,” published in 1999, Nicholas Lemann concluded, “You can’t undermine social rank by setting up an elaborate process of ranking.”
“My students at Yale—the poster children for meritocracy—are more nearly overwhelmed and confounded by their apparent blessings than complacent or even just self-assured,” he writes. “They seek meaning that eludes their accomplishments and regard the intense education that constitutes their elevated caste with a diffidence that approaches despair.” I happen to know some current students and recent graduates of Yale Law School, and they don’t seem diffident or despairing to me at all.
Back in the fifties, Markovits says, we were all on the gravy train together, or, at least, white men were. The well-off ate the same food and drove the same cars as everyone else. You could make a good living as a middle manager or an assembly-line worker. Americans didn’t get high-handed about virtue issues like identity politics, racial bigotry, and gay marriage, issues that Markovits thinks the average worker rightly regards as irrelevant. We need to bring that America back.
For Markovits, both classes are the prisoners of meritocracy, just as Marx thought that both the capitalist and the worker he exploits were doing only what the system was making them do. That did not prevent Marx from calling capitalists greedy and cruel, and it does not prevent Markovits from calling élite workers selfish, corrupt, and immoral. But, like Marx, Markovits thinks that the whole system is a Frankenstein’s monster.
Markovits is right that the concept of merit is now tied up with a certain idea of work, and the two are not easily separated. College-educated people believe that you are supposed to work hard. It is difficult for them to respect someone who treats his or her job as a paycheck, rather than as a source of achievement and fulfillment.