Degrees of exclusion

Are we losing sight of what it means to be smart?

In the U.S. Congress, 95 percent of House members and 100 percent of senators are college graduates … as recently as the early 1960s about one-fourth of senators and one-fourth of members of the House were elected despite not having a college degree.

— Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good? (2020)

Over the course of the past quarter-century, Michael Sandel has established himself as that rarest of species: a readable philosopher. For many years, my colleagues and I adopted his 2009 book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? in our team-taught Humanities course at Fieldston, which gracefully summarized and critiqued the western philosophical tradition from Aristotle of John Rawls. But Sandel has also established himself as a compelling communitarian thinker in his own right in his 1996 book Democracy’s Discontent, as well as the more recent What Money Can’t Buy (2012), and his latest, The Tyranny of Merit, which I just got around to reading in paperback.

The notion of meritocracy has been subject to some justified scrutiny lately, notably in Daniel Markovitz’s 2019 book The Meritocracy Trap, though, as is often noted, Michael Young’s 1958 study The Rise of the Meritocracy, where the term was first used, cast it in dystopian terms. Sandel’s contribution to this discourse involves noting just how deeply entrenched it is on both the left and the right. In a sense, the case is more straightforward on the right: whether consciously or not, meritocracy ends up as de facto Social Darwinism that conflates economic value and moral worth: if you’re succeeding, you must be doing something right.

On the left, the story is a little more complicated. For Sandel, it begins in the 1990s, when politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair finessed the rise of the right by casting welfare capitalism in terms of more robust equality of opportunity so that deserving citizens can rise to the best of their abilities—as opposed to indiscriminate handouts that destroy incentive and wreck budgets. The underlying premise was society as a whole benefits when gifted people are rewarded for pursuing their passions—and that they will naturally be willing to reciprocate for having the privilege to follow their bliss by serving society as a whole.

Sandel is dubious about this presumably less crass formulation of meritocracy on a variety of fronts. For one, he’s not sure it’s logical that gifted people really will feel they owe the rest of us anything for chasing what they love. For another, it’s not clear that people should be rewarded for talents that are God-given and/or accidents of environmental history (would Michael Jordan be a living legend if he had been born in the 17th century?) Third, notions of merit are devilishly elusive. Some of us have a problem thinking that test scores really matter that much; others of us really wonder whether being a racial or gender minority should in itself constitute merit, as is now commonly calculated in college admissions, for example. In any event, Sandel says, the slippery slope tends to assert itself here, too: meritocracy leads elites to think they deserve what they have, which breeds complacency and finally arrogance. At least avowed aristocrats have a sense of noblesse oblige.

As perhaps one would expect of a philosopher, Sandel is a little vague when it comes to actual policy prescriptions to address this problem. It’s clear he has a strong egalitarian streak when it comes to distributing societal resources, and he’s quite explicit in his affirmation of the dignity of work (from which I infer that he would reject a notion of guaranteed minimum income as an assumption of labor’s irrelevance in an age of automation). But the thing that really arrested me about this book—the reason why I’m producing this post—are the statistics I quote above, which have stuck with me since I first ran across them last week (on page 97, if you’d care to see for yourself).

At some level, it’s hardly surprising that well-educated people would end up running the country. That’s pretty much been true from the very beginning. We are unfazed by the fact that neither George Washington nor Abraham Lincoln went to college, perhaps assuming that was the norm way back then. But that’s not quite true: many of their peers did receive elite educations. Thomas Jefferson, for example, attended William and Mary, where he was tutored by the legendary George Wyeth (as was the great Speaker of the House and Senator Henry Clay). James Madison went to Princeton; James Monroe also attended William & Mary, and John Quincy Adams’s parents sent him to what they regarded as a second-rate Harvard instead of a European academy because they feared their multilingual teenage son was getting too refined after serving as his father’s secretary when John Adams was a diplomat in Europe.

In recent times, this education premium has been intensified by what Sandel calls credentialism, whereby where you went to school matters at least as much as the fact that you graduated. Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, even Trump: all Ivy Leaguers. As befits his age, Joe Biden — University of Delaware, class of 1965 — is a bit of a throwback. It’s hard to imagine a recent graduate of Lyndon Johnson’s San Marcos State or Ronald Reagan’s Eureka College getting anywhere near a congressional internship, never mind the White House. (They probably couldn’t afford to in any case, since those posts go to kids who work for free and network their way into a real job later.)

In fact, however, there is something of a counter-tradition in American politics. Like Lincoln, Andrew Jackson was a lawyer who lacked a formal education, and there were suspicions among some he was barely literate. (Jackson reputedly joked he could never respect a man who only knew one way to spell a word.) Harry Truman never received an undergraduate degree. These people, who had long careers in politics, had their detractors, and still do. But one cannot credibly label them stupid or ineffective, any more than you could call Ulysses S. Grant, who finished at the bottom of his West Point class, dumber than Robert E. Lee, who finished at the top of his.

Conversely, elite education cannot be equated with virtue, much less effectiveness. The Yale-educated John Calhoun was among the most brilliant politicians of the nineteenth century, utterly demolishing the notion that racism is a form of ignorance. Nor can well-intentioned technocrats necessarily engineer positive outcomes. As David Halberstam documented in his classic 1972 book The Best and the Brightest, it was a cadre of Kennedyesque experts who led the nation into the quagmire of Vietnam. (And the Machiavellian Richard Nixon, Whitter College class of 1934, who slithered us out.)

One of the unfortunate aspects of contemporary politics is that we seem to have lost sight of these complexities in leadership. The closest we came recently involved the glancing acknowledgment of the relative novelty in Amy Coney Barrett’s Notre Dame law degree in her elevation to an otherwise Ivy-bound Supreme Court. Our notions of diversity can sometimes seem monochromatic.

One of the truly unfortunate aspects of this erasure of a more full-bodied democratic spirit in politics—and public life generally—is that the repressed tends to return in a debased form. For many Americans, Donald Trump’s real credential is not his Wharton degree but rather the loathing he evokes among the credentialed classes. Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who falsely claimed to have graduated from the University of Georgia, is manifestly unfit for office, as any even cursory examination of his record (or lack thereof) suggests. Like Trump, he's a symptom of a decaying order that reflects mass restlessness with the status quo—a desire to tear down walls of exclusion without really imagining what a more open and fair society might actually look like. The gatekeepers of that status quo speak often of equity these days, but unlike equality—whose metrics, however questionable, are at least fixed—equity is too often in the eyes of a managerial beholder. That needs to change, especially for the two-thirds of Americans who never complete a college degree.

I’m among those who feel we’re on the cusp of a major political realignment. It’s in the nature of these things that leaders emerge suddenly, even improbably. In my more hopeful moments, I imagine a figure who scrambles and reinvigorates our notions of common sense, reframing and recalibrating the inevitably tensile relationship between majority rule and minority rights. I hope I’ll be wise enough to recognize such a figure emerging from the mist.