and bureaucratic legal ideas. His conservatism, clearly designed for bankers and tech workers who are worried their kids won’t get into the Ivy League, is both weird and off-putting. But that doesn’t mean he is wrong to see that the idea of meritocracy resonates with most Americans, that a perceived abandonment of it would make many of those people nervous.

What would it look like for progressives to embrace the idea of American meritocracy? There is an argument to be made that the equity model pushes a vision of merit in which disadvantaged people are finally given a fair chance to compete with the privileged. But its expression—whether in attempts to scale back standardized testing, diversify corporate boardrooms, or place D.E.I. infrastructure into storied institutions—only really exists in the same élite, educated spaces where DeSantis and the like have waged their war against wokeness. But the promise of meritocracy can be found elsewhere; it can be found in supporting public schools and community colleges, providing broad economic protections for families, and taxing the super-wealthy. These policies, which are already popular among Democrats, might advance a better story of meritocracy—one that could appeal to voters who worry about the overreaches of the equity approach, and one that doesn’t abandon an ideal that very few Americans, of any political leaning, would ever leave behind. ♦