CRAIG CALHOUN AND CHARLES TAYLOR
Freedom, equality, and solidarity are all basic for democracy. Omission of any, or excessive tilt toward one, can be fatal.
Freedom is often a greedy concept—or passion—seizing attention that should be shared with equality and solidarity. Too often it is seen as the “essence” of democracy. We speak of the free world, for example. The most prominent index of democracy is published by Freedom House. But important as it is, freedom is only one of democracy’s ideals and part of its story.
It is crucial that freedom be pursued as the equal freedom of all, not the privilege of a few. To be sure, the definition of “all” the people has everywhere required expansion over time. Two hundred years ago, many “semi-democrats” convinced themselves it was legitimate to exclude women and people without property—and even to condone slavery.
Inclusion involves not just equality and freedom but also solidarity: full membership in the body politic depends on integration into cohesive social relations. No combination of freedom and equality can substitute for solidarity—or even be stable without it. Of course, conversely, solidarity—community, social cohesion—cannot substitute for freedom or equality. We need all three, and must work to keep them in balance as interdependent goods.
Since the 1960s, two projects of liberal freedom have powerfully reshaped most democracies, bringing new levels of inequality and undermining solidarity. Authenticity has become a powerful ideal of self-definition and identity. It is part of a tradition of expressive liberalism focused on freedom as self-realization but also prone to essentialism. Meritocracy is an ideal of justice as fairness, commonly harnessed to distributing rather than reducing inequality and shaped by neoliberalism with its emphasis on more instrumental action and especially the rights and independence of property owners.
The two ideals are distinct, but both are complicit in legitimating enormous inequality and deteriorating solidarity. Inequality and declining solidarity are products of a new “great transformation” linking globalization, financialization, and technological innovation. Jobs have shifted away from manufacturing to services and logistics. Towns and whole regions have lost their economic basis.
Democracies have broadly failed to address adequately the disruptions and inequalities of this new “great transformation.” It is important to ask why. What have the citizens and policy-makers of the world’s democracies been thinking about when they could have been thinking about equality?
Obviously, many have been thinking about money. This has been an era when even the leader of Communist China declared, “To get rich is glorious.” Or as the American movie Wall Street (1987) put it, “Greed is good.” But even those who are not rich have had monetary concerns: paying their mortgages, sending children to “good” colleges, and struggling to save for retirement. And more and more even of the previously well-off have had to cope with loss of jobs, declining incomes, and downward mobility. If getting rich captured the imagination of many, trying to avoid becoming poor has become a daily struggle for others.
But material pressures and possibilities have not been not the whole story. Social policies have shifted. Powerful ideologies—ways of thinking, structures of feeling—have distracted citizens from the problems of inequality and the importance of the public good and distorted how they understand the relations among liberty, equality, and solidarity. This chapter is about two of these ideologies: authenticity and meritocracy.
Authenticity and meritocracy are seductive because each was important in previous struggles that actually advanced equality. The idea of authenticity shaped a new understanding that saw capacities for citizenship in every individual. The idea of meritocracy helped challenge systems of inherited privilege, such as aristocracy. But in recent decades, each has been taken to extremes. Each has also been distorted by an exaggerated view of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of individuals.
When we look back at our Western democracies in the postwar period, we are struck by the legislation they passed to dramatically improve the condition of their people. In some cases (for example, the United States and Sweden), this continued a trend that started or resumed in the 1930s. Elsewhere, it represented a new departure, and everywhere a dramatic increase in extent.1 These measures included the building or marked extension of welfare states, provisions to maintain full employment, legislation favorable to trade unions, increase of minimum wages, economic planning (in France), Mitbestimmung (worker participation in governance of firms, in Germany), and an even greater extension of social democracy in Scandinavia. These measures were obviously the expression of, and the sustaining force behind, a high degree of solidarity across the whole of society and embracing all classes.
The contrast is striking with the state of affairs in these same societies in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. The response in most of these countries to a sudden decline in the standard of living of many of their citizens—lost jobs, mortgages foreclosed—was surprisingly stingy. The American Congress called for “fiscal responsibility.” Throughout the EU and especially in soon-to-exit Britain, governments demanded austerity from citizens. These were ill-advised policies. Economic benefits were debatable. But in moral and political terms they amount to forcing citizens to pay for a crisis caused by profiteering financial elites. They have contributed to the rise of belligerent populism. But these policies are continuous with the dominant neoliberalism of the immediately preceding decades. They represent a striking loss of the solidarity that so strongly marked the postwar period.
What brought about this change? An important part of the background lies in the great social and economic transformations of the last half-century, described in Chapter 3. Institutional changes—the decline in many countries of trade unions, the shrinking of social democratic parties—reflect and intensify the socioeconomic changes. We have traced the rise and spread of the most important ideological justification: neoliberalism, starting from the work of Friedrich Hayek. But what is still missing, or at least greatly underdeveloped, in our account, is an adequate portrait of the great changes in culture and outlook on life chances that have taken place in the West over the last three-quarters of a century since 1945.
One way to conceive the loss of solidarity is to see it from the other side, as it were, as a rise of various forms of individualism. And one of the important forms of individualism that has come to prominence in Western culture in this period is what has been called “the ethic of authenticity.” This ethic flows from the core idea that each person has their own way of being human. Taken seriously, it lays on each individual the responsibility to find their way and realize it against social or familial pressures to conform. And it lays on others the obligation to respect this choice and facilitate, or at least not hinder, it. To show a person respect is to respect their path, or, as this has come to be described, their “identity.”
Of course, the ethic of authenticity is often seen as a new form of individualism. The individualism of personal responsibility called on us to choose certain crucial life commitments—first of all in the domain of religion: it was in a sense initiated by the Reformation. But then came the instrumental individualism of the agent seeking personal advantage, including the “possessive individualism” identified by Brough Macpherson (and later prominent in neoliberalism).2 But another form, which is often called “expressive individualism,” comes with the Romantic turn at the end of the eighteenth century. At first, it was an ethic confined to elites, in particular to artists and poets. In keeping with this, originality came to be seen as a key component of truly creative art.
It was in the period after the Second World War that this ethic became widespread in many Western societies. This complemented growing freedom from immediate material necessity, more consumer choice, and greater opportunities for social mobility. Smaller families, new emphasis on childhood development, and longer adolescence with extended education all mattered. So did the idea of freedom itself. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s and 1970s, “Do your own thing” was one of the slogans of the day.
The widespread adoption of an ethic of authenticity in the postwar period changed the framework in which many long-standing forms of discrimination and inequality were understood. We can illustrate this shift from the attitude toward homosexuals. Homosexuality was long seen as a deviant form of sexual life. Many authorities sought to forbid and punish it; negative views were embedded in families and local communities, causing enormous pain. With increasing momentum from the 1960s, this changed. For the most part, being gay is now treated as an “identity,” a direction in life integral to and given legitimacy by individual personhood. Sanctioning it or depreciating it has moved from standard practice to an act of illegitimate discrimination. Issues remain, such as the insistence of some religious groups that their members should not be obliged to follow antidiscrimination laws. But by the early twenty-first century, the legalization of gay marriage moved forward with relatively little controversy.
The same can be said about the removal of obstacles to new career paths for women or the lifting of the stigma surrounding certain disabilities. Barriers and prejudices remain, but they retain less and less force. It now seems obvious nonsense for a person who can walk easily to feel that accommodating wheelchair users with curb cuts or lower elevator buttons is a restriction of their freedom or a violation rather than an achievement of equality. But is the equality achieved simply fair distribution of private goods to different individuals or categories of individuals? Or is it an advance in the public good, a desirable way of life to share?
If we look at the ethic of authenticity as a novel form of individualism, then the suggestion is unavoidable that this is partly responsible for the weakening of solidarity that is plainly one of the great negative developments of the last forty years.
If this is really so, then it looks as though the demands of nondiscrimination, and in this sense of equality, are in conflict with the kind of solidarity that we need to ensure a decent life for those whose standard of living has suffered devastation from the march of globalization, automation, and geographic concentration that has dominated recent decades, and will continue to do so. Since these are two of our basic values—or if you like, two facets of our basic value of equality—this conflict would be tragic. We have to find a way beyond it.
But examined more closely, demands for recognition based on authentic identity are not in conflict with solidarity as such. On the contrary, they always calls on a form of solidarity, at least among the group suffering from discrimination—of homosexuals behind gay marriage, of women in the #MeToo movement—and of their supporters. Does this have to be at the expense of a wider solidarity across the whole society? That it can work that way is undeniable. But does it have to?
In a democratic polity, we are motivated to accept differences—sometimes very sharp differences—with our fellow citizens not simply as a matter of tolerance for different views and statements or cultures and identities, but because we recognize citizenship, shared belonging, being “one of us.” Not least, solidarity sustains commitment to a common future even among those who lose an election or who are still struggling for full rights.
Solidarity can be achieved without freedom and equality, but democracy requires all three. Families, churches, communities, craft guilds, small businesses, and military platoons can be close-knit with a strong sense of common identity and purpose. But such cohesion becomes democratic only when it can (in principle) be freely chosen in equal proportion by all and when its benefits are shared equally by all.
Solidarity can be achieved in ways that are repressive rather than supportive of individual creativity, distinction, and expression. What looks to some like a close-knit family can feel to others like an organization of patriarchal domination. Conflict may arise when living out a particular identity puts a person at odds with their local community, or even with their family; and then this alienation may be deepened and hardened when the person affected feels they have to move away. And since there are more and more reasons to move in a modern society—to get an education, to find a congenial job—this way of resolving or rendering tolerable family or community conflict is more and more frequently resorted to in the contemporary world. And this, in turn, yields the pattern we’re all too familiar with, wherein the (frequently small) home community maintains its prejudices all the more fiercely and condemns the “permissive” culture of the larger cities that are the refuge of “deviants” in general.
At larger scale, the social psychology of mass nationalism involves a celebration (and enforcement) of complete unity. This is very different from a strong, shared identity combined with freedom and equality. The ethic of authenticity has been a powerful driver of the liberal pursuit of freedom and recognition. But self-declared liberals have too often assumed the declarations of equal freedom could be adequate without material equality. This produced a fuzzy mood of benign optimism among elites and growing frustration among others.
We need both equal recognition of each other, in our differences, and recognition of each other and ourselves as members of a common polity. It is easy to lose balance between respect for freedom or rights and promotion of equality. Communist societies, for example, encouraged fears that pursuit of equality would require domination. Conversely, one-sided emphasis on freedom has been inimical to both equality and solidarity. The outlook we call neoliberalism justifies the most appalling lack of solidarity in the comfortable assurance that the globalized market unleashes a rising tide that will somehow lift all boats. It is like a “prosperity gospel” that urges Christians to pray for personal favors, one at a time and separately, rather than for community or justice. “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz …”3
The combination of freedom or rights with equality does not by itself provide for mutual commitment among the citizens of a democracy. Whatever its sources—and these are contested—solidarity is required for building institutions and countries, for undertaking projects such as reducing inequality, and for movements to strengthen and deepen democracy. It is basic to sharing communities, sharing countries, and indeed, to sharing the world.
David Goodhart, discussing mainly the British scene, notes a growing rift between two kinds of people, to whom he gives the names “Anywheres” and “Somewheres.”4 The latter term designates people who remain in and attached to their communities of birth; the former applies to people for whom career fulfilment is the major value and who are willing to leave home, and indeed, change their residence many times to attain this end. The conditions of success in the professional and managerial occupations more and more demand that one become an Anywhere. First, these careers require tertiary education; this often requires going away to college (though this varies among countries). And then living the career requires that one stay in or move between major centers. This is just another facet of the process described in Chapters 1 and 2, whereby smaller towns find themselves drained of life and activity in favor of a few large cities. The small town no longer has a newspaper, no longer contains the headquarters of an important firm, cannot offer the more lucrative reaches of a career in law, and so on. You have to go away—or since you may already be off somewhere else at college, you have to stay away—if you want to succeed.
Seen from the perspective of one’s Somewhere relatives and high school friends, this is the inexorable process of community decline, and often downward mobility, as well-paying, secure jobs become less and less available. It is lived as a process of being Left Behind, not only left by your high-flying relative, now living in London, or New York, or even Singapore, but also abandoned by the globalizing society and economy you belong to.
It is this sense of neglect and abandonment by the governing elites that has helped produce a feeling of powerless, or declining citizen efficacy, which is at the heart of our first degeneration.
Goodhart shows evidence, at least for the United Kingdom, of a deep split in values between his two types. Obviously, there is a difference in their understanding of the good life, between career fulfilment far from your roots and community life among the people you belong to. But he notes also other differences in values that correlate with two career patterns.
Anywheres place a high value on autonomy, mobility, and novelty and a lower value on group identities, tradition—what he calls “local / national social contracts (faith, flag, family).” With Somewheres, the reverse is true. Anywheres are comfortable with immigration, European integration, and the spread of human rights; Somewheres are “socially conservative and communitarian, and moderately nationalistic; less comfortable with mass immigration and fluid gender roles.”5
For Goodhart, the vote of the people who feel left behind put Brexit over the top: 56 percent of “self-described have-nots” voted for Brexit.6 But a finding that is more important for the issue addressed here concerns the “liberalism” of the Anywheres. Goodhart breaks this too broad concept into more subcategories and singles out one associated with rights and equality and another one associated with “the market revolution of the 1980s that we call economic liberalism.” This latter is close to what we are calling “neoliberalism.” His finding is that Anywheres tend to accept a too-easy merger of the two and generally approve of this “double liberalism,” which “has dominated British society since the early 1990s and strongly overlaps with Anywhere progressive individualism.”7
In the light of Goodhart’s findings, we can see how the commitment of the professional and managerial strata to “double liberalism” has exacerbated the social polarization that bad populism feeds on. If it is true, as he argues, that the people left behind by globalization and automation are anchored in communities that have been slower and more resistant to adopting the more open stance to newly recognized identities, then how much greater will the resentment be if the main proponents of rights liberalism show a sublime lack of interest in the great downgrade that their less fortunate compatriots are experiencing? Think of the firing up of revolutionary zeal in Paris in the wake of Marie Antionette’s (alleged) remark, when told that the people lacked bread: “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (“Let them eat cake”). There is a public danger in the fact that so many of our high-flyers are living in a beautiful Versailles of the mind.
The new Versailles may be less a monarchical palace than a corporate headquarters. The pursuits of authenticity and meritocracy converged to dramatic effect in the high-tech world of Silicon Valley. Early Silicon Valley culture was Romantic and embraced expressive individualism as it overlapped the countercultural pursuit of freedom and creativity in 1960s Northern California.8 Individualism still reigns ideologically; Silicon Valley politics are largely libertarian. Apple, Google, and countless startups try to look and feel cool, not bureaucratic.9
At the same time, the sense among the industry’s elite of being a technological vanguard, trained at top universities, and able to work with tools outsiders simply cannot understand, encouraged a sense of being the smartest kids around. Hugely empowered by their educations, grants from the US Defense Department, and investments of venture capital, many of these young men (for they were almost all men and indeed almost all white) focused instead on a sense of their own personal achievement. Declaring themselves the best and the brightest, many genuinely brilliant and creative scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs also declared themselves entitled to lead (as well as to accrue great fortunes). They believed this to be fair as a matter of meritocracy.
Meritocracy told those on the losing end that, in essence, they didn’t have what it takes. This could be internalized, diverting those it frustrated from blaming the actual sources of inequality. But it could also breed new discontents. In the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville argued that in ages of aristocracy people saw their statuses as fixed and immutable, but in democracies they believed they should be able to change them. They could rebel, but they seldom did because they had weak class solidarity. They responded as individuals. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb summarize: “People still remained restless unto death, forever seeking to find some manner of living in which they felt authentic, worthy of being respected, dignified.”10
Anxiety and self-doubt reflect a tension between the pursuit of authenticity and what was in Chapter 1, termed “a lack of citizen efficacy”: to feel that your needs are not being met, that your standard of living is declining, that your children may not have the chances you have had; and all along to see this decline as the working of an opaque political system, which seems to offer no insight into the inner workings of cause and effect within it, and hence no levers for change that you can set in motion.
Inequality has been justified by the notions that the economy would always grow and that citizens have equal opportunities to get the new goods. President Joe Biden articulated a version of this American dream in a tweet shortly after being elected:
I’ve always believed we can define America in one word: Possibilities. We’re going to build an America where everyone has the opportunity to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them.11
It is appealing to hope that equality of opportunity might adequately take the place of material equality. This would, for example, eliminate the need to decide between redistribution of wealth and continued, perhaps growing, inequality. This was never quite as feasible as the hopeful suggested. But there was more reality to open opportunity for most of American history than for the last fifty years. It was a country of social mobility, punctuated by crises such as the Great Depression, but resumed in the postwar boom. Social mobility has been almost completely blocked in the neoliberal era.
For neoliberals, private property is the nearly sacred basis of freedom. Taking money away from the rich to provide more opportunities for the poor seems to many (especially the rich) like a fundamental violation of freedom. But is life “free” when being born safely, sent to school, protected from violence, and provided with medical care all cost money? Is it meaningful to say everyone is “free” to drink wine that costs $20 or $200 or even $2,000 a bottle or send their children to a school that costs $100,000 a year? Inequalities of wealth and income make some people freer than others. We probably don’t worry very much when the consequence is only more freedom to be a wine snob. But we do—and we should—when the result is lack of education, or good health, or other conditions basic to exercising the freedom a democratic society offers.
Neoliberalism celebrates inequality. Its ascendancy since the 1970s has produced innumerable top-ten lists, rankings of the best phones or cameras or business class seats on airlines. Special issues of magazines claim to help consumers find the best physicians or cars or cities in which to live (though most are only one step removed from simple advertisements). The world’s numerous university rankings date from the neoliberal era and reflect reconceptualization of higher education from public good to private investment. In the United States, where there is no state regulation of university prices, they track those of luxury goods.
Not only have luxury goods proliferated in the neoliberal age; they are themselves hierarchically differentiated. A ten-year-old Scotch whiskey used to be special; then norms shifted to twelve and fifteen years, eighteen and twenty-one. Just in one product range black labels trumped red, then were in turn trumped by green, gold, and blue. And even the fanciest of these can’t touch the upper end of single malt prices. Not to be left out of the profits, distributors of bourbon and rye have followed suit with their own high-priced, distinction-conferring bottles.
London’s Financial Times, a business-oriented newspaper, took to publishing a special monthly supplement catering to the rich under the title “How to Spend It.” The rich seem to need not only ideas of what to do with their money but intelligence on how other people are spending theirs, what will confer the most cultural capital. The market for watches has long since ceased to be about telling the time. Nor are yachts mainly about transport or vintage wines about refreshment.
“How to Spend It” basically tracked the obsession with hierarchy and the growth of discretionary income among the rich. It was launched as a one-page feature in 1967, became a magazine in 1994, and gained an online version in 2009 at the height of the financial crisis. It promoted properties for £10 million and up, £1 million paintings, £100,000 motor cars, £10,000 skin treatments, and classes in vegan cooking. There is perhaps no clearer demonstration of how little pain the financial crisis caused the very rich: During the Covid-19 pandemic, “How to Spend It” reported on obtaining the fanciest possible meals—“all-encapsulating evening” events—by delivery.12
Can this unfortunate fusion of authenticity and the neglect of the less fortunate be broken? Citizens cannot be political equals if they are divided by too much inequality. How much is “too much” can of course be debated. Certainly not so much that it takes tyranny to achieve and maintain it, or even the use of state power to limit democracy. A short answer could be that enough citizens are confident they are not dominated by others, that the opportunities of others do not deprive them of their own chances to pursue happiness, and that all citizens share in both the public good and public risks. In any case, there must be substantial actual equality, not just “fair” distribution of inequality.
A politics of recognition follows naturally from the ethics of authenticity.13 In a sense, this is integral to democracy itself. Authenticity helped produce a strong notion of the individual that informed demands to be recognized with democratic citizenship. In both aristocratic and republican forms, elite rule was not just a material injury—oppression—but also an insult to the dignity of individuals.
It took a very long time for women to be recognized as citizens fully equal to men—and there are limits to full recognition today—for example, whenever government policy facilities a gender-based gap in pay. It took a civil war for Black Americans to gain equal recognition—and it has taken a century and a half of struggle after that for formal recognition to be matched by full respect for their equal rights. The same issue is on the table when marriage is restricted to heterosexuals or when planning of the country’s infrastructure fails to provide for citizens with disabilities.
In other words, identity politics is not something new that rose in the wake of the 1960s, as critics often allege. But from the 1960s on, renewed focus on authenticity and self-expression did contribute to a dramatically increased politics of recognition—both legal and cultural. Previously marginalized or excluded citizens claimed the right to be seen, accepted, and valued equally with others. This was a double expansion of the pursuit—and achievement—of equality.
First, it moved beyond the issues of economic class that had been basic to social democracy and democratic socialism. Inequality and blocked freedoms and aspirations come in many dimensions. Indeed, members of the middle classes became increasingly important advocates for the new sorts of egalitarianism—on lines of gender, sexuality, race, and ability. Unfortunately, they often abandoned or relegated to low priority the older concern for economic equality that had been central to trade unions and the “old Left.” The genuine gains of cultural recognition appeared to come at the expense of material equality.
Second, the new politics of recognition challenged an older idea of political equality based on disregarding differences of identity to achieve impartiality. Too often the “impartiality” achieved actually embodied an affirmation of the status quo. It relegated important dimensions of the public good to treatment (or neglect) as merely private, or sectional concerns. But “the personal is political,” as the feminist slogan had it fifty years ago. A key achievement of the new politics of recognition was to put issues associated with the previously excluded or marginalized on the political agenda. There was often, however, a failure to address these as matters of the public good rather than only a fairer distribution of private goods. We should want good childcare, for example, not just to benefit women but to benefit society. University admission is access to education as a public good, not only credentialing for individual career advantage.
Full, equal recognition is hard to achieve, but important. Not least, it requires citizens (and their government) to overcome historical and institutional biases so deeply entrenched and taken for granted that it is sometimes hard for those not directly affected to see them. This is part of what is meant by institutional racism or sexism, though both also include rules put in place with a conscious intent to discriminate.
Indeed, the very visibility—or, rather, invisibility—of our fellow citizens is an issue. The middle and upper classes may know about poverty in the abstract, but seldom see it personally, let alone experience it. In a host of other ways, those of us who are relatively well off insulate ourselves from disagreeable aspects of society that are all too familiar to other citizens.
Indeed, an issue of recognition is part of what aggravates many followers of Donald Trump and analogues in other countries. The issue is that their fellow citizens—especially members of the political and professional elites—seem not to see them or regard their grievances as legitimate.14 Of course, this is exactly how others denied recognition have felt—including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the disabled.
It is not just elites who have distorted views of social reality. Citizens much more widely failed to fully see pervasive sexual aggression and violence until celebrities and a social movement call it out. Men often simply denied the reality. But the name of the #MeToo movement makes clear that part of the challenge is overcoming silence or repression of the speech of women. Absent public recognition, too many women will think this only happens to “other people,” that it is rare, or that victims must share in the blame.
The importance of public recognition is also basic to calls to say the names of the victims of police killings: Breanna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, and the still growing list of others.15 White citizens don’t see racism until more and more shocking videos of police violence and the Black Lives Matter Movement make it hard to ignore. Even then, whites don’t see Black people. This is one of the enabling conditions of systemic racism. We not only fail to perceive the racism; we literally do not see Black people. This is partly the result of pervasive segregation in housing, schools, and workplaces. It is also deeply reinforced by the media.
A glaring example in the United States is the extent to which the white elite of Hollywood have minimized Black roles (and indeed Black writers and directors). This was not a market-based decision. Pervasive racial bias actually cost Hollywood a lot of money—as much as $10 billion in annual revenues according to a 2021 study by the corporate consultants McKinsey & Company.16 Indeed, film production is the least racially integrated of all industries in the United States, and this has a consequence for how Americans see their country and the world.
Integration itself is a vexed issue. Does equality demand blindness to color and equal presence of Blacks everywhere? Or does it demand Black-owned production companies (and other businesses)” Should every community reflect the national or state proportions of Black and white? Or should there be some thriving mostly Black communities? Is there a role for Historically Black colleges and universities that even well-integrated mostly white universities cannot play?
There are no easy or clear-cut answers. Intermarriage means that many families incorporate multiple races and ethnicities. Part of the significance of mixed-race identity is that some people feel both Black and white (or Black and Asian or American Indian or other combinations). This is not simply a matter of different technical definitions. It is partly a matter of continual redefinition. Sayings like “America is becoming majority minority” are too often repeated without critical reflection on the extent to which the majority itself is continually redefined.17 Indeed, self-definition is a basic right of citizens. Equal recognition requires that citizens be able to shape their own lives—to pursue happiness and, indeed, life and liberty—in their own ways.
Equality was long a basic democratic goal. We saw that Alexis de Tocqueville viewed it as central to democracy’s definition. The project of greater equality is what made the United States stand out compared with European countries. It was not just a matter of wealth and political rights but also of culture, relations between children, even terms of address. Americans stood less on ceremony.
Europe was stuck, thought Tocqueville, but equality would come to Europe, too. Indeed, it did, with revolutions and social movements that tried to close the gaps between working and middle classes as well as between both and aristocrats. By contrast, Americans more often convinced themselves that inequality was ok so long as it was fair. (In this, as much else, Britain and to some extent Canada were placed between Europe and the United States.) Americans were more apt to see the rich as successful businessmen made wealthy by their own achievements. Instead of trying to close gaps between classes, they sought to create opportunities for individuals to move up in the social hierarchy (without dwelling much on the converse potential for downward mobility).18
Reluctant to embrace equality in general, elites and perhaps especially the growing middle classes drew a distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. The deserving demonstrated their merit by working hard, displaying customary morality, and refusing political insurgency. The dustman Alfred Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion offers an exposition:
What am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.” … Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.19
There is a seed here of what would become meritocracy—the notion that justice could be achieved in an unequal society so long as social advancement was based on “merit.” Merit was defined largely as a combination of native ability, self-discipline, and hard work.
Late in the postwar boom, the English sociologist and Labour politician Michael Young gave the name “meritocracy” to this combination of aspiration, policy, and social change. An egalitarian social activist, Young had been one of the architects of the British welfare state. He founded England’s Open University, National Consumer Council, and Social Science Research Council. He contributed enormously to opening up access to education and political opportunity. And he saw that this might not work out entirely as he hoped.20
Meritocracy is the idea that being part of the ruling class (or the elite or the “rich and powerful”) should be based on merit. It is opposed to aristocracy and the idea that the right to rule—or to have access to wealth and education—should be based on inherited social positions. It embraced both opening up opportunities—on the basis of merit—and fairness in rewarding talent and hard work.
Ending aristocratic inheritance had obvious resonance with democracy. Greater openness of opportunity did facilitate growth of the middle class. It did remove obstacles that previously prevented people from different backgrounds becoming wealthy and powerful. Selecting officeholders based on their ability and performance also promised improvements in government (and other) institutions. Wouldn’t armies work better if generals and all officers were chosen on the basis of how well they could do their jobs rather than whether their parents were aristocrats? And aren’t there good reasons why publicly held corporations choose top managers based on ability? Of course.
But meritocracy is not democracy. The Mandarin elite of imperial China was chosen on the basis of examinations, but was not in the least democratic. A ruling class based on merit would still be a ruling class.
For the middle class, meritocracy was an empowering ideology. It was not just what distinguished deserving from underserving poor, but what accounted for their own relative prosperity. It also underwrote their attack on aristocratic privilege. Opportunity should be more equal, they argued. Middle-class children who demonstrate more merit should get into Oxford or Cambridge (or Harvard or Yale) ahead of the offspring of dukes and earls. Access to land should be open to farmers—or developers—who would show merit by “improving” it, not restricted to aristocrats who would try just to keep it beautiful. Jobs in the civil service should be awarded on merit, not used to provide sinecures for younger children of the elite. Political participation should be opened up to those of merit. The public should judge the merit of candidates for office. The judging public should itself be open—at least to those citizens who could read and write and perhaps owned a little property.
As so often, however, those seeking greater opportunity for themselves saw reasons to deny it to others—or even saw restrictions so natural that they didn’t need to offer reasons. In Britain and sometimes in the United States, Protestants thought Catholics demonstrated less merit. The English thought the Irish underserving; Americans have recurrently thought immigrants undeserving. In many contexts whites have thought Blacks lacked merit. Almost everywhere men saw women as less deserving.
Still, the ideological commitment to merit and fairness was powerful in loosening restrictions on opportunity. The working and middle classes shared aspirations to move up and therefore made demands for more open and fair access to the conditions of advancement. They were at least partially successful with regard to education, credit to start a business, the chance to work as a civil servant, and the opportunity to be a military officer.
Education is central to the ideology of meritocracy. Those who succeed in school are deemed to have demonstrated their merit. So, if one relies on educational credentials (and further examinations and performance reviews) for positions of power, one is in principle creating a new system of rule based on merit, not just privilege.
There is a variety of problems with this. To start with, of course, meritocracy may be a sham. Exams may be biased. Universities that claim to admit students only on the basis of academic merit in fact give preference to the children of earlier alumni or wealthy donors. This has been far less controversial than policies of “affirmative action,” which use multiple standards to assess academic merit in order to achieve racial diversity.21 The first policy—of perpetuating privilege—also shapes the racial composition of student bodies, but it more often remains hidden. And what is true of university admissions is also true in practices of hiring and promotion. There are many ways in which those who have benefitted from past inequality can perpetuate those benefits and pass them on to their children. They can move to the “right” neighborhoods, for example, and hire tutors.
So, it can be an illusion that there really is a free and open competition based on merit. There are biases in the seemingly objective tests and other forms of evaluation. There are parental investments that give students with more family resources an advantage. And putting the “objective” measures in the foreground also diverts attention from the frequency with which institutions make exceptions. We are encouraged to forget this by the fact that we all participate in examinations so often that we take them for granted. But the result is that access and promotion on the basis of apparent merit disguises and legitimates inequality. This is the Bourdieu catch described in Chapter 3, a limit to the otherwise great achievements of les trente glorieuses.
Bourdieu famously analyzed the ways family background and cultural privilege allowed some to succeed at the expense of others in the supposedly meritocratic postwar educational system.22 But he made clear that this was an indictment of covert bias and inequality, not of more widespread education. He pointed out that though he was the son of a village postman and grandson of a sharecropper in one of France’s poorest regions, he was enabled by scholarships to go to top schools and eventually to become one of the most celebrated intellectuals in France. But he stressed that his case was an exception that proved the rule, not a demonstration that opportunity was completely open in France.
Pointing to exceptions as though they were much more common than they really are is one of the ways people are convinced to misrecognize the reality in which they live. Rags to riches stories obscure the more common paths of some riches to more riches or simply staying stuck without riches.
Young was on the same page with Bourdieu. They both saw expansion of educational opportunities as a great achievement. It was basic to the empowerment of democratic citizens. Young campaigned all his life for greater educational opportunity. But he genuinely wanted equality and solidarity, too. He championed better schooling for everyone at every stage, not just opportunities for more people to be part of the narrow elite selected to attend the “best” schools.
But Young was not happy about the rise of meritocracy and predicted a bad end. The ideas of merit and fairness were being made into rationalizations for inequality and lack of solidarity. Indeed, during the last forty-some years, the term he introduced as a critique has been claimed as a virtue. It is used to celebrate inequality by claiming it has a fair basis. Business, financial, and technological elites imagine they are the smartest people and therefore the most entitled to rule. This is taken to an extreme among the ostensibly self-actualizing elites of Silicon Valley and investment banking. To Young’s enormous disappointment, the Labour Party under Tony Blair explicitly claimed to be meritocratic.23
In the United States, the educational system long discriminated openly on the bases of race, gender, and property (not unlike the original US Constitution of 1789). Eventually explicit barriers were lowered but covert ones remained. Even today, admission of a few Black or immigrant students to Harvard gives them great opportunities and appears to demonstrate that educational (and career) access is really open when in fact it remains sharply biased by race and class.
New kinds of inheritance are not as openly visible as the old. When there is a formal division between aristocrats and common people, the role of inheritance is clear. When inequalities are matters of prices and only some have enough to pay, the disadvantaged are usually well aware that their problem lies with lack of wealth or income—not merit. But when they are embedded in different levels of preparation and support for the same apparently objective selection processes, the sources of inequality are obscured.
Even honest efforts at meritocracy narrow the idea of merit and neglect other virtues besides intelligence or even hard work. There is merit to honesty, care for others, and considering the public good alongside one’s selfish interests. As Michael Sandel suggests, “The more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.”24
Merit is too easily equated with worth. Are those who demonstrate “merit” in certain kinds of performance—tests, for example—in fact worth more? Do they deserve more investment in their futures? This is what placing them in better-funded schools or honors programs with smaller classes amounts to. And indeed, almost all modern democracies are limited by the extent to which they focus more resources on those already destined to do well. And the rewards of seemingly meritocratic competition include honor, recognition, and respect as well as money and power.
Students who succeed in admission and exams keep being promoted. Why shouldn’t they think they are simply more deserving? This dovetails with the ascendant rhetoric of authenticity: “smarter” becomes one more important feature of personal identity deserving recognition.
Starting down that path, it is easy to lose sight of notions such as the moral worth and dignity of all human beings or that every citizen has equal rights. This was more or less explicit in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Seeking to “improve” the population—at large, or of a country, or a race—eugenicists defined certain individuals as lacking merit, often on the basis of alleged mental deficiency or criminal tendencies. Some were sterilized. But this ostensibly meritocratic project was also shaped by ideologies of racial purity. In the United States, the eugenicists were typically white and privileged. They exercised power against Black Americans, immigrants, and the poor. In Nazi Germany, eugenics was a justification for genocide.25
Stressing unequal talents naturalizes inequality. Meritocracy insidiously harnesses individual-level experience to justify systemic inequality. Some kids do better on tests, or in football, or at playing the piano. Variations can feel obviously natural and no doubt are partly natural.26 Building on this naturalization, middle- and upper-class parents call for public schools to offer special tracks and programs for the “gifted.” Implicitly, these parents are also asking the public schools to consecrate inequalities at least partially grounded in private wealth.
In the face of ubiquitous competition, it is not surprising that parents work hard to give their kids advantages. During les trente glorieuses, buying an encyclopedia was an exemplary investment in children’s future. During the neoliberal era more and more investments have been demanded: computers, expensive achievement-oriented summer camps, music lessons, and tutoring. Of course, richer parents have more to invest.
An ideology of meritocracy may actually encourage inequality. As those who win at games like to play more of them, those who get sorted into the top rungs of social inequality seek further gradations in which they can be ranked highly.
If it is good to make distinctions, isn’t it better to make more distinctions? Perhaps distinguishing among A, A–, and B+ is too crude. Do we need more fine-tuned (often quantitative) evaluations? For those who score well, tests are like a drug that offers more chances for the high of success. But addiction to test success (and meeting other challenges) can be the enemy of finding satisfaction in human relationships—including even with members of one’s own family— as well as recognizing others with equal respect.27
Meritocracy encourages invidious comparisons among individuals and groups, distracting from broader democratic struggles for greater public good. It emphasizes rewards to individuals rather than improving the situation of whole communities, or classes, or racial categories. Take the example of New York City high schools: these are not equal. The city funds a small number of elite schools for especially talented students, as measured by standardized tests and sometimes interviews. There are only nine, in a system with 542 high schools. This distribution of opportunities puts the focus on fairness in selection but not fairness in overall availability. This shortchanges the public good. In short, New York City could choose to have more good schools instead of more unequal ones.
Ambitious parents call for more magnet schools and honors programs; they want public institutions to give talented children advantages otherwise available only on the basis of wealth. But these run into two problems. If members of some ethnic groups—say, Jews or Asians—do better on tests and gain more and more of the places, other members of the middle class—especially whites—get upset. Not all are rich enough to escape competition by buying their children a path to privilege through private schools (and some invest poorly in academically inferior private schools).
The key issue is artificial scarcity of high-quality public schools. This is the product of government policy. There could be better funding for all high schools. If there is a need for high schools organized particularly for the most talented students, there could be more of them. There is also a further layer of inequality because the vast majority of all elite secondary schools are in metropolitan areas, especially those already better off than other localities.
As hierarchy increases—as there are more rungs in the social ladder—there are fewer places at the “top.” Perhaps 1 percent of students attend super-elite, extremely selective colleges and universities—those that admit fewer than one out of ten undergraduate applicants and confer enormous prestige. As many as 10 percent get degrees from a wider group of excellent and still selective colleges and universities. The remaining 89 percent or so attend minimally selective universities. Some are helpful. Some are scams. But none conveys the prestige of the elite.
Admission to a highly selective institution confers as much prestige, as what students learn there. Consider the cachet of Harvard dropouts in the tech industry. They are understood to have proved themselves by getting admitted in the first place and then to have proved themselves again by not needing further teaching. This doesn’t mean a Harvard degree can’t reflect wonderful education. It means the allocation of prestige is based as much on admission as on education. So is introduction into the social networks that link the admitted elite to each other.
There is no educational reason for this radically skewed system. It is like an economy with a rung of billionaires, another rung of millionaires, and then everyone else trying to stay afloat and meet their mortgage payments. Of course, that is the economy we have.
The inequality of the higher education system is one key to this socioeconomic reality. Instead of creating equal opportunity, it has created a massive and expensive college admissions apparatus for managing and perpetuating inequality. This is really most of all about exclusion—which students should be turned away from the most elite schools. Students’ chances are influenced by the neighborhoods in which they grow up, their accents, the schools they attend, how much their parents read to them, and whether their families can afford music lessons. As one critic has put it, which looks better on an elite college application, being captain of the lacrosse team or working twenty hours a week at a fast-food restaurant?28
Focusing on personal success also obscures the public good. It encourages people always to think the key question is who gets the reward—or even the opportunity. But if that matters at all, it should follow from more basic questions about what we are trying to accomplish together. We might, for example, be trying to make our society healthier. It is one thing to say communities needed the best possible doctors and another to say certain kids are entitled to all the public investments that go into to training doctors. There is a slide from preferring selection on the basis of talent because it advances the public good to seeing it as a personal right.
Support for greater overall health could mean investing in truly more equal opportunities—such as good schools and free universities for all. Individual differences in ability or effort could still matter in matching students to courses and eventually jobs. But the public good—health, in the example just given—would be the point, not individual success.
The idea that performance makes selection for success a right encourages beneficiaries to think they are entitled to keep all the proceeds—fighting fair taxes and failing to give back to society. At the same time that meritocracy makes the dominant feel naturally entitled, it disempowers the rest. It literally leaves them out of the opportunities of democratic society. It often makes them feel personally inadequate, for they internalize negative sorting and test results while others internalize success. Members of the elite feel encouraged to see nonelites as less deserving, probably less intelligent or hardworking. Those are people who didn’t make the grade. Some elites will make their contempt manifest in ways that add insult to the injury of lower incomes and lesser life chances.
Elites continuously identify new ways to demonstrate their superiority. Consumer goods are the obvious example, as Thorstein Veblen argued in his theory of conspicuous consumption.29 But investing in fancy universities can be at least as satisfying as investing in fancy clothes and more helpful for reproducing status across generations. Symbolic success is as important for reassuring the winners of competitions as for lording it over the losers.
Making hierarchical distinctions is hard to avoid. It is even implicit in many efforts to contest established hierarchies and distinctions. Consider how often arcane, abstract, and polysyllabic words are used to articulate concern for justice. In many cases the terms have clear meaning in academic theories, and they genuinely focus on ways in which dominant cultural and social categories can be unfair. Heteronormativity really is pervasive in the United States. Terms such as “cisgender” and “postbinary” can both clarify and offer liberatory insight to those who take them up. There is good reason to seek an inclusive category—say, “Latinx”—and to avoid genderings embedded in ordinary language. But it is almost inescapably the case that such terms do as much to make high-status education manifest as to advance social justice.30 We repeat: this doesn’t mean the terms or uses are wrong—any more than wearing well-tailored clothes is wrong. It means that their use is at least implicitly and sometimes consciously a manifestation of meritocratic distinction from the less well-educated—who by implication have not only inferior understandings of justice but also inferior vocabularies.31
Encouraged to take pride in their own successes, the winners in social competitions forget what the public paid for and too often underestimate the parts played by specific other people. The reality, though, is that each is a beneficiary of both public and private support. Even at high-tuition private universities, student fees do not pay the whole cost. Private gifts are important but encouraged and supplemented by tax deductions at public expense. As the British philosopher Harry Brighouse put it, “We tend to equate merit and achievement, but no one who is meritorious gets to achieve anything unless someone invests in them.”32
Failing to appreciate the contributions others make to one’s own life is both a personal failing and evidence of weak social solidarity. As importantly, the exaggerated focus on individual success and the correlated social sorting directly undermine solidarity. There are fewer shared experiences establishing social bonds among people headed in different directions and to different levels of success. Mass military service, as in the Second World War, meant that army platoons brought together soldiers with great and mediocre school records, soldiers from the working and middle classes (even if the latter were more often selected to be officers). Scout troops, churches, sports teams, and summer jobs have all done the same thing—and do it less today than in the past.
Nothing is perfect. In the United States, old-fashioned community-level public schools mixed students of different talents, aptitudes, backgrounds, and ambitions in the same classes. This was not always matched by creative pedagogy for encouraging collaborative learning. Schools were often racially segregated or at least reflected the communities in which they were located.33 Mixing wasn’t always a brilliant success; schools are full of cliques that intensify social differences. But it did foster greater connections across class and other social boundaries than the hyper-sorted schooling of the neoliberal and ostensibly meritocratic era.
As successful people move to new levels—and often new locations—they leave families and communities behind. Rock stars and neurosurgeons once married to high school sweethearts find that their old partners just don’t fit into their new lives or that they have “earned” new trophy spouses. We are veering here into the themes of sentimental movies, but for good reason. Meritocracy may actually bring corruption to the character of those it rewards and privileges. They may think success is everything, which is a constricted outlook. Personal relationships are undermined by exaggerated meritocratic sorting. So is the solidarity that is basic to democracy.
The only way to be part of a highly unequal society is to be incorporated into its hierarchies of value and distinction. One can fight to change the system, but one cannot escape. The logic of membership is inextricably also one of hierarchical incorporation.
Higher education provides the paradigmatic example. It is on offer only through colleges and universities that stand in a hierarchical relationship to each other, conferring different amounts of prestige and shaping different life chances.34 To get a degree is precisely to get a place in the hierarchy. It may still be a good investment, and you may learn a lot; you may work hard to better than most with your degree, but you must buy into inequality. This is like buying a house. It comes with a neighborhood that has more or less prestige and better or worse resale prospects, as well as potentially nice neighbors and commuting convenience. You can say this isn’t important to you, but you can’t entirely avoid it.
During the postwar boom public investment made possible dramatic expansions in education at all levels. In the rich democracies, literacy became nearly universal. Secondary school completion followed. And if access to universities did not become universal, still it increased substantially. This was a democratic and egalitarian project, aimed at overcoming class-based blockages on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The United States led the way. The GI Bill (discussed in Chapter 2) enabled nearly eight million veterans to attend college or university. Public universities expanded remarkably in almost every state. Expanding educational opportunity was part of the social democratic bargain in Europe and indeed in many countries around the world.
In Michael Young’s Britain, the number of graduates each year rose from 22,426 in 1960 to 51,189 by 1970.35 This did not come without opposition. For one thing, the beneficiaries of aristocratic privilege were not eager to give it up. For another, those with new wealth wanted the benefit of expanded education more for their own children than for “the masses.” Indeed, there was even a prominent argument that there simply weren’t enough intelligent young people to benefit from expansion.36
As the number of universities expanded, so did hierarchy among them. A flatter hierarchy with a broader pool of graduates from respected (but not necessarily super-elite) institutions would be better for almost every educational or public purpose. It could achieve a wider geographic distribution of opportunities, counterbalancing domination by the coasts in the United States, by London and nearby counties in Britain, and by Paris in France.37 It would leave fewer first-generation graduates frustrated and resentful because they worked hard and went to university only to find the degrees they earned are less valuable in job markets because they are not from elite schools. Unfortunately, schooling was increased much more than equality in job markets.
Steeper hierarchy creates artificial scarcity. It serves the interests of institutions that claim bragging rights, but not of the whole system, the whole pool of potential students, or indeed democracy. But universities themselves have made competing for status a major focus of their efforts (pushed of course by students and alumni wanting market advantage, by those who do rankings, and in general by the whole of neoliberalism). This has driven up costs. In this competition, universities have become more and more like other luxury goods, priced at whatever level the rich will pay and discounted for the rest where subsidies are available or where it is necessary to fill empty places. To complete the picture of a vicious circle, costs have gone up largely because the fees students pay are used to support the competition for rankings—for example, by attracting star faculty—and for more students—for example, by building fancy facilities.
Great inequality and selectivity have, not surprisingly, encouraged corruption. This was made public in a laughable (but also sad) 2019 scandal that revealed abuses in admissions to elite US universities. It was found, for example, that sports programs at elite private universities were, for a fee, happy to offer places to children who never fenced, or rowed, or ran competitively. This corruption was driven mainly by wealthy white Americans—like the actress Lori Loughlin and her fashion-designer husband. They paid an “admissions counselling service” to find loopholes to get their children into selective universities that in principle selected on merit.
Indeed, one of the beneficiaries of corruption, in this case an international student, explained the ideology of merit even while her parents subverted it. The family of Stanford student Yusi Zhao (since expelled) paid $6.5 million to help her get in. This attracted special attention because Ms. Zhao had posted videos to her blog advising prospective students to follow her example. The key to success, she said, was just hard work. “Some people think, ‘Did you get into Stanford because your family is rich?’ No, the admissions officers basically do not know who you are,” she explained in a video she posted online. “You just need to have a clear goal and work as hard as you can toward it.”38
The salacious side of scandal focuses attention on the unusual elements, the apparent bribe and the ill-considered video. But we might want attention to fall on the condition that made the corruption desirable, such as the displacement of educational goals for status, the hierarchy in which only a few schools could seem really valuable, the existence of an entirely legal market for college preparation and placement services, or the fact that Stanford costs $60,000 a year before living expenses. Most potential students couldn’t begin to afford Stanford and aren’t in life circumstances that would make them even consider it. It really is about families being rich. The supposedly meritocratic competition is largely about which rich children get into which elite universities.
Less rich students are not simply kept out of higher education. They are admitted, but at a disadvantage: the less rich have less chance to get into the very top schools; they have less support to finish degrees. Some do make it; some are even supported by scholarships. But this does more to make the competition seem fair than to produce actually equal opportunities.
Even more pernicious, students from middle- and working-class backgrounds end up financing higher education with loans. Borrowing to pay university costs has risen dramatically. While fees in France and Germany remain relatively low, in the UK a single policy change brought them from £1,000 to £9,000 in 2010. Most students finance their studies with loans. This is a more extreme issue in the United States, where public university fees are close to British levels but fees at many private universities exceeded $60,000 by 2019 (not counting living costs). Total student debt passed $1.5 trillion in 2018. Heavily indebted students graduate with reduced freedom in their career and life choices because of the loan payments they face. They are inhibited from choosing jobs in which they might help their fellow citizens—as teachers, say, or health care workers. It’s not just that the finance sector pays more; it’s that public service jobs often don’t pay enough to live and also pay off loans.39
Student debt is a disaster regardless of what colleges or universities students attend. It is a particular disaster where students accumulate debt to attend schools that do not greatly advance their life chances. This is part of the scandal of the for-profit institutions promoted by former US education secretary Betsy DeVos. Companies made their profits by getting students to borrow money in government loan programs. But students graduated with more debt than success in the job market. They were sold a dream of higher education and opportunity. They received what Tressie McMillan Cottom has called “lower ed,” and it has kept them locked into subordinate social positions.40
Opting out of higher education is not always a realistic choice. Hierarchical incorporation is the only form of opportunity available. Education remains necessary for learning skills, even though hierarchies of universities are more about status. Indeed, the hierarchies may even get in the way of education since a university’s status is elevated more by being highly selective—excluding most students who apply—than by offering good classes. Rankings accentuate the difference between the top, the next, and the rest. In higher education, there is only modest difference in the quality of what the highest ranked universities offer students and what the many just below offer. Indeed, the biggest effect of the hierarchy may be not on what kind of education students get, but on whom they get to have in their network of classmates: other anointed winners. And of course, status has a big influence on who gets what job, how much they get paid, and how quickly they advance.
Tools such as standardized examinations purport to make exclusionary effort fairer. It might be better to reduce exclusion. In addition, the process selects in ways based on different levels of social support and “cultural capital.”41 The UK and France use national examinations of students’ achievement. The United States places even greater emphasis on the illusory notion of natural differences in talent. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) ostensibly evaluates students’ natural ability and suitability for university as such, rather than through testing specific learning. Though supposedly neutral, it has been shown by substantial research to be seriously biased.
Even more in the era of neoliberalism than in the postwar boom, elites see their power, privilege, and wealth as justified by their educational success, by their brains or other talents, and by the success of risky investments they made. Few ask whether there is any good reason for the whole system to be so unequal. Instead of extreme hierarchy with scholarships for a few less well-off students to attend the top universities, public funds could have gone to create a more equal educational system open to a wider range of students.
The possibility of social mobility was perhaps the most important legitimating promise of the compromise between capitalism and social democracy, not least during les trente glorieuses. Children were to have a chance at better jobs than their parents, at owning homes, at living longer. Opportunity was real, if not as great as announced. But mobility was sometimes bittersweet; upwardly mobile children had to leave their families and communities behind. This was one factor in the growth of cities and suburbs. Equality of opportunity was offered to individuals. Actual equality would have benefited whole communities.
Still, genuine mobility made it look like the system was fair (even if statistical analyses showed continued bias). At least children seemed to have a clear path to being better off than their parents. But this hope has pretty much ended. Young people today will not have higher incomes than their parents. Social mobility has become pervasively blocked. In a blow to the famous American dream, it may even have become more blocked in the United States than in Europe.42 For the first time, a whole generation is reaching adulthood with weaker economic prospects than its parents. This is one of the most jarring features of the last fifty years, deeply undermining citizen efficacy and democracy.
Meritocracy is a profoundly antidemocratic ideology. In place of democratic recognition of the equal worth of all citizens, meritocracy suggests that some are more worthy than others. It is self-serving for the elites, who think their positions and accumulated wealth simply reflect their merits. It is disempowering for others. It disguises the differences of starting points and support on the way that help account for success stories. Seemingly neutral assessment of individual merit not only obscures biases and differential investments; it also obscures the policy decision behind the hierarchies—the creation of artificial scarcity. It discourages solidarity with those less well off, implying that they deserve their fate. Perhaps most perniciously, it suggests to everyone else that their own lower position must be their fault.43
Of course, as Young’s novel predicted, this breeds resentment. Michael Sandel sums up: “Like the triumph of Brexit in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality and a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary citizens feeling disempowered. It was also a rebuke for a technocratic approach to politics that is tone-deaf to the resentments of people who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind.”44
Resentments of those not selected for the ostensibly meritocratic elite are exacerbated by what Pierre Bourdieu called “symbolic violence.”45 They not only don’t get the benefits of selection; they are implicitly told that this is because of their own inferiority and often that they belong to a category they cannot change. They hear contempt in the ways they are discussed by highly educated professionals—famously in Hillary Clinton’s reference to supporters of Donald Trump as “deplorables.”46 For many, frustration is compounded by the sense that others with less merit than themselves receive benefits at their expense. Why are the needs or wants of those in other categories privileged, they ask, while their own are neglected or even insulted? Critics of welfare insist it rewards those who don’t work or have too many children or otherwise demonstrate lack of merit. They complain that their own genuine merits are overlooked. The tyranny of merit turns out to be not only about who has it and deserves to be part of the elite, but also who doesn’t and deserves abjection.
Young introduced the idea of meritocracy in a satirical novel that described first the ascendancy of this elite so confident of their own merit and then a revolt against them by resentful masses on whom the elite looked down. The Rise of the Meritocracy gave what we now call “populist” revolt the fictional date of 2033. The real revolt came even sooner.