I am a lucky person.
I do not mean I am lucky in the general “look at how well I am doing, how happy I am” sense that people usually use the term, though that could certainly apply to me as well. I am doing well, and I am pretty happy, the tenor of these post occasionally to the contrary notwithstanding. No, I am speaking of actual luck, of how actual good fortune out of my control has contributed to my upper middle-class lifestyle and generally happy family life. My success is in many ways a refutation of the idea of the common understanding of meritocracy — and idea I am becoming more and more convinced is eating away at democracy.
I was born into a stable, wealthy democracy. My Dad never served in Vietnam, so he 1) was alive for me and 2) not messed up like a lot of my friend’s fathers were. That was luck. We were poor as a kid, but while we occasionally missed meals, we never fell into homelessness — a lot of that was luck. The wrong layoff, the wrong bill, the wrong breakdown never hit at the wrong time. When my parents divorced, they worked hard to ensure we were never in the middle of their mess — something not true of all my friends. Not every stepparent was good, but the worst were never kept around long — something not true of all my friends. When I was run over as a teenager, my father’s military medical care ensured I didn’t suffer permanent injury.
I could go on. I was able to work my way through college — I was lucky to be in the last generation where college was subsidized enough for that to be possible. When I didn’t have health insurance of my own, I was never injured severely enough to force me out of work or school — something not true of a lot of the people I worked with and a lot of my friends. I was an angry young man, but my fights never put me in front of cops or permanently injured me. The car never broke, an illness never laid me low, a job never vanished at just the wrong moment — all of that luck. And that doesn’t even get into societal privilege — my run ins with the cops never ended with me being shot. Being lucky enough to be born white and male had a lot to do with that. Statistically speaking, given all the jobs I had in all the places I lived, at least one of them went to me because the owner wanted to hire a white male, something I was lucky enough to be. Merit had nothing to do with it.
Yes, I was smart and I worked hard and tried my best — but a lot of people were smart and a lot of people worked hard and a lot of people tried their. And I watched the world chew them up anyway — people who did have the car break at the wrong time, the injury that made them unable to work, the job disappear right before a massive bill was due. The people who were just a bit unluckier than I was.
We live in a world where the simple truth of my story, and the even more simple truth that my story is a part of every successful person’s story, cannot be accepted. We are supposed to believe that everyone gets basically what they deserve. That people are on top because they largely deserve to be on top — they have arrived there mostly because of their own merit. That wealth and power and prestige and acclaim are theirs by right. And that attitude is killing our democracy.
The central disturbing fact at the heart of the Clarence Thomas gift scandals is not that Clarance Thomas is corrupt. Corruption has been part and parcel of business and politics since time immemorial. Ever since there has been a means of exchange and a way of wielding power, I suspect, people have used one to gain the other. No, what is disturbing about the Thomass scandal, what is so disheartening about it, is that all nine justices rejected proposal for independent oversight of their ethics. All nine, from both parties, in the face of several corruption scandals, said, nope, we are above that. In their minds, they are the best of the best in the legal world. They MUST be above reproach, not because they have acted above reproach, but because they are Supreme Court Justices and by definition, they are therefore above reproach — they have earned that deference by virtue of their position. In the meantime, they worry about how public opinion in the trustworthiness of the court has fallen.
The rightwing members of the Federal judiciary in general seem surprised and offended by the push back they receive. They command the judiciary at this point, and yet any criticism of their shoddy legal reasoning or the impacts of their rulings is met with insults and aggrieved whining. Part of this, of course, is performative. But part of it seem genuine. Alito, a Supreme Court Justice and one of the six conservative overturning precedent left and right, recently whined “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.” That is not a man playing– he is upset that he is not getting the accolades he sees as his due. They genuinely do not seem to understand why they are not held in the same regard as earlier jurists — after all, have they not achieved the same positions? Are they not deserving of the same respect because they hold the same seats? Do we not know that they are better than us? How dare the citizens not approve!
Such hubris is not limited to judges, of course. We have an entire culture around deifying businesspeople. Elon Musk is held as a genius despite erratic behavior and never actually being responsible for the success of a company. Elizabeth Holems received a flattering portrait in the New York Times that was focused around the idea that her medical fraud crimes weren’t so bad after all. Peter Thiel has disparaged women voting and the concept of democracy itself and yet is still welcomed as a donor in the GOP. Criticize these people and you can be assured that folks will come out of the woodwork to defend them — they must be smart, because they are rich. Prosecution of corporate crimes has declined precipitously. Silicon Valley billionaires like Thiel are taking their philosophical marching orders from anti-democratic thinkers who argue that CEOs should rule us because they are better than us.
Nor is this worship of the mythical man of merit entirely a function of the right wing. For the last half decade or more, centrist pundits have been up in arms because some college students at elite universities have dared to protest right wing provocateurs when they come to their campuses. Occasionally, they catch protestors going too far, or some ridiculous overreaction to a minor sin that results in, well, not much of anything, actually, and act as if the very foundations of the Republic have been shaken. But in the face of the destruction of tenure, the silencing of teachers and students who are left-wing or minority and the banning of books by right wing politicians, their reaction has been to ignore it or to downplay it. In the words of one ostensibly left-wing commentator, only the elites matter:
But while I would urge you to vote against local officials who act this way, I do not think that small-town politicians being close-minded and prudish is a super-alarming social trend. This is the way of the world. The reason many of us have a harsher reaction to the faculty, staff, and students of elite universities adopting wildly overblown ideas about “harm” and “safety” with regard to the speech of others is that we’re concerned these institutions have real social and cultural cachet in a way that the Walton County School Board does not. So I think a different kind of focus on elite institutions and top-tier left-wing intellectuals is warranted.
(2) Donald Trump’s re-election is a dire threat to free speech (slowboring.com)
Yglesias cannot imagine a world in which the opinions, education, and wellbeing of those who have not proven their merit by attending the right schools or living in the right neighborhood or writing for the right audiences could possibly matter. What difference does it make if some kid in podunk Indiana has their life affected by right wing politicians? By definition, they aren’t going to grow up to affect anyone who matters. If they were, they would have been born to more successful parent, wouldn’t they, and live somewhere other than podunk Indiana.
And so here we are — institutions that cannot conceive of holding people in power accountable for their actions, elites who do not think that they should be held accountable for their actions because they deserve to be elite because they have earned, through nothing but the sweat of their own brow, their elite status, a worship of success to the point of an embrace of anti-democratic worldviews, and a complete lack of concern for the functions of democracy for the majority of their fellow citizens because they simply don’t possess enough merit to matter.
A lot of these poisons, of course, have many sources. Racism, sexism, classism, plain old asshole-ism. But the concept of meritocracy, the idea that you have gotten pretty much what you deserve, that luck effects your life only on its edges, is the meal that allows all of the other poisons easy access to our collective tables. It allows the racists, the rich, the sexist, the beneficiaries of all kinds of luck, societally driven and otherwise, to convince themselves that they deserve what they have, and the disadvantaged deserve to not have what they don’t. It feeds resentment of the unlucky that can be used as a weapon — it cannot be bad luck that such a deserving person as me didn’t get what I deserved. It must be bad actors keeping me down. It must be them. Whichever them serves the purposes of keeping the lucky elite in power that day.
I have been a lucky person. But because most of our elites cannot stomach the idea that they have been too, I may not be lucky enough to see my democracy survive my lifetime.
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