The meritocracy and the poverty of the liberal imagination in 21st century America

It’s remarkable the extent to which people in America accept the idea that a meritocracy is not only possible, but affirmatively desirable. As a consequence, almost all criticism surrounding the idea of meritocracy consists of observations about the ways in which our society falls short of that ideal, rather than any criticism of the ideal itself.

Here’s a passage from Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration speech:

We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American; she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.  (Applause.)   

It’s a sign of the profound poverty of the liberal or progressive imagination in our political culture that this claim hardly strikes anyone as being as completely outrageous as it so clearly becomes, if we bother to think about the matter at all.

Leave aside the sheer practical absurdity of the very idea that, in this or any foreseeable version of this country “a little girl born into the bleakest poverty” could have the same chance to succeed as someone born, say, into a family at the cut point for the 99th percentile of household income in the USA in 2021 ($570,000). Note that there are about five million Americans living in households with an annual income of less than $4,000 — that is, $77 per week, for everything that those households could not obtain from our now largely non-existent social welfare system.

What should really appall us about this bromide — coming from, we should recall, a politician who is considered a far leftist by the increasingly insane right wing in this benighted country — is the assumption underlying it, so deeply embedded as to be practically invisible, that it’s in any way acceptable for little girls to be born into “the bleakest poverty” in the United States in the third decade of the 21st century. And it clearly is acceptable, because we live up to our ideals not when we flatly refuse to accept that this circumstance is in any way compatible with even the most minimal concept of a just society, but when we comfort ourselves with the notion that the continuing daily reality for millions of Americans of lives lived in the bleakest poverty is not really any sort of serious problem, as long as this little girl can somehow — eventually! — be presented with a “level playing field,” from which she will have as good a chance as anyone else to achieve “success.”

Again, the absurdity I want highlight here is not the incoherent and indeed oxymoronic idea that it’s even possible to create anything like “a level playing field” in a society as hierarchical and class-stratified as our own, but the apparently invisible absurdity inherent in the notion that it’s acceptable for millions of Americans at any particular moment to be living in “the bleakest poverty,” as long as we continue to work toward creating a society where this outcome is “fair,” because it reasonably reflects the individual merit of everyone in the class hierarchy.

The problem, in other words, is not that the little girl born into the bleakest poverty doesn’t currently have the same prospects of getting into Harvard that Jared Kushner enjoyed: the problem is that “Harvard” — or rather the very concept embodied in that word — remains such a central concept in our culture.

That concept at bottom is that some people deserve almost literally inconceivable wealth, while others deserve to live in third world poverty — which again millions of Americans do in fact continue to live in — and that the only problem with this social arrangement that we haven’t yet built a society that manages to make sure that wealth uncountable and “the bleakest poverty” are distributed appropriately, according to merit.

Now the temptation here for Barack Obama’s admirers, including myself, is to minimize all this by pointing out this is just one line in a speech. But we should resist that temptation, because the very existence of that line, in a document as worked over as a presidential inauguration speech, delivered by the leader of what passes for any kind of liberal or left or even tenuously social democratic political party and movement in this country, indicates the extent to which, in what historically speaking is an unimaginably rich nation, we remain in the grip of a profoundly immoral indifference to the very existence of levels of poverty that exist only because we are profoundly indifferent to their continued existence.

As I’ve mentioned before, the modern world’s biggest failure of imagination is the ongoing failure to recognize that, in developed nations at least, poverty, and especially the sort of extreme poverty we tolerate in America, is a political not an economic problem. The economic problem — the problem of generating enough wealth to ensure that everyone in the society enjoys a minimally decent standard of living, and is secure in the knowledge that they are protected from the ravages of true poverty — has long been solved in such societies. That millions upon millions of people in our society live in such poverty, and tens of millions more live in the constant shadow of it, is something that is the case because we choose that it should continue to be the case.

And the intellectually incoherent and morally bankrupt ideal of creating a “meritocracy” remains a critical contributor to this state of affairs.