Overcoming Merit

The illiberal agenda behind the "overclass" hype.

Virginia Postrel from the October 1995 issue

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But neither Lind, nor Herrnstein and Murray, nor Kaus will take their argument to its logical conclusion: that married women have no business in the professional world. Lasch was less squea mish. The late social critic saw in feminism no more than financial support for yuppie greed: "Fe male careerism provides the indispensable basis of their prosperous, glamorous, gaudy, sometimes indecently lavish way of life."

The anti-meritocracy crusade leads inevitably toward one particular policy prescription: univer sal conscription, a draft to the nth degree. If you can't keep ambitious, talented men and women out of good schools and good jobs, you can at least derail their careers and remind them that the govern ment owns their lives. You can expropriate the years they'd spend in the library or the lab, at the gym or the school newspaper. You can make them tote a gun or clean bedpans instead of staying up late arguing politics or fooling with computers.

The point isn't to fill jobs that need doing; it's to confiscate human capital, and the precious years young people have to build it. "For social egalitarians, national service is valuable precisely because it would force Americans to pause in their disparate career trajectories and immerse them selves in a common, public enterprise," writes Kaus.

They may disagree on many issues, but on this every anti-meritocracy polemicist (except libertarian-leaning Charles Murray) concurs: America made a terrible mistake in 1973 when we ended the draft, when we told young people that their lives were their own. Lind calls the all-volunteer military "feudal," while Kaus waxes nostalgic for a draft because it "attempts to treat all citi zens, rich and poor, with equal dignity." Or equal contempt. Equality, not dignity, is the point.

Elites are nothing new. The one that has this crop of social critics so agitated is simply much larger, much more open, and much more diverse than the old ones. Sure, as Murray and Herrnstein warn, "When people live in encapsulated worlds, it becomes difficult for them--to grasp the realities of worlds with which they have little experience but over which they also have great influence." And, sure, public debate might be improved if The New Republic occasionally hired someone who went to a state university or whose parents worked in textile mills. (I can supply references.)

But keeping smart kids out of prestigious schools and prestigious jobsor stealing part of their lives for "national service"won't solve the problem. Murray and Herrnstein's worry about encapsulated worlds is as true of the worlds of Harvard graduate Mickey Kaus and Harvard dropout Bill Gates as it is of The New Republic's offices and the local Jiffy Lube. We can only know so much about other people's lives. That fact is an argument not against meritocracy but against social engineering--against the arrogant impulse to meddle that animates the attack on the "overclass."