No, Virginia

It's a shame when they lose their idealism, isn't it?

Let’s assume, for a moment, that a real meritocracy would be an awesome thing to have; that giving every person a chance to run the Race to the Top is a worthy goal of government policy.

Even with those assumptions it’s not so simple. Why should Americans work to ensure that everyone has a fair chance to join the ruling class, if the great principle of that ruling class is unfairness? Why should Americans compete on the level if what we’re trying to win is admission to a fraternity of thieves?

Let me explain. A meritocracy requires more than simply making it possible for people at the bottom to climb the ladder of opportunity. It also involves chutes of accountability for those at the top. These are two sides of the same coin: the skilled must be able to rise, but grandees caught with their snouts in the trough must also come tumbling down. “We cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of the forgiveness to the powerful,” writes Chris Hayes in his sweeping meditation on meritocracy, “Twilight of the Elites.” And yet: “This is the America in which we currently reside.”

Is it ever. Recall for a moment the situation in which Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009. During the preceding decade, we had endured a tech bubble and a housing bubble; our accounting industry had been suborned in all sorts of ways; our prize stock analysts had been suborned in all sorts of different ways; our leaders and foreign-policy pundits had sold us a war in Iraq using completely bogus reasoning; our investment houses specialized in cooking up poisoned investments; our ratings agencies specialized in hanging blue ribbons on them; and the executives of our financial industry specialized in helping themselves to stupendous bonuses even as they lost billions—even as they blasted holes in the economy of the world.

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I confess here that believing Obama would act in this way was one of my reasons for supporting him back in 2008—the hope that this thoughtful and talented man would bring a completely new crowd to D.C. and break the grip of the Clinton-era centrists on the Democratic Party.

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I will also confess that Obama’s subsequent failure to follow these meritocratic rules astonished me in a way that we cynical types don’t like to be astonished.

Yeah, well, join the club, bunky. It's a hard lesson to learn, but like Lucy pulling the football one more blessed time from poor ol' Charlie Brown, it must be learned and internalized all the same. It's nice that the "WTF Haz Obama Done?" crowd can hang their hat on the previously uninsured now getting insured, but they are strangely silent on the fact that, since everything still costs what it always has, and the 1% have refused to pitch in, someone has to pay for all that. This country still has banana-republic levels of income and wealth disparity, something Obama has a popular mandate to remedy, and failed not only to do so, but to even try.

Nothing will happen, because nothing ever does. People will either get out and vote like they think it makes a difference, thinking that holding back whatever ludicrous teabagger poltroon counts as a principled stand, or they won't bother, fulfilling their own assumptions that it doesn't matter.

Well, it doesn't and it does, in that acceptance of the, in the Chomsky parlance, "evil of two lessers" constitutes any sort of real choice. Hopefully by now even the most enthralled Obamanaut from '08 understand now that their man, however well-meaning he may have genuinely been, is simply an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill. So is everyone he's surrounded by, colleagues, counterparts, and political opponents alike.

I think many, if not most, people understand this at least intuitively, that their government no longer has their best interests at heart, that the middle-class expansion of the middle of the last century is well and truly dead and gone, that it's a dog-eat-dog world and we're all wearing bacon pants. What remains to be decided is whether that is acceptable, what is to be done about it, and then to do it.

Whether that means simply disengaging from a parasitic, overweening system of hypocritical technocrats and their corporate PR crews, or taking your chances in the streets against an increasingly paramilitarized and unaccountable security apparatus, is anyone's guess.