“Meritocracy”
The concept quickly begins to eat itself.
He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something good to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about the questions, but to write down the answers they had learned.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974)
In 2020, the Trump Administration issued an Executive Order which was at least superficially aimed at rolling back requirements for diversity training in federal agencies.
One of the probable authors of the EO was Chris Rufo, self-proclaimed architect of the anti-“CRT” panic. (Rufo is the guy who famously wrote, “We have successfully frozen their brand—‘critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”)
While many headlines on the Trump EO focused on this attack on “CRT” (as the term was intentionally misappropriated by Rufo and others) the order also contained a prohibition against another so-called “divisive concept,” that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.”
This line, along with the rest of the EO’s list of “divisive concepts,” survived long after the EO was canceled by the Biden Administration.
For example, it has been copied and pasted, virtually word for word, into each year’s South Carolina budget since 2021.
Most of the public probably doesn’t know this, because of the non-transparent process South Carolina uses for budget provisos.
But before we get too deeply into these kinds of official policies, it should be said that “meritocracy” is one of those unexamined concepts that people across the political spectrum periodically yammer about, but which few people seem to really stop and examine as a concept. (For example, as I’ll get into below, the idea of “merit” is a major driver in the American obsession with using standardized tests to decide who is worthy of going to college.)
As a word, “meritocracy” means, literally, a society ruled based on merit. But merit is a slippery concept.
Using the Merriam-Webster definitions alone, “merit” can mean “virtue,” but it can also mean “achievement”; in the world of ideas (the merits of the argument), it can mean “substance” or “justification”. It can even reference “spiritual credit”.
These meanings can’t always coexist: an inherent virtue is different from a series of actions that lead to an achievement. Being a worthy person is not always the same as doing a worthy thing.
And this slipperiness allows “meritocracy” to operate as a weasel word, where proponents can pretend to want a society ruled by the people of who have earned power through good works, while really wanting to assign a subjective value to individuals (one that, as the EO protests too loudly, could obviously never be used by one demographic group to oppress another, by pretending one group, say White males has “earned” a status that society may have actually handed them for other reasons).
To put it bluntly, meritocracy is a lie that even its proponents don’t seem to believe.
SC’s state government, which made it illegal to teach children that “meritocracy” may be a grift designed to steal opportunities from one group and hand them to already-high-status, reveals the lie behind the myth by not trusting the concept to survive on its own in the “marketplace of ideas”.
Similarly, if the opportunity to work in a job, or service in government, is awarded based on individual merit, why gerrymander? Yet the same SC GOP majority that has allowed the budget proviso to remain law for over five years, when charged with unconstitutional racial gerrymandering, explicitly argued in court that it wasn’t being racist when it drew the state’s voting districts; they merely wanted to win.
If society is supposed to be ruled based on achievement, or even on personal virtue, parties shouldn’t have to rig voting districts to win; they should be elected on the merits of their policies and their service.
Similarly, at the federal level, self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has long performatively railed against so-called DEI hires in the military and in federal government.
Hegseth recently knocked two Black officers and two female officers off of a promotion list that contains mainly White men. His probable defense will be that he did so because promotions should be based purely on “merit,” an argument he has made for years without any apparent self-awareness around his highly-contentious nomination (TLDR: he was widely and credibly accused of being a sexual predator and a non-functioning alcoholic, qualities reasonable people might argue show a lack of “merit” for the job of running US military operations.)
