The debate over H-1B visas and skilled immigration that flared up while this newsletter was on Christmas holiday was, in one sense, a foretaste of the likely policy conflicts between the populist and Silicon Valley wings of Donald Trump’s coalition, the challenges of uniting the impulses of JD Vance and Elon Musk.
The debate also raised a related but somewhat different question, especially once Vivek Ramaswamy took to X to explain why, in his view, Silicon Valley companies might prefer to hire foreign-born recruits and first-generation immigrants for jobs that require diligence and intensity and a grinding work ethic. That question: Does America need more meritocracy?
For most of my professional career, I’ve been a skeptic of the American meritocracy. Not a skeptic of the basic idea that competent and intelligent people should fill positions requiring competence and intelligence, but a skeptic of the idea that a system of frantic adolescent hoop-jumping and résumé-building, designed to skim the smartest kids from every region and segregate them from the rest of society for college and beyond, has actually created an elite that’s more responsible, effective, morally grounded and genuinely cosmopolitan than the more quasi-aristocratic upper class that it displaced.
But critics of meritocracy should be careful what we wish for. Since the mid-2010s, we have run an experiment in correcting meritocracy’s faults from the left, an extended attempt to re-moralize elite culture with a vision of social justice and race-and-gender equity and anticolonial redress. And while in the early days of what we now call wokeness I expressed some sympathy for its critique of American higher education and its frustration with the moral emptiness of elite competition, by the time we reached peak woke it was clear that there were worse things than frantic meritocratic competition. Better standardized tests than constant political litmus tests. Better an atmosphere of amoral competition than an atmosphere of moral conformism. Better overconfidence among credentialed experts than the credentialed rush to submit themselves to ideological manias.
So one potential lesson of the woke era is that meritocracy’s critics were wrong to focus so much on its faults, and instead we should actually be doubling down on its rigors and expectations. Thus Ramaswamy’s intervention in the H-1B debate, which was basically an argument for Meritocracy 2.0, built back better after wokeness to be much more demanding than before:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. […]
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.” […]
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
These comments kicked up a lot of outraged patriotic responses and defenses of the great American sleepover. And at the very least, as I wrote on X, Ramaswamy is wrong about the trajectory of American culture: Our educational system didn’t turn away from extracurriculars and science Olympiads in the 1990s; it became much more frantically competitive from that point onward, and the woke era didn’t alter the reality that the nerd’s place in the social ecosystem is much more favorable today than it was in Ronald Reagan’s America.
However, that misapprehension about the recent past doesn’t mean that he’s necessarily wrong about where we should go from here. Maybe the culture of junior achievement that has intensified since my own youth needs to become yet more intense still. Maybe the rigors of extracurriculars and math tutoring need to spread beyond the mass upper class to encompass all young Americans, middle class and working class, exurban and rural. Maybe it would be good for the whole country, not just its elite and would-be elite environs, to become an academic pressure cooker.
But here are several reasons to think otherwise. First, one of the core promises of America has always been a version of the “normalcy” that Ramaswamy wants to subject to harsher competition — meaning the idea that a basic form of hard work and competence and adult seriousness should suffice to deliver prosperity and ordinary human goods, the proverbial suburban home and secure family life, without requiring that everyone become some sort of aristocrat or superman or, in this case, uber-nerd.
Upward mobility is part of the American dream, but it isn’t the whole of it. Our national ideal is also fundamentally a dream of home, of life lived with a certain independence from bosses and landlords and politicians, a certain security so long as you worked hard and played by the rules, a good life that doesn’t require everyone to be “excellent” and “high-achieving” at all times.
Obviously, this dream isn’t always achievable; obviously, it’s threatened and undermined by various forces; but announcing that we’re just giving it up because we need absolutely everyone to compete in a “global market for technical talent” is a surrender of something that’s as basic to our country’s spirit, in its own way, as the pursuit of all-American excellence or glory.
Second, the models that we have for cultures where the pressure cooker is seemingly turned up way higher than our own, where competition is frantic and everyone is expected to be above average, are not exactly encouraging or inspirational. Sometimes on the internet I’ll see people passing around a Ramaswamy-esque comment from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in investing, offering a clichéd take on the power of the South Korean work ethic:
Koreans came up from nothing in the auto business. They worked 84 hours a week with no overtime for more than a decade. At the same time, every Korean child came home from grade school and worked with a tutor for four full hours in the afternoon and the evening, driven by these tiger moms. Are you surprised when you lose to people like that? Only if you’re a total idiot.
Except that the atmosphere he’s describing in South Korea, the frantic cycle of educational competition, isn’t just a seeming contributing factor to that country’s social misery; it’s almost certainly a contributing factor to the literal collapse of South Korea’s population, the steep economic rise that Munger describes giving way to an equally steep demographic decline. So for societies no less than individuals, it appears possible to basically burn out on competition, to cram-school your way to misery, pessimism and collapse — something that any advocate of intensified meritocratic competition would do well to keep in mind.
Finally, the idea that the future of America depends on the spirit of the engineer triumphing over the spirit of the high school quarterback is itself alien to the deep sources of American greatness and success. Outside of the halls of junior high, we have traditionally been a country of jock-nerd synthesis and sympathy: Sometimes through alliances (eggheads charting courses for astronauts, stats nerds hovering over sporting fields) and sometimes through synthesis, the quest for both physical and mental self-improvement, mutual convergence on both sides of the jock-nerd divide. “Gentle giants” smelling of “gold and milk” who “could do anything” — that’s how Logan Roy, the Scottish-born antihero of “Succession,” described his first encounter with Americans (as opposed to our current era, when we’re gone to fat or “scrawny, on meth — or yoga”). The football king can have strengths the valedictorian lacks, or set a standard of energy and action that the more academically minded kid might want to meet, and sometimes the prom queen can just be the valedictorian. That’s America.
Also America: a society of outsider geniuses, people who don’t fit into meritocratic systems, tricksters and dreamers and religious fanatics and utopians and cranks who sometimes get one thing very right. Where is the Hollywood “dream factory,” the source of so much American wealth and soft power worldwide, in a vision of endless weekend science competitions and no sleepovers? (Almost every important movie I watched as a teenager I watched at someone else’s house at 1 a.m.) Where is the genius who refuses to be a cog in anyone’s system of competition? (Such were many of the pioneers of Silicon Valley — dropouts and experimenters, not self-conscious high achievers.)
Part of the problem with the meritocracy as it exists now is that it trains up too many consultants and managers, comfortable participants in pre-existing processes whose horizons and imaginations end up being too limited to deal with the full scope of reality.
To remedy that deficit, a moralistic and utopian spirit is not enough, and a clear lesson of the recent progressive ascendancy is that you can’t just junk the basic asks of the system — standardized tests and academic standards and managerial competence — and expect your imagined better world to actually deliver.
But a better form of meritocracy, one that yielded an elite capable of delivering the “new golden era” Ramaswamy references, can’t just double and treble down on the spirit of competition for competition’s sake that helped yield the woke reaction in the first place. Something else is needed — a greater depth of wisdom, a reconnection to higher purpose, a deeper appreciation for the past, and somewhere in there, as well, a little more space for talented kids to dream, waste time, sleep over, and even hang out at the mall.
Breviary
Ranking the arguments for believing in God.
Debating the rise of Christianity.
An architecture critic judges “The Brutalist.”
A supernaturalist assesses “Nosferatu.”
Lamenting the eclipse of American high culture.
Reimagining the American sublime.
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