Meritocracy, the idea that one’s place in society should be based on ability and effort, is under heavy attack – its failures having opened wide the doors for Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán and other populist mutants. The core criticism runs thus: meritocracy’s beneficiaries not only enjoy the fruits of a high-quality education and outsized salaries but are insufferably smug, sure of their virtue and superiority. They believe they are winners not because they are lucky to have had the “right” genes or parents who supported them in countless ways, but because they deserve to be winners. The elites may be brilliantly educated and regard themselves as sophisticated, tolerant and liberal, but in reality they are hopelessly disconnected from the societies they rule. They have grown way too big for their meritocratic boots. And if all that weren’t bad enough, it’s getting harder to become a meritocrat in the first place: social mobility, at least in the UK and the US, has declined since its postwar heyday.
But here comes the counter-attack. Adrian Wooldridge sees meritocracy as a revolutionary idea worth improving, not abandoning. He ranges across two and a half thousand years of history, surveying many societies and cultures, to remind us that until relatively recently the talented were almost always a matter of no interest to the rulers – not only unrewarded but undiscovered. In a recent cover story for this magazine (“In defence of meritocracy”, 19 May), Wooldridge expanded on the contemporary political salience of the idea, arguing fiercely that if Labour wants to win elections it must claim – he would say reclaim – meritocracy in order to demolish the perception that it has been captured by “woke egalitarianism”, or at the very least harness meritocracy to define its central purposes and remedy its lack of “vision”.
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