So....still reading that meritocracy book, and it actually kind of made me put some things together about meritocracy, particularly the current political realignment going on, and why everything is getting so messed up.
In a sense, this is not really news on this blog. I mean, i've long been paying attention of the trend that we're heading toward a world in which the left is the party of the educated elite and the working class is being driven toward conservatism out of a sense of resentment toward the political system. I've also pointed out that this is not helping the situation, and if these trends crystalize with a 7th party system, we're kinda screwed for the next generation. And a lot of my work on this blog has been about encouraging people to pursue a different path.
But this book kinda makes me realize, hey, this is actually about meritocracy to some extent. I mean, think of politics during the 5th and 6th party alignments, since FDR through present day is basically like two iterations of a similar party system on economics, but with the 5th being more culturally conservative and economically liberal, and the 6th being fiscally conservative and socially liberal (or divided). And what we're experiencing now seems to be another relatively gradual iteration of the trends we observed in the 6th.
But let's look at this way. Traditionally, the left has been the party of the working class. It's been the party of fixing the economic issues, recognizing that the economy is unfair, and that changes needs to be made to make it fair. In the 5th alignment, we saw massive expansions of the welfare state, regulations, and unionization, whereas in the 6th we've kind of seen that devolve a bit, especially as the democrats back away from the new deal and make poisoned compromises with republicans to undermine the system.
Traditionally, the right has been the party of the free market, small government, and also...meritocracy. They're the ones who insist that the winners won fairly, the losers lost fairly, it's fine for the losers to suffer as they should've worked harder. The right has traditionally been the side of the aisle for the affluent, the winners of the economy. Those who are educated, and see themselves as job creators, blah blah blah.
But as we know, throughout the 6th alignment (Reagan-Trump), the democrats have been moving away from the working class and toward the affluent and educated. Meanwhile, the right has been doubling down on the uneducated, and even making anti education populism a big part of their pitch. They look at liberals as elitists and technocrats who look down on the common man, and in this era of trump, they're really taking off with the populism and anti intellectualism and dialing it up to the 10. Meanwhile, the liberals are going in the direction of basically abandoning and betraying the left, whose coalition within the democrats have been thinned out over the past 50 years or so. And now their big pitch is to win over all of those white suburbanites who live outside of cities like Philly, Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, etc. Like, those guys, when I was growing up, were largely conservatives. They lived in their own gated communities away from the problems of the rest of the country, and america just worked for them. They were affluent, their neighbors were affluent, everything worked, they were the winners of the economy, and they believed they deserved it. They didnt want their tax dollars going to the inner cities, where people were too lazy to work and on drugs and they just steal everything or whatever. No, they were NIMBYS fixated on their own little communities with their perfectly manicured lawns and white picket fences and HOAs and school systems that worked.
But now, the democrats appeal to those people. Because the populist turn of the GOP has these guys horrified. I mean, they're educated. They see what is becoming of the party, with the trumps, and the marjorie taylor greenes, as the unwashed masses taking over. They probably were out, much like me, after the tea party took over in 2010, but they still held on in 2012 to vote for mitt romney because he was for low taxes and austerity.
But with trump speaking his populism, and being...what he is, they're horrified. ANd clinton is making a pitch for these people. She spoke their language. She talked of the protestant work ethic and how people should be free to live up to their god given potential. She didnt wanna rock the boat on healthcare or education, or taxes. She was a clinton through and through, her husband was the one who started selling out the new deal in the 90s, and she wanted to consider that.
In a lot of ways, her way of talking was very meritocratic. I mean, part of what drove people to trump is our economy aint working any more. Decades of neoliberalism, which bill clinton was implicit in, have helped hollow out american living standards, and people were angry. And ironically, people who a generation ago were happy to deny welfare to people and tell them to work for it, are now finding the economy isnt working for them. But because they're anti welfare, anti sociology, and have a poor understanding of the world, they're just going mask off with the racism and blaming all of our problems on immigrants and minorities.
Meanwhile, the democrats were able to expand on their emerging coalition of racial minorities, driven to the democrats en masse by racism, and the affluent at the same time. By throwing working class voters under the bus, they would appeal to the meritocratic elite, while shifting the narratives toward caring to the poor to fit their language.
And so we get...identity politics. You see, all of this talk about privilege and the like doesnt threaten those who are successful under the current system. it speaks their language. It speaks of having equal opportunities and equal playing fields, rather than having systemic redistribution to fix the problems with the economy. For me, while the economy itself is the problem and the only way to fix it is through mass redistribution and a rejection (to some degree) of the work ethic and meritocracy, the democrats get to talk about opportunity and jobs and making things more equal.
Nothing is given to people, mind you (outside of some talk of reparations, which is so fringe its probably less popular than my ideas), they have to work for it, but that's the point. The focus is on fixing unequal outcomes by race and gender, by understanding the systemic barriers to success that exist. And the focus is on things like affirmative action, and diversity seminars, and blah blah blah. And those suburbanites get to act like theyre doing something to fix the problems by caring for the less fortunate, while their status at the top is secured.
So what happens if you're white, male, and you're crapped on by the modern economy? Well, nothing. The democrats won't do anything for you, and because you're "privileged" in the modern rhetoric, they won't do anything for you. And this is where a lot of shaming comes in. The left looks down on a lot of white working class people. Sometimes legitimately (and ill explain my nuance here), and sometimes illlegitimately. To some extent i dealt with this in 2016 and 2020 as i argued for my ideas. I was told that i was privileged, and that my lack of success was my fault, and that i was a lazy POS for being anti work and for more redistributional policies, and that they'd prefer a hard working immigrant over me (yeah, ive literally had people say that when i mentioned that i'd compromise on immigration for economic gains). Ive even had liberals become insanely antagonistic toward me and rubbing their status and economic privilege in their face, going on about how they're making bank and barely do any work and meanwhile im screwed and hahaha. You might think im exaggerating, but no. I did encounter this crap, from other libs, which is why i have an intense hatred toward a lot of centrist craplib types. They literally do this.
But yeah, as we know from yang, and my own research into this backs this up too, it's about location. It's about who you know and where you live and who your parents were to some extent. We dont really live in a meritocracy, we pretend we do, but it's a flawed one at best and not one at worst. And i happen to live in the rust belty areas where the war on normal people is going on. I see the stores closing. I surf the job openings, I know this economy is complete and utter BS. I understand it. But many libs live in their little suburban enclaves with their big houses and big cars and 6 figure salaries, and they flaunt it. They're successful and if you arent, in their eyes, its your fault. You gotta JuSt MoVe (with what money?) or LeArN tO cOdE. So yeah, they shame fellow liberals all the time, especially of the bernie and yang varieties. As a matter of fact, the modern democrats seem to hate us. They were so condescending of us in 2016 and 2020, and even now in 2024, although i would say given how obnoxious the left is getting some backlash is justified by this point. But back in 2016? Its like they went into that cycle with the intent of antagonizing people who just wanted some fricking universal healthcare and a living wage. Things that were supposed to be hallmarks of the democratic party.
And honestly, it drove me nuts. I avoided the worst instincts of the right. I mean, having JUST left them the previous election cycle, I kinda knew that they werent selling anything I wanted and that they didn't change. They just happened to get an idiot who said the things that people wanted to hear. But that doesn't mean that I liked the democrats either. Clinton was very much against my values, and I kind of realize a lot of it was because she embraced the language of meritocracy with her god given potential nonsense, whereas I had stopped embracing it when i left conservatism. I kinda chalked it up to atheism at the time, but in reality my humanist worldview led to an outright rejection of belief in meritocracy and work ethic whereas the left a la clinton still embraced it.
The thing is, the modern democrats dont want to improve the system as a whole, they want a system with winners and losers, a meritocracy of sorts, one where the winners live very good lives and the losers are made to suffer. The thing is, they just wanna focus on the identity aspects of the problem and push their idea of making all the demographics equal, rather than fixing the entire system. Which is the problem. If whites are 50% of the population and blacks are 13%, they'll want exactly 50% of poor people to be white, and 13% of black people, in line with demographics. When when whites protest being thrown into poverty, because guess what, to some extent the economy IS a zero sum game despite all the growth, they'll throw self righteous phrases at people like "imagine being so privileged that you see equality as oppression" and crap like that. I mean, IT IS WHEN THE ECONOMY DOES OPPRESS PEOPLE! And that's the point. I dont want an equal number of people from all demographics to be successful and unsuccessful, I want to focus on narrowing the range of actual outcomes, where those on the bottom are better off, and those on the top are worse off than they are now. A society where instead of the richest people being tens or hundreds of thousands of times better off than the poorest, maybe they're only a few hundred or a few thousand.
Basically, to go back to that oppression quote, I want NO ONE to be oppressed. I want EVERYONE to be taken care of. I dont wanna focus on this nonsense of equality of opportunity, because there's only so much opportunity to go around statistically, and our system literally, at least not without the reforms i propose, actually provide a good life for EVERYONE.
This is why people make fun of woke neolibs with their rainbow capitalism crap. it's the same crappy system but just more diverse and multicultural. It's literally just rainbow bud light instead of normal bud light. ANd unlike the right, which flips out over the rainbow on the can, i flip out because HEY MAYBE BUD LIGHT SUCKS AND I DONT WANNA DRINK THIS CRAP.
Like, in an ideal world, this wouldnt even need to be debated. Should we focus on equality of opportunity at all? Sure, I just dont think it's the end all be all of everything, and that the real problem with america is racism and all of these other isms. The fact is, our economic problems go deeper than skin color and discrimination and racial and sexual inequality. But that's all these neolib rainbow capitalists wanna focus on. The same old crappy system with a friendlier face. And they just wanna shame the losers of the policies that they advocate for and have spent the last several decades advocating for.
Which brings us to the republicans. As we know, most republicans are white. And many of them also believe in the work ethic. And a lot of them apply it in racist ways, wanting to look down on POC and the like. For as much crap as i give the dems for rainbow capitalism, dont think for one second im racist and i condone this crap. I dont. And if anything, my ideas were literally crafted in order to bypass the resentment aspect of welfare. The way to do it is to give it to everyone, to make everyone feel like they're getting a piece of the pie. To change the entire system. I want to defuse racial resentment in this country. I want to keep going with our post 1960s status quo where minorities won their rights, and we're all equal and blah blah blah. I just wanna focus on fixing the economic system where we all have more equality. And to me, the solution, and i say this as someone who lives in a minority-majority community, is...my policies. a UBI would give a massive cash infusion into these poor areas where "opportunity" is limited because "job creators" dont wanna create jobs in these areas, because there is no money to be made, and theres no money to be made because they have no jobs. Like seriously, i live in an inner city where most people are on welfare. Poverty is something insane like 35% these days, and was over 40% during the recession. Median individual income is around $13k a year, median household income is like $30k. And yeah that basically speaks of an area in which everyone is literally getting by on literally minimum wage. The jobs are trash, our situations are trash, everything is trash, and I believe we need an actual systemic shift.
But that kind of requires...raising taxes on the successful, not just the mega millionaires but also wealthy suburbanites making 6 figures in their gated suburbs. Maybe they cant afford another trip to paris this year with my tax increases, oh no, boo hoo, cry yourself to sleep with wads of hundreds, why dont ya? But...the democrats dont want that. Because they wanna focus on "opportunity" and appeasing fiscal conservatives obsessed with work ethic and meritocracy and not on actually fixing the fricking system.
But yeah, back to the GOP. The GOP...yeah, they're becoming a party of racial resentment. They always have been, but they used to be more successful as they werent impacting by the worst the economy had going, mostly POC ended up getting the real crap side of the economy. Because again...they live in poor cities, with failing schools, few tax dollars, and a cycle of poverty that keeps repeating itself. A cycle my own policies would fix, but hey, virtue signalling above reals, right democrats? Anyway. Yeah, republicans are historcially privileged, and a lot of them are happy as long as they get to look down on someone of lower status than them. And thats how they see it. Hence why they scream about immigrants the first thing when their jobs are threatened. But they too are experiencing this hollowing out of the middle class, and most of them arent on the positive side of it. And I was hoping we could, you know, kinda convince them that maybe big social programs are a good idea, kinda shifting back toward the 5th party system in a way where they'd be for social programs and workers rights and stuff, but between the neolibs pissing them off and trump, they're just going hardcore in the racism direction.
And honestly, this book kinda points out a couple things to me. it follows a lot of the same ways of looking things as thomas frank's "whats the matter with kansas" as most conservatives are driven primarily by resentment toward elites and have an own the libs mentality. They do. Because the elites and the libs are so obnoxious and self righteous, a lot of their perspective is just spiting them. See them "rolling coal" to piss off environmentalists, or being explicitly racist and crap when they know it pisses off libs. hell, donald trump was so well liked because he would say things that trigger the fricking libs all the time. The dude's entire mentality is based on pissing off liberals, and his fan base is all about pissing off liberals.
It's kinda cathartic. Think about it, if these people are obnoxious self righteous jerks who look down on you (and they are), it must feel pretty good to pretty much shove a middle finger in their face with their cultural policing and go "F U, you dont control me", while also saying several horrible things i will never repeat. I mean, I dont necessarily agree this is productive, but I get it. I get the impulse at least. It's kind of a petty act of revenge or retaliation, but it's something. And given how little else many of those guys have these days, it makes them feel good.
In some ways, trumpism is the whole idea of the person the village ignored or rejected will burn it down just to feel its warmth. Thats trumpism in a nutshell. A bunch of people angry with white hot rage over their loss of status over the past half century, and who express it in unproductive and harmful ways. I kinda get frustration over the economy. But again, if you wanna fix it, you gotta stop this meritocracy nonsense. Not just shifting who the winners and losers are. This is why i hate identity politics, it just divides people into groups based on identity, and fuels resentment of each other. It isnt a unifying ethos, its not just divisive, it's unproductive too.
It doesnt fix anything. Again, it just shifts who the winners and losers are. When I, a privileged white dude, experienced my first glimpse into life on the other side, wanna know what i did? Man, this isn't good, this isnt right. And you know what? I changed my entire ideals to fit a new ethos that would fix the problem. I didnt turn to racism. I didnt turn to privilege politics. I actually looked at the issues, was like "okay, how do we solve this", and my policies are a response to that. And my ideas would effectively fix the system. No more poverty, no more economic coercion. Yes, inequality still exists, it would always exist, but its lessened. Inequality still exists under the neoliberal left's regime, they just try to change who wins and who loses on the basis of identity and focused on their work obsessed meritocracy, instead of fixing the very problem that the economy literally has a numbers problem that cant be ignored if you wanna actually fix things. The sad reality is there arent enough jobs, there never will be, and those jobs will never provide enough money, and they'll never be dignified. The very idea of the system, taken to the extremes that it is, IS the problem. I want to fix it. Id rather have a system in which no one is poor and the richest person is only a few thousand times richer than the poorest person than one where we make sure the demographics are all equally in poverty in according with their statistical prevalence in the population, and the richest person is tens of thousands of times richer.
In other words Id rather have a GINI index of like 0.35 instead of one that's like 0.5, instead of focusing exclusively on racial and identity based equality within a neoliberal capitalist system that systematically confines 10-15% to poverty, leaves half the country living paycheck to paycheck, and leaves people in crippling fear of losing their job, which they are effectively enslaved to.
Ya know?
Another thing that this book discussed, that I dont technically agree with but i see where they're coming from is the conservative backlash against smart people and the college educated. I mean to some extent I cant see how its driven by populism and this anti elite attitude, but heres the thing. I might be unsuccessful economically, but I am educated. This book seems to overemphasize education with success. While many of the most successful are highly educated, education is no guarantee of success. The reason it was in the past was education was successfully gated among the rich where the poors couldnt get educated enough to get degrees. but the "equality of opportunity" people decided to make a system of student loans that you could go to college and pay the loans back alter. This allowed tons of people who otherwise wouldnt have access to college, like me, to go to college. but without the jobs waiting for us when we got out, many of us fell into debt while not having the jobs we expected to have. And many of us are kinda doubly economically screwed as a result. This is why i focus on free college and student debt forgiveness as a plank in my own politics. It isnt right that were saddling college students with tens of thousands in debt and telling them to sink and swim. Many of us feel like we leave college worse off than if we went at all. So I would disagree with the emphasis on credentialism. like, a lot of us college educated people are right there with the unsuccessful these days. Im one of them.
But the anti college attitudes on the right are problematic. Lets face it, experts...know things. People who spend their whole lives studying a topic are going to know more on that topic than a random person who doesnt. You go to doctors when youre sick, lawyers when youre in legal trouble, you call plumbers when your pipe are leaking, ya know? You go to the people whose job it is to know their crap in that specific specialization. But a lot of conservatives have this attitude that their ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. That they know more about viruses than the people who study viruses for a livbing, and that they know more about climate change than climate scientists.
If you go to college, you gain a lot of knowledge about how these disciplines work. They're like a trade, or a craft. College is kinda like going into a guild to learn a trade like in the middle ages where youre an aspiring blacksmith so you train with blacksmiths to become blacksmiths, and then you know more about blacksmithing than someone who farms fields. Ya know? Except a lot of fields are like that. Climatology is like that. Virology is like that. Even politics is like that, and everyone and their mother is supposed to have an opinion on it, but if you dont study it in detail, how do you really know? I mean for the record i have my knowledge because i ltierally have a bachelors in political science and criminology/sociology, and a masters in a similar social science type field. I'm literally a political problem solving machine. You give me enough time to study and issue, figure out how things work, and develop solutions, and ill...develop solutions. Even if they're not what most people wanna hear. You throw me on the bad end of the economy and guess what, I'll spend the next decade writing and blogging about...how to fix said economy. And here we are.
But...conservatives, they're simple folk. And yes, this is where i get to be a condescending butt myself. They dont like that science stuff, science keeps changing. Meanwhile the bible is always the same as its gods word, it never changes. Evolution? Whats that? The world is 6000 years old, it says so right here in the bible. Climate change? God wouldnt make a universe humans can destroy, after all, god made this world for us, it says it right here in genesis. I dont trust those experts with those fancy words and degrees and stuff, i tell you what, i listen to rush limbaugh on my lunch break at pep boys and that MF is spitting. These smart people dont know what they're talking about, im just as smart as they are...blah blah blah...
And heres where i turn the snarky liberal elitist. No, no you are not. You are an idiot, you have no idea what youre talking about, youve never studied these things, you dont even know the basics, and coming to you for advice is like going to one of those middle ages doctors who thought the answer to diseases was more leeches. That's the level of inaccuracy and wrongness were talking about here with these people.
Theres nothing wrong with not knowing everything. Im ignorant on things outside of my field. I dont claim to know everything about say, biology, or chemistry, or advanced math, etc. I mean due to being in liberals arts i know at least enough to navigate these subjects somewhat, but im not gonna be as smart as someone who has a degree in a lot of them. And thats okay. No one is going to be. And i admit, the neolib hacks tend to lean a bit into to the "we're the winner F U loser" narrative. I explained my own experience with centrist libs myself. I hate those fricking people. But....let's face it. This weird populism against the idea of having experts, or having an education at all is literally dumb. Like it's the epitome of dumb. Crap on stuffy self righteous libs all ya want but dont knock actual education or expertise, ya know?
So....thats one aspect of this I think is cringe. Because i dont fit fully in one group or another. I lean liberal on like 90% of issues, and often consider myself left of them (but right of the "leftists"), but because im not successful, i went in the direction of full on economic justice and wanting to restructure the economy over just falling for the upper class privilege crap. I actually consider those guys to be privileged. Because they're often the big winners of the economy but only feel sympathy for others through a limited lens that makes them feel self important for caring but comes at no sacrifice to themselves.
But yeah. Im too smart to join the right, but I'm also too unsuccessful to support more incremental shifts to the system that largely wouldnt help me. I made my solutions based on my expertise, proposing solutions that would both benefit me and solve problems system wide. But i just dont fit anywhere in the modern political system. Because the left is developing a hardcore meritocratic side that id expect from republicans, and the right is going toward a particularly unhelpful and dangerous form of resentment politics that solves nothing and if anything threatens the system as a whole.
And I cant help but feel helpless in the face of these political trends amplifying in the exact wrong directions. I just didnt really blame meritocracy itself until i looked at it through the lens of this book.
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