Misfiring Meritocracy
New York Times music critics, the WASP establishment revisited, and more in this week's digest.
What does it take to produce an elite that leads well? A couple of stories this week shed light on that.
First, the New York Times recently published a list of their top 30 living American songwriters. It was a source of tremendous controversy and discussion, which of course makes it a huge success from the Times perspective.
One of the critics of the Times list was the popular and very knowledgeable music Youtuber Rick Beato, who recorded an interesting short video looking at the background of the Times critics who selected the list:
Beato notes the prevalence of Ivy League and elite degrees among the critics, pointing especially the lack of any degrees in music. Times pop music critic Jon Caramanica went to Harvard and got a B.A. in English, for example. I ran the list of six critics through Claude, which indicated none of them have any formal musical training.
I don’t think one needs to have a degree in music or be a musician to be an effective pop music critic. But Beato’s complaint about the Times critics’ educational backgrounds does illustrate something about the changing nature of education and meritocracy in America.
It used to be that prep schools and elite colleges took people who were already destined to become top leaders due to family background, and formed them with a particular ethos. Now those schools provide those who would not otherwise likely become top leaders with the credential that allows them to obtain those positions.
We call this new system meritocracy. But listening to Caramanica complain about white male songwriters and dismiss Billy Joel, I ask myself: is he really the best person in the entire country in understanding and writing about pop music such that he should be a major critic at the New York Times based on merit? When I see that over 700,000 people watched a Rick Beato video breaking down some subtle elements that make Toto’s “Africa” a megahit, or note that almost 300,000 people subscribe to the deeply knowledgeable Ted Gioia here on Substack, I’m not convinced.
It’s great for Caramanica that he got that gig. I’m sure he has real talent or he wouldn’t be there.
But this illustrates the way that our present system of credentialing, filtering, and elevating people is not producing the results we would necessarily expect from a system that’s supposed to be organized around skills, competence, and merit.
The next piece will take a deeper look at this topic, looking at the question of what the right model is for elite formation and structuring.
The Best Model for an American Tech Elite
Palantir’s Alex Karp wrote a widely-discussed book called The Technological Republic about the role he advocates Silicon Valley play in our society. I previously highlight a review essay by Tanner Greer that is very critical of Karp, and which lays out a history of the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern aka WASP Establishment that he views as the real model of fusing new technology with national development and leadership.
Geoffrey Kabaservice at the Niskanen Center did his doctoral dissertation on the last generation of the WASP establishment, which he adapted into an excellent book I’ve mentioned before, The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment.
He is out with his own long and interesting essay interacting with Greer. He is something of a friendly critic, arguing that instead of the Gilded Age establishment, it was actually the later 1940-1970 establishment that provides a better model for Silicon Valley.
Greer’s analysis of the Eastern Establishment offers real insight into the realities of power and influence in America in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that same analysis also complicates his argument in significant ways. Taking a page from E. Digby Baltzell — the sociologist who popularized the term WASP — Greer describes this establishment as the postwar fusion of a New England-centric patrician class with a rising group of industrial magnates…Baltzell believed that American society benefited from the creation of this establishment. In his view, the wealthy industrialists reinforced the power and standing of the upper class while also putting them in touch with the realities of a modernizing world. At the same time, the upper-class code of conduct operated as a check on the magnates who otherwise might destroy the republic through their greed and lust for power.
Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account is overly New York centric, and downplays the important role played by the Boston tradition:
Grant, however, emphasized: “Most important, Union forces had struck a major blow for freedom and equality.” Greer’s account, in my view, generally underestimates the importance of moral and egalitarian ideals (including the principle of racial equality) in the formation of the post-Civil War leadership. He believes that “The key city in [the Eastern Establishment] constellation was always New York City,” and that the scholarship of historians and sociologists like Baltzell “is distorted by its focus on elites in lesser Establishment cities such as Boston and Philadelphia.”
But this is to dismiss the genuine struggle within the establishment, throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries, between American commercial impulses embodied by New York and the ideals embodied by Boston. Conservatives who believe that politics is downstream from culture should consider how the post-Civil War histories written in Boston, for example, influenced Americans’ perceptions of national identity and national priorities. Historian Mark Peterson has demonstrated how the South’s defeat in the Civil War allowed Boston “to put its impress on the future of the United States,” not least by enabling Boston’s pioneering historians (including Francis Parkman, William Hickling Prescott, and John Lothrop Motley) to construct new narratives.
Kabaservice is critical of the brand of rapacious capitalism practiced by Gilded Age elites. He also points to conflicts within the governing class of America, such as over the scope of corporate power:
And while many people believe the late 19th and early 20th centuries to have been a laissez-faire era, governments at all levels (including local and state as well as federal) took action not only to support economic growth but also to limit corporate excesses. Landmarks along this path included antitrust legislation and regulatory action, civil service reform, and the institution of progressive taxation as well as the creation of a rudimentary social welfare safety net. The Supreme Court affirmed the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, and Congress created the Federal Reserve two years later in order to ensure the nation would not have to depend on the good graces of individual bankers to survive the next financial panic. Many of these initiatives were advanced by Republicans with the support of GOP presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, which calls into question the idea of an all-encompassing political establishment.
One of the points Baltzell makes is that the WASP establishment stood as an affront to the Marxist conception of class. Here you had a class in which its own class interests did not straightforwardly determine its politics. There were people of different parties and different persuasions within the establishment itself. This ability of the establishment to make space within itself for high-stakes conflict, while regulating the conduct of that conflict, and ensuring its participants retained personal relationships and ties, was one of the establishment’s core functions. In our age of no-holds-barred, zero-sum, winner-takes-all political and cultural wars, we feel keenly the lack of this establishment function today.
Kabaservice here also emphasizes what I call the “human-social stack,” focused on making sure that techo-industrial acceleration worked well for America and Americans broadly, not just a narrow stratum of industrialists. So much focus today is on how we accelerate new technologies, build more housing or energy, etc. But the social structures and institutions in which this is embedded and deployed are of equal importance.
In general, Kabaservice argues that Greer’s account makes the establishment appear too unified and monolithic.
He also argues that the Great Depression did not mark the establishment’s decline as Greer claims, but that it continued into the postwar era. In this, I should note that Greer follows Baltzell, who sees the decline of the establishment in the 1930’s, viewing its postwar reflowering as, in his words, an “Indian summer.” Kabaservice writes:
There is no doubt that the Depression did discredit the Republican Party and many of the policies it had upheld since the 19th century, which the considerable majority of Americans came to believe had brought on the economic collapse and which offered few solutions for the widespread misery that resulted. Some Old Guard Republicans continued to cling to Gilded Age nostrums. But the party as a whole moved toward moderation during Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, endorsing parts of the New Deal social welfare safety net as well as policies to educate and empower the workforce — and the result from 1940 to 1970 was both a much faster rate of growth (measured in output per person) and a more egalitarian and cohesive society than in the period from 1870 to 1940.
The Eastern Establishment pivoted in response to the Depression, away from knee-jerk association with the GOP and toward the model of Henry Stimson and his acolytes, who offered dedicated public service to both Republican and Democratic administrations as an expression of placing the interests of nation above class. Although many today would dismiss this idea of noblesse oblige as a myth, it was reinforced by the high rate of World War II casualties among graduates of elite prep schools and universities as well as the service of dollar-a-year men in government and the wholesale conversion of American industry to wartime production. The postwar era also saw the movement toward meritocracy in Ivy League universities under leaders like Harvard’s James Conant and Yale’s Kingman Brewster Jr., largely because they believed that elite institutions had national responsibilities that transcended the interests of the class into which they had been born.
I see two basic models of thinking about governance modernization in America. One is the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. The other is the era from 1933-1964, running from the New Deal through to the postwar institutions (like the UN and NATO) to the Civil Rights Act. In both cases, America was creating a new set of institutions to deal with new challenges. Kabaservice is very enamored of the latter era.
FDR is an archetype of the kind of leader who can operate within the American cultural and political tradition, and yet still carry out major institutional reforms. Not everything he did was positive, obviously, but transformation was definitely necessary.
But Greer’s choice of the Gilded Age/Progressive Era may be a better parallel to our own time due to the rapid development of disruptive technologies with the potential to radically reshape society, depending on how AI turns out. Our Silicon Valley style startup world that can create stupendous wealth and power for founders is definitely more akin to that era than say the 1950s “organization man” one.
Kabaservice also has to reckon with the fact that in his preferred era, the establishment failed to accomplish the most critical thing it needed to do, namely perpetuate itself.
Also missing within the accounts of Greer, Kabaservice - and me - is a look at the streak of self-critique and even self-loathing within the WASP class that emerged in the early 1900s. This is over-emphasized by non-WASPs with an ethnic ax to grind, like Michael Knox Beren in his book Wasps, and I have not yet come across a good modern treatment of it.
Greer and Kabaservice agree on a key point that is very relevant today, namely the importance of the establishment being willing to make personal and class sacrifices for the sake of the nation in order to perpetuate their own dominant position.
Tanner Greer is correct that the Eastern Establishment played an outsized role in American history over a decades-long span because it aligned industrial wealth, political power, and a culture sustained by upper-class rituals and institutions. But what made the establishment durable — and indeed gave it legitimacy — was less lockstep agreement on political issues than an ethos that subordinated class interest to national interest. At its heart was a compromise that involved not just the negotiated mutual absorption of two rival groups but their adjustment to a higher national creed. The New England aristocracy allowed the “crude but vital America” into its ranks, while the industrialists agreed to Puritan-inspired limits on their pursuit of profit at all costs. The establishment that emerged did, at its best, prove willing to incorporate talented outsiders, to adhere to an ethos of disinterested public service, to abide by norms of liberal democracy, and to build institutions that ultimately undermined its own dominance — even while helping to make the United States the most globally competitive society the world had ever seen.
This echoes Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in his Prison Notebooks:
Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed—in other words, that the leading group should make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind.
This is a critical element missing from the worldview of Silicon Valley elites, Wall Street financiers, and other would-be dominant groups like “the 9.9%” upper middle class.
You can click over to read Kabaservice’s entire essay.
Related: The newsletter Upper Middle - targeted at the anxieties of the urban upper middle class - has a fun online game called “The Elite Game” in which you try to perpetuate your ruling class over the generations by deciding which people to include or exclude.
Best of the Web
Mere Orthodoxy: The Forgotten Evangelicals of Colorado Springs - One of the most important things to understand about evangelicalism is that it is deeply shaped by the geographic and cultural periphery - Colorado Springs, Grand Rapids, Lynchburg and Virginia Beach, and the suburbs (not the city) of Chicago.
More Births has an interesting X thread on how divorce affects fertility in future generations. Answer: it decreases it.
NYT: U.S. Schools Face a Crisis as the Number of Children Drops (gift link) - With fewer students, many public school districts are confronting unfilled classrooms, and hard choices about school closures
New Content and Media Mentions
I got a link this week in Ross Douthat’s New York Times newsletter. And the crew at Theology Pugcast had an interesting discussion about my essay on the link between the decline of Protestantism and the decline of literacy.
New this week:
There Is No Boomer Succession Plan - How a generation that didn’t form its successors is structuring around its own absence
The Three Ages of Boss Rule - The era of political machine bosses is remembered as one of corruption. It was also one that mastered important parts of politics and governance that we’ve forgotten. A guest essay by Stephen Eide.