The View from Flyover Country

THE VIEW FROM FLYOVER COUNTRY
By Sarah Kendzior

Meeting the 18th president of the United States was an experience that forced Henry Adams to reconsider much of the prevailing scientific thought of his day:

That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Cæsar, a man like Grant should be called—and should actually and truly be—the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as common-place as Grant’s own common-places to maintain such an absurdity. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.

Imagining what Adams would think of the presidency of Donald Trump is too depressing to want to consider. But we may take Trump’s ascendancy to the highest office in the land as making ludicrous many of our own intellectual shibboleths. Foremost among these is the notion of modern society being a meritocracy. Would you refute America as meritocracy? One might kick at Trump as Samuel Johnson did a rock and declare “I refute it thus!”

Or, as Sarah Kendzior puts it, “Over the past few decades, the U.S. has turned into a country where the circumstances into which you are born increasingly determine who you can become.” Those circumstances are primarily one’s socioeconomic status, but also relate to race, gender, and the year of one’s birth. The much maligned Millennials, to take Kendzior’s own cohort, are the “screwed generation.” It’s not a judgment I would argue against. I feel sorry for these people. They live, as Kendzior puts it in a nice image, “in the tunnel at the end of the light.”

Many of the essays in The View from Flyover Country deal with the job situation in the media and academia, being the two sectors of the economy that Kendzior is most personally invested in (she is a columnist with a Ph.D.). I would have liked a broader analysis, but you have to write what you know. As it stands, her conclusion that “In multiple professions, workers are performing nearly identical tasks for radically different salaries” is limited, though the principle does have some purchase outside journalism and education.

Meritocracy is, largely, a myth. Privilege is leveraged to maintain itself in all walks of life. The current social structure is based on luck and then multiplied through the so-called Matthew effect (“For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”) As inequality deepens this will only become more obvious and more of a problem. The process of de-evolution from Washington to Trump is just the beginning.

“The first step to topping a meritocracy is recognizing that it is not a meritocracy.” From there, however, any correction will probably require far more radical steps than we can currently imagine. In the wake of Trump and the Covid-19 crisis most people want a return to normal. It is essential, Kendzior reminds us, “we remember that ‘normal’ is how we got here.”

Notes:
Review first published online May 7, 2020.