Thoughts from Glenn Reynolds:
“The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it.”
Well, now they’ve heard it, and they’ve also heard that a lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
There’s nothing “elite” or even educated about them. They’re just credentialed.
I believe that the Progressives finally thought they had won and could show their true hand. For decades they hid behind incrementalism and only got away with major policies under Roosevelt and Johnson. But since Bush II, they thought they were strong enough to make sweeping changes in the open.
You nailed it Jon. In the case of Islam, it’s even codified in their teaching (Taqiyya.)
The only real problem with Western meritocracy is that there isn’t one.
And, yes, the left have spent decades deplatforming everyone on the right to the point where they lived in a left-wing bubble where most of them truly believed that everyone else agreed with them. Discovering that they were a small minority all along has really caused mental meltdown in many of them.
If the Trump movement is the revolt of people outside of the “protected class” then … adjunct professors must have been pro-Trump.
Our friends to the left are explicitly opposed to a meritocracy so it shouldn’t be surprising that their elite gain status by meeting a criteria other than skill and competency.
It’s not so much a meritocracy as a credentialocracy.