Meritocracy is like free trade. Countries or classes embrace it when it advantages them and view it more skeptically when they are no longer on top. Like Great Britain before us, America preached free trade when it meant opening up foreign markets to our world-beating products and enriching our allies. When it came to mean losing our industrial base to China, we belatedly started to ask whether the case for free trade was really so axiomatic.
“Meritocracy is like free trade.”
The same pattern is now playing out with meritocracy. It was a useful rallying cry for those who wanted to open up America’s ruling institutions to non-WASPs, starting with the Ivy League in the 1960s and culminating when the new class swept through Washington in the Clinton years. But when it came time for those newly minted elites to send their own children to college, suddenly unfettered dynamism no longer looked so appealing. A wave of books appeared in the 2010s with titles such as The Meritocracy Trap, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, and Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy.
This belated skepticism was doubtless self-serving. But, like the free-trade skeptics, meritocracy’s critics were right. Free trade and meritocracy are both ways of maximizing competition; competition is healthy, but too much can be toxic.