“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.)
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, while declining to respond directly to questions about Hegseth blocking the promotions of the officers, claimed that Hegseth, is “doing a tremendous job restoring meritocracy throughout the ranks at the Pentagon, as President Trump directed him to do.”
Yet Hegseth works for an administration that, in order to carry out a plan outlined in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, has already fired hundreds of thousands of federal workers— many of whom proved their merit, in at least one sense, through many years of effective government service— and replaced them with sycophants and “loyalists” who are often unqualified to do the actual job by almost any measure.
And it probably doesn’t need to be said, but while the concept of meritocracy may not always be a tool used by once race to oppress another, it is certainly being used by many members of our state and federal governments to do just that.
Under the pretense that America is “colorblind” and that any attempts to address obvious ongoing discrimination inherently harm White, male, Christian, straight, rich people, is “racist,” federal and state officials have fired members of minority groups, defunded programs designed to address ongoing discrimination, disproportionately censored and banned the work of people of color, and moved to erase the histories of people of color.
If there’s one video that encapsulates the ludicrousness of the idea that this is what it looks like for the people with “merit” to run society, it’s this one:
The video comes from depositions given as part of a lawsuit brought against DOGE by the the Modern Language Association, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association.
The lawsuit alleges that the way DOGE canceled grants and funding was a violation of the First Amendment— and a violation of the separation of powers, since Congress had already funded the programs before DOGE (a pseudo-agency created by Trump and Elon Musk, with no clear administrative structure) unilaterally withheld those Congressionally-approved funds.
In the video, Justin Fox— who started at DOGE as a 27-year-old with no experience in government, grant administration, or any of the fields he is accused of wrongly defunding— is unable to define “DEI,” a term he used to get ChatGPT to make him a list of projects to defund in order to cut wasteful spending. (His colleague Nate Cavanaugh, in his own deposition, acknowledged that DOGE did not actually achieve this goal.)
An attorney representing the plaintiffs repeatedly asks Fox to explain his own understanding of what “DEI” was, leading to long, awkward pauses and Fox’s repeated non-answer that he used the language of a Trump administration EO to define “DEI,” but that he couldn’t remember what the EO actually said.
At another point, when asked why DOGE canceled funding for a documentary on, according to the New York Times, “Jewish women who had been slaves during the Holocaust,” Fox awkwardly explained, “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture… It’s inherently related to D.E.I. for that reason.”
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether Fox got his job through a “merit-based system,” and also whether these DOGE defundings are animated by an overt bias against anything that makes spoiled young White men feel sad.
And “merit” doesn’t just apply to people, but to ideas.
Mainstream conservatives once loudly proclaimed a “marketplace of ideas”; if such a marketplace exists, and if the best idea wins based on its merit, then attempts to codify Trump’s EO into SC law failed on their merits.
Anti-CRT bills with similar language to the budget proviso failed in committee. They received massive public pushback, with hours of testimony across weeks of hearings mainly rejecting the need and questioning the motives behind the bills.
The need to sneak the Trump EO language into a proviso in the state Department of Education budget each year isn’t meritocracy, anymore than re-drawing a voting district so that your opponent can’t win proves you have more inherent “merit”.
For modern American self-styled meritocrats, “meritocracy” is a thin disguise for might-makes-right power plays at best, and social-Darwin-style racism and sexism at worst.
The concept of an equal playing field is already problematic when applied to public services: arguably, citizens should have access to the services themselves, and not just an “opportunity” to compete for them. But a willingness to stack an already-stacked deck even more indicates a deep fear of your ability to survive on your own merits. In a free society, we don’t provide services only to people we believe have more inherent skills or value. We provide services because they make society better (which often means prioritizing what people need over what they “deserve”).
Our obsession with standardized testing, for example, seems to spring from what Peter Sacks calls “meritocracy’s crooked yardstick”.
As Sacks describes in Standardized Minds: The High Price of America’s Testing Culture and How to Change It, humanity has created a series of standardized tests with built-in biases (usually unintentionally, I hope) and then we have consistently stuck with the ones that reaffirm what those in power wish to believe about who “deserves” to go into college or into desirable careers.
One great example that has stuck with me for years after reading the book is that early IQ tests asked French test takers of the early 1900s what a person should do in case of fire. Wealthy test-takers were likely to give the “correct” answer (call the fire brigade), while poor test-takers were more likely to “incorrectly” answer that the best choice was to flee the building (perhaps because in poorer quarters, the fire brigade probably wouldn’t come). Is that a test of “IQ,” or a confirmation-bias machine for proving the “merit” of wealthier test-takers?
There are other ways to create and maintain a society.
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “ambiguous utopian” novel The Dispossessed, the main character hails from a moon-planet that has rejected Western-style competition in favor of an “anarchist” system which is— mostly— ruled by collective consensus, where social services are provided by the community to all who need them and where the pursuit of knowledge is driven mainly by intrinsic motivation. When the protagonist begins an unusual professorship on the neighboring planet, in an “archist” society that is much more competitive and consumerist, he is disturbed to find that students want to be ranked against one another, that they want to compete for numerical prizes, that they want educational opportunities to be granted based on merit.
Obviously, Le Guin’s novel is a thought experiment— where, you won’t be surprised to know if you’re familiar with her work, the outcome is complicated, but the more egalitarian moon society is at least more appealing than the “archist” one. Real life isn’t so black and white.
But the idea that the state, in a nominally democratic country, would forbid schools from even questioning the underlying value of “meritocracy” is a pretty good indicator that we definitely don’t live in one.
Maybe we can imagine something better.