Reclaiming Meritocracy

MAGA is Affirmative Action for Insurrectionists. Democrats Shouldn't Be Afraid to Say So.

Dear readers of Word Salad and, I assume, Jeffrey Goldberg:

“The DOD,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, “will be merit-based and color-blind. You will be judged based on how good you are at your job. Full stop.”

Given that Hegseth had accidentally group-texted a reporter secret American strike plans, the logical next sentence after “Full stop,” would be “Which is why I’m resigning.”

Obviously that didn’t happen. But the fact that - even in the irony-free zone of the Trump administration - Pete Hegseth was talking about merit just days after Signalgate says something important about America’s rhetorical landscape.

During the George W. Bush era, Democrats allowed Republicans to own “freedom.” During the Trump era, Democrats have allowed Republicans to own “meritocracy.”

Here’s Elon Musk: “If we want to preserve freedom and meritocracy in America, then Trump must win.”

Marco Rubio: “We are restoring meritocracy.”

John Ratcliffe (the CIA director, who was also on the signal chat): “We must be the ultimate meritocracy.”

And here’s Trump himself: “We will transform America back to a merit-based country.”

Believes in meritocracy. His handpicked team of cost-cutters can’t do basic math.

This should go without saying, but MAGA believes in meritocracy the way Musk believes in free speech. To get a job in the Trump Administration, you don’t have to be good at what you do - you have to be loyal to Trump. I’m not saying everyone in the administration is incompetent. Some people have the opposite problem: they’re smart people who are so arrogant about how smart they are that they wind up doing lots of dumb things. But the litmus test for becoming a powerful person in Trumpworld isn’t your job performance. It’s your willingness to put the president above the country.

MAGA, in other words, is an anti-meritocracy, a system of affirmative action for insurrectionists.

And if Democrats don’t change the way we think and talk about meritocracy, we’ll let them get away with it.

The Opposite of Meritocracy Isn’t DEI, It’s Incompetence

“What I believe unites the people of this nation, regardless of race or region or party, young or old, rich or poor, is the simple, profound belief in opportunity for all — the notion that if you work hard and take responsibility, you can get ahead in America."

That’s from Obama’s 2014 State of the Union, which I didn’t write. But I did write a variation of that line - “a country that lets you go as far as your talent and hard work will take you” - into dozens of his less important speeches.

At the time, President Obama’s beliefs were not remotely controversial. We put them in speeches, in part, because nearly every American could agree with them. President Obama believed America promises meritocracy – and that he himself was an example of what happens that promise is kept. That’s what he meant in the key line of his 2004 keynote convention speech: “only in America is my story even possible.”

But there are two huge Democrats’ vision of meritocracy a decade ago and Republicans’ today:

First, Obama cared about everybody being able to reach their full potential. That could mean become the next Thomas Edison, but it could also mean living a happy, secure, middle-class life. MAGA only cares about allowing people with the capacity for greatness - as they define greatness - to become great. (The rest of us, presumably, will be ground up and used as fuel for AI data centers.)

Second, for Obama, meritocracy was a goal. Like “a more perfect union,” it was worth pursuing, but could never be fully achieved.

Trumpism sees it differently. MAGA doesn’t view meritocracy as a concept that stands on its own. To them, it’s one half a binary. And the other half is DEI.

Believes in meritocracy. Became CIA director because “lack of integrity” was the main qualification.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: a lot of Democrats - despite 100 percent disagreeing with MAGA on the subject of meritocracy - have come to accept the same basic framing: that “meritocracy” exists only as a pretext for discrimination and protecting an unequal status quo.

Here are just a few pieces and essays that all argue meritocracy is a “myth.” They were all published after Trump took office in 2017. There are plenty more where these came from.

I think nearly all of these essays start with an important and fairly clear premise: the United State is not, and has never been, a true meritocracy. For most of us, the circumstances of our birth play a tremendous and unfair role in determining far we get to go in life.

But where I think we’ve gone wrong intellectually as a party is to make an unsubstantiated leap. Just because meritocracy doesn’t exist doesn’t mean merit doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean that aspiring to meritocracy - just as we aspire to other abstract and unattainable concepts like freedom - is a bad idea.

To put it more simply: some people make better defense secretaries than others. And that’s true regardless of your opinions about DEI.

How Democrats Lost Their Rhetorical Edge

It might sound like I’m just complaining about the words Democrats currently use. To which I’d reply: that’s exactly what I’m doing! Because the way we talk about ideas has a lot to do with whether people side with us or with Trump.

And the way we talk about talent and aspiration, as a party, has changed dramatically in a relatively short time. Look at 2024. Kamala Harris didn’t run as a leftist intellectual. To her credit, she proudly spoke about patriotism. “Freedom” was the major theme of her campaign. But here’s what she said in August, shortly after becoming the nominee, about talent and success.

During her pre-convention rallies, she said: “Now is the time to build an America where everyone’s work is rewarded and talents are valued.”

Later, in her convention speech, she said, “We will create an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed.”

Believes in meritocracy. Probably could have gotten his job on merit, but has to perform less well at his important job because that’s how you make the boss happy.

I don’t think Harris should have just quoted Obama. But I think it’s noteworthy that in both these cases there’s an important shift in emphasis. The suggestion that hard work leads to success is gone. So is any mention of personal responsibility. “Talent,” meanwhile is used to refer to something that everyone has, rather than something that differentiates us from each other.

Instead of framing opportunity around individual success - “you can get ahead” - Harris framed it around collective success. “Everyone has the chance to succeed.” Harris didn’t sound like a socialist. But the most rhetorically compelling and attractive part of aspiring to meritocracy - the idea that each of us can control our own lives - got sanded away in favor of something more egalitarian. A rhetorical flattening took place.

For the record, I thought Harris’s convention speech was on the whole really good. And I don’t fault her, or her team, for speaking about opportunity in this way. They reflected a broader change in the party. I have no inside information here, but my guess is that if Harris tried to say something along the lines of “we want to build an America where you can work hard and get ahead,” or “we decide our own destiny,” she would have gotten a ton of pushback from fellow Democrats, especially online.

In a way, maybe that’s progress! But there’s an enormous cost to rejecting the idea that meritocracy is a worthy goal:

Trump and his goons are irresponsible, incompetent losers who want to steal from hardworking Americans to shower themselves with riches they don’t deserve. If we’re afraid to say that personal responsibility and talent ought to matter in life, or that some people deserve more than others, we’ll struggle to hold this administration fully accountable, or to present a clear alternative.

Some thoughts that I, a white guy, have that touch on DEI. What could go wrong?

MAGA wants to force a choice between believing in meritocracy and believing in diversity. The anti-MAGA coalition’s job is to reject that false choice.

How do we do it?

First, we make clear that true meritocracy should lead to more diversity, not less. When a large percentage of the American population is overlooked because they’re not white, or male, or willing to say that Trump won the 2020 election, it’s like benching three-quarters of your team before you even take the field.

Second, we make it clear that talent should be subject to the law of supply and demand. Let’s say your football team has six great wide receivers but no running backs. It’s not reverse racist to say, “We’re going to make it a priority to find a running back this year.” And it wouldn’t be considered biased to draft a running back over a wideout who's equally talented on paper: the team has plenty of wide receivers, it needs a running back, so it drafts a running back.

There’s tons of research supporting the idea that diverse groups perform better than homogenous ones. If a group lacks an important perspective, then someone who has that needed perspective is intrinsically more valuable, in a meritocratic system, to that group. And when it comes to government, having higher-performing teams benefits us all.

Believes in meritocracy. Where do I even start?

Third, we should be clear about why representation matters.

Democrats have taken to celebrating bringing diversity in high-level positions - cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, presidential nominees - without explaining why that’s a good thing. This was true long before Biden, but here’s an example from the Biden Administration, celebrating “the most diverse administration in history.” In this framing, diversity is seen not as a means to an end, but as an end unto itself.

Perhaps the theory was that voters would see it that way, too - that as America becomes more diverse, voters will reward the party whose institutions “look more like America.” Obviously, that didn’t happen. Trump saw huge surges of support among young Black men, immigrants, and particularly among Hispanics. I don’t think Democrats should abandon their commitment to diversity - but they should abandon the idea that increasing diversity in elite institutions self-evidently improves most Americans’ lives. We need to make the case.

And I think we can. By making sure that more talented young people see people who look like them in positions of authority, it demonstrates that they won’t be unfairly denied the chance to compete for and win those types of positions in the future. Which means we get fewer people who never even try to reach their full potential because they believe their hard work won’t be rewarded. Which means more talented people in positions of leadership - which, when it comes to government, should benefit us all.

Fourth – and this one isn’t diversity related – Democrats should fire people sometimes.

Democratic campaigns, and groups, have become really reluctant to fire people, or in some cases to pass people over for promotion. Instead, they “layer,” adding people who are supposed to do someone’s job without technically replacing that person. That’s bad. It creates extra busy work for everyone, and more importantly, it leaves a lot of the most talented staff in the party frustrated because their hard work isn’t being rewarded.

Democrats should treat people respectfully. But if we mean what we say about the threat to democracy, then we need to be willing to replace people who aren’t up the job - not just when it comes to congressional leaders in their eighties, but also staffers in their twenties and everyone in between.

Maybe none of this will matter, because Pete Hegseth will accidentally push the “launch the nukes” button while trying to order UberEats. But assuming that doesn’t happen, the fact that the Trump administration has been (yet again) exposed as a bunch of careless incompetents gives Democrats a huge opening at a time when we really need one.

Let’s hope we’re able to take advantage.