The Bad Guys
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Sounds a lot like he's decrying white privilege. There is one thing I take exception to:
After this social norm was eroded, a funny thing happened. Members of our class still overwhelmingly married and then had children within wedlock. People without our resources, unsupported by social norms, were less able to do that. As Adrian Wooldridge points out in his magisterial 2021 book, “The Aristocracy of Talent,” “Sixty percent of births to women with only a high school certificate occur out of wedlock, compared with only 10 percent to women with a university degree.” That matters, Wooldridge continues, because “The rate of single parenting is the most significant predictor of social immobility in the country.”
It is not that they were not able to marry and have children in wedlock. It's that the social mores that supported that disintegrated.
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That's from David Brooks. Not a bad piece. Dovetails somewhat with my framing of the elite sneering class, as our contemporary cultural conservatives. It's just fact that the institutional domination of leftism is what it is. You have to also add large corporations and their profoundly stupid DEI offices, to the list of captured 'elite institutions'. Beyond schools and media, beyond journalism and movies and TV, the large corporation bit is what makes the illiberal left touch people's lives, whether they want it to or not.
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The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.”
The meritocracy isn’t only a system of exclusion; it’s an ethos. During his presidency Barack Obama used the word “smart” in the context of his policies over 900 times. The implication was that anybody who disagreed with his policies (and perhaps didn’t go to Harvard Law) must be stupid.
They're calling it a meritocracy, when it isn't. It's rigged. A true meritocracy would reward individuals on merit, regardless of economic status.
Where the piece is right, is the increasing common attitude of the Haves, which views those as less educated as stupid. And that attitude is accompanied by a condensation so thick you can cut it with a knife.
