The Left Should Embrace Meritocracy if Only for the Signal It Sends
It's also good policy, which is a nice a bonus
We’re currently up to our necks in election post-mortems — I swear I’ll only do 20 or 30 more of these. Naturally, these articles focus on what might have been done differently. What policies should have changed? What messages were ignored? Was adding an “x” to “latin” a problem, or was the problem that we didn’t add enough xs, and it should have been “xlaxinxx”?
We focus on what to do differently because structural forces that no one controls aren’t really worth talking about — you can’t change them anyway. But that doesn’t make them less real. And it’s probably true that broad societal trends like extreme sorting are changing our political parties. Maybe Democrats are simply destined to be the party of annoying twats who say “cinema” instead of “movies”, and Republicans will be the party of half-sentient carnival freaks — maybe there’s not anything anyone can do to reverse those trends.
If true, that’s bad news for Democrats. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of the “slobs vs. snobs” divide — there’s a reason why no one ever made a movie about a ragtag bunch of misfits butting heads with rich snobs that expects you to side with the rich snobs. And it looks like Democrats are increasingly the party of “elites” — look at this chart and tell me that we’re not sorting into the “highly-educated urbanite party” and the “everybody else party” (from AP Votecast via Patrick Ruffini).
Probably everyone except the most elite person in the world is at least occasionally annoyed by “elites” (and actually, the richest guy in the world just voted for Trump, so it might be literally everyone). We’ve all looked at someone with more money, looks, prestige, or whatever than us and thought “fuck that guy”. Both parties rail against elites, politics is something of an “I’m rubber you’re glue” game in which you try to get the “elite” label to stick to the other side, and right now it’s sticking to Democrats way more than Republicans.