The funeral services for President George HW Bush triggered Ross Douthat’s nostalgia for the “aristocratic virtues of the old WASP establishment, and a disappointment with the meritocracy that has risen in its place.” This column ignores his nostalgia and alleged virtues and discusses briefly his bizarre assumption that a “meritocracy” runs America. Given the 2008 Great Financial Crisis (GFC) and President Trump, I thought that the meritocracy fantasy was dead. We are far closer to anti-meritocracy (a kakistocracy).The basis of conservatism is traditionalism, which in the extreme mythologizes the supposed "gold age" of the past and yearns for recapturing it essence through reactionary politics.
Douthat’s Mendacious Meritocracy Myth
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC
