A couple of fabulous pieces on the decline of meritocracy in America.

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It was thanks to the radical meritocracy and audacious dynamism of institutions like Goldman that we were able to dismantle so much of the authority of elite power structures that restrained us from fulfilling our potential. The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality.

But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.

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As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.

But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.

If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.

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The radical left is now presenting a critique of meritocracy that is far more extreme than anything that has gone before it, but which also wields far more cultural heft: a woke assault on meritocracy. It starts by repeating standard leftish complaints about meritocracy: that it protects social inequality by dressing it up as cognitive inequality, thereby adding to the already intolerable pressure of modern life. Then it throws the explosive question of race into the heart of the debate. This rests on the demeaning claim that the best way to promote members of ethnic minorities is through ‘equity’ rather than ‘excellence’. It also makes it far more difficult for ordinary people to discuss the subject dispassionately and far easier for radicals to engage in demagoguery and polarisation. Even more importantly, it creates a new hierarchy of virtue at the heart of society. We are thus moving to a more ambitious stage in the left’s long social revolution: from simply dismantling meritocracy to creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.

Meritocracy is ‘racist’ and ‘the antithesis of fair’, pronounced Alison Collins, a former commissioner of education in San Francisco. And the old idea of judging people as individuals? That’s the white man’s game of divide and rule. ‘Colour blindness’ – what we used to regard as the absence of discrimination – is dismissed as a con, designed to draw a veil over millennia of exploitation. The entire machinery of meritocracy is rejected as a legacy of the eugenic movement or imperialism. Or, perhaps, the ‘white’ way of looking at the world. ‘The use of standardised tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade black minds and legally exclude black bodies,’ writes Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby.

The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. ‘The only remedy to racist discrimination,’ writes Kendi, ‘is antiracist discrimination.’ The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. ‘Abolish whiteness!’ says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. ‘White lives don’t matter. As white lives.’

These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.

Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.

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Reducing your economic efficiency is a foolish thing to do at the best of times, because it condemns our children to a lower standard of living than we have enjoyed. It is suicidal at a time when an increasingly belligerent China is rediscovering the virtues of meritocracy, but this time by producing scientists and technologists, not Confucian scholars.

The second is that it politicises the distribution of opportunities and jobs. One of the virtues of meritocracy is that it takes some of the heat out of job allocation: people with power try their hardest to give jobs to those who deserve them and people who are disappointed can take comfort from the fact that the system tried to be objective. But once you say there is nothing to the distribution of jobs and opportunities but the raw exercise of power, you encourage a free-for-all. And once you start deliberately privileging some groups over others on the basis of race, you reinforce ethnic enmity and reward ethnic power politics.

The new woke elite, if it continues to gain strength, is destined to rule over an increasingly divided and embittered society as people advance their interests through collective agitation rather than individual effort, and as economic growth becomes a thing of the past. Perhaps we should think a little harder about replacing the aristocracy of talent with the aristocracy of woke

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