The Myth of Meritocracy Runs Deep in American History
15th January 2025
From America’s founding — and before — false narratives about post-racism and meritocracy have been at play in our national identity. By the early 19th century, there was a general expectation that white men should, and could successfully, strive for self-mastery and improvement: that a hard-working, right-living youth could become a prosperous self-made man. Implicit disapproval of the poor has an even longer history, rooted in debates over colonial poor laws. As a nation, we have absorbed and employed these narratives for generations.
In tracing the roots of these narratives, two caveats are in order. First, what the average person thought about individual achievement and opportunity at the beginning of the 19th century is difficult to say. What exists are the accounts of those who succeeded, those wealthy enough to have had political power and thus be included in the historical record. Second, this topic is much too broad to cover adequately here. Many have written about the nation’s evolving sense of itself in the wake of independence and during the years in which the republic solidified. I will borrow from their insights and heavily summarize the import of their work for this discussion of the origins of The Myth, as I call it in my book.
In other words, this guy wrote a book just summarizing what everybody knows about ‘meritocracy’ and bad-mouthing every phase of American history. AI could do the same with less effort and pretension.
Americans don’t like anything that can be characterized as an ‘-ocracy’. A large segment of the population doesn’t like rich people because Envy and so smears rich people as ‘oligarchs’. Another large segment of the population doesn’t like poor people because they are the generators of crime and other icky aspects of American culture, even though that’s pretty much true, but it’s outside of the Overton Window to say so and engage in the crime of Noticing. And these segments overlap more than you might expect.
And, tellingly, the People Who Matter don’t like talk about ‘meritocracy’ because the notion that some people might have a greater dollop of Merit than other people goes against the Narrative that everybody has exactly the same potential and talents and only differ in their outcomes because Oppression.