Marble Falls       David Brooks has made a living in books, New York Times columns, and the academy as a palatable social critic and commentator.  He’s deeply conservative, but in a tolerable and largely unoffensive way.  He’s a “never Trumper,” who goes out of his way to try and understand the Trump base; he’s that kind of conservative.  Recently, as a contributing editor of the venerable Atlantic, he wrote a forever long piece on the meritocracy called, “How the Ivy League Broke America:  The Meritocracy Isn’t Working, We Need Something New.” Yes, I know to some that might seem like he’s a forever Trumper as an anti-elite.  Hardly!  Are any of these folks, even Trump with his time at the University of Pennsylvania and Vance with his Harvard law degree, ever really, deep down, anti-elite?  I doubt it, but that’s a story for another time.

Back to Brooks, his argument in the essay is that in the mid-1960s, Harvard’s president, and others like him, assessed their ranks and concluded that for decades they had helped fashion an aristocratic stereotype of social, economic, and political elite based on money, class, and special access that was creating inequity.  The antidote was to reset their institutions on what they believed to be a fairer course based on merit.  Believing in technical fixes, they would sort people into meritocracy through IQ testing and achievement.  It was hard to break the mold that had endured almost since the Civil War, but gradually it took hold.  The problem, as Brooks has no difficulty pointing out, is that under any measure now, it didn’t create more equity.  Furthermore, this new so-called new meritocracy was more than able to botch things up as badly as the old one had done.

All of this resonates with me on many levels, because attacking the fiction of our society as a meritocracy has been a fundamental part of my political analysis.  It’s also personal and goes back to arguments and debates I waged in high school and college about the absurdity of the claims made by meritocracy fabulists.  My high school, Benjamin Franklin, in New Orleans was part of the sorting and tracking machine and rationalized its existence as a basic part of the infrastructure manufacturing this myth, while I spent my time raging against its falsity, unsuccessfully.  Not that we were drowning under this wave.  A case could be made that we benefited from it.  My class at Williams College, where I spent a brief off-and-on two years, was the first to have a majority come from public high schools.  My brother graduated from Yale and had a PhD from Princeton.  In another time, likely neither of those tours would have been traveled out of an oil field, western and southern family.

Brooks focuses on changing education as the answer to his detailed critique.  He advocates for a “humanist turn” where curiosity, drive and mission, social intelligence, and agility, as he calls situational adaptability, takes pride of place along with basic intelligence, and perhaps even common sense, though it goes unmentioned.  He believes changing the way education is delivered in schools to encourage those traits would create a “new, broader definition of merit.”  Opportunity would be expanded to include “things we actually want to try to do with our lives.”  National service would break now barriers with more mixing of classes.  He sees his position as radical, because it would “shrink the cultural significance of school in American society.”

Interesting, isn’t it?  Hopelessly, idealistic as well.  Brooks never engages exactly who and what would be willing to buy the services of the people in his new and improved meritocracy.  The bedrock of the American educational system is that it produces young men and women to the mold fashioned by the needs of national and local business and industry, as defined by the capitalism that drives our economy.  Brooks tries to make a case that some weeds will break out of the concrete of our system to give us innovators, thinkers, and better people, but he never really comes to grip with the facts driving the road builders and their motivations.  There is every reason to believe that they are benefitting from our increasing inequity, and pretty much like the way everything is working now.

It pains me to say so, because in Brooks “country” he argues that America should…

…invest more in local civic groups, so a greater number of kids can grow up in neighborhoods with community organizations where they can succeed in nonacademic endeavors – serving others, leading meetings, rallying neighbors to a cause.

           Damned, if at the end of this piece, he isn’t suddenly singing my song.  He’s recruiting organizers for ACORN in this new world.  I would love to join in verse by verse, but I’m afraid no one is really listening, and meanwhile the wheels keep turning.