I shared another Substack post, but I want to expand it a bit here. On the Substack version, I conspicuously didn’t name certain obvious names, but here, I shall. I also left out a reference to Plato’s Republic.
Meritocracy, and the men who would not deny it
The current American regime is built on meritocracy, and – this is the part everyone misses – it would not deny the charge. It rather likes the word. It uses the reinterpreted version, the laundered one my other essay was about, in which merit means precisely whatever the sovereign has decided it should mean this morning. Accuse them of meritocracy, and they will thank you for noticing.
Take the man at the centre of it. Whether Donald Trump is meritorious is not, in the end, a question about Donald Trump. It is a question about which ontological grammar you happen to be speaking, because the grammar constitutes the object before a single fact is admitted into evidence. This is the whole Language Insufficiency point in miniature: the frame quietly does the work the facts are later congratulated for.
To Cohort A, he is a charismatic and self-made businessman. The six bankruptcies are not failures but proof of a shrewd operator who knows how to play the game and walk away intact – power-mind, killer instinct, the art of the deal. That he has a decades-long habit of not paying his contractors, and an even longer one of not paying his tax, does not indict him; it endears him. It makes him the everyman who beat the system the rest of us merely resent. A working-class hero, if you can manage it, descending on a golden escalator.
To Cohort B – and I’ll confess my membership, since honesty is cheaper than the pretence of the view from nowhere – he is a less likeable Forrest Gump: a man forever arriving at the centre of history without ever quite grasping how he got there, weaponising a charisma that works only on the already-mesmerised, and rebuilding the world with himself at the origin. He has a certain gravity. It attracts sycophants and rewards them, which is the only merit test his court reliably administers.
Same man. Two grammars. The ‘merit’ resides in neither the man nor the record; it is assigned by the frame and then invoiced to the evidence. Which is exactly the thesis of the parent essay, now wearing a name tag.
The downward stroke, said plainly
The parent essay left the reverse operation as a coy ‘phrase in current circulation’. I’ll say it here without the euphemism: DEI hire. The move is to take career civil servants – people with decades of demonstrable domain competence, whatever their private politics – and broad-brush them as diversity appointments, which is to say, unqualified by definition, arrived by an unauthorised route. The vacancies then fill with those who have pledged fealty and displayed the one indispensable qualification: a flexible integrity. The competent are marked down for being the wrong sort; the pliant are marked up for being biddable. ‘Incompetent’ has been quietly reissued to mean not ours, and ‘qualified’ to mean loyal. Same machine, thrown into reverse – now with a name engraved on the lever.
The cream, and the dimension it rose along
Which brings me, as these things do, to Plato. The Substack piece used his ship of state – the crew who master the mutiny rather than the sea. Here I want the other half of the same complaint: the comfortable conviction that the meritorious rise to the top like cream.
They do rise. That was never in dispute. What the metaphor conceals is the dimension along which they rose. These people are genuinely competent – at working the system, at the acquisition and retention of position – which is a wholly different skill from governing, and precisely the one we so conveniently assume we were measuring. Cream rises; so does scum; the trope declines to specify which, and physics is no help at all.
This is the standing problem of republicanism – and no, before anyone lunges for the comment box, I do not mean the Republican Party, which has its own well-stocked catalogue of failures, as do the Democrats, who would be unwise to feel smug reading this. Nor is any of it uniquely American. If you are somewhere else entirely, enjoying the spectacle from a safe distance, do put the popcorn down. The mechanism by which a society mistakes competence-at-ascending for competence-at-ruling is not a national defect. It is a design flaw in selection itself, and your country installed it too.
I will not, on this occasion, start in on the failings of democracy as a system. Been there; done that. There are only so many sacred cows a man can tip before lunch.
The question, once more
‘Meritocracy’ survives all of this the way it survives everything – by never once being asked the only question that matters: merit at what, judged by whom, to whose benefit? Put it to the present court, and the answer is almost embarrassingly legible. Which is, of course, exactly why the question is never put.
