Fascists for the New Millennium

Welcome to the Meritocracy. We as a culture have become increasingly comfortable with the notion that everyone should be free to rise as high as their merit can take them, to the point where, in many circles, this idea is now a given. Perversely, we have also become a much more bureaucratic and conformist society over the past 50 years, one that can process only a pinched and narrow vision of merit, leaving the test takers and the product makers as the grand winners in our evolving societal bargain.

In politics, the folks who now run this country, people like Michael Bloomberg, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emmanuel, et al., increasingly come from a rarified and specific class, that of the educated elite. While their birth places and backgrounds are varied, the one constant, no matter what their roots, is that most of our current leaders graduated from the same small coterie of Ivy League schools. By and large, these are men and women who knew what they wanted at a very early age. These were the kids who sat at the front of the class, who always turned their homework in on time. They were go-getters at a time in their lives when most of their classmates were still just getting comfortable with their bodies, their world, and how they were going to navigate their place within it. And I guess we should congratulate these folks for their precocious talent. But we also need to recognize it is a very narrow range of personality that wins this game, specifically a type of person who can fixate on the tangible means to wealth and power by mid-adolescence, if not earlier.

There was a time, not that long ago, when a great man could reveal his merit at some later stage in his life, but that world has largely disappeared. Yale graduate (Obama), Yale graduate (George W.), Rhodes scholar (Clinton), Yale graduate (the elder Bush): Our Presidents are symbols of the possible, and these are the men we have elected to run our country for the past 23 years. And now, it looks like we will soon be able to choose between which of two graduates from the Harvard Law School, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, will be our commander-in-chief for the coming four years.

And it isn’t just the Presidency, or even politics in general, where this is true. In a variety of fields, from the bowels of corporate America to the creative arts, it seems that a degree from a top-tier university has become an increasingly necessary calling card. I can speak as a journalist. A couple of generations back, journalism was still a working man’s profession. Sure, some reporters had a journalism degree from a major university, but many others were brought up through the ranks, from street hawker to cub reporter to newshound to columnist to bureau chief. But for at least the past couple of decades, the established news organizations have placed more and more emphasis on a strong academic pedigree. When I worked for a financial newswire, almost all of my peers had Master’s degrees from a prestigious journalism program, either tony schools on the eastern seaboard or highly regarded Midwestern institutions like Michigan, Missouri, or Northwestern. And, at least at the lower levels of the profession, what we earned didn’t even come close to justifying that kind of personal or societal expenditure. I personally was able to buck this trend and land a job despite the fact that I got my degree from a lowly teacher’s college, namely Northeastern Illinois University. But my boss hailed from Australia, a country where commoners are still respected, and I suspect that is part of the reason she gave me a chance, as I have little doubt that most American-raised bureau chiefs would have taken one look at my resume and dropped it into the circular file.

I have long put Michael Bloomberg, both the individual and the politician as well as the news corporation that bears his name, at the avant garde of this new age of meritocracy. As a journalist, I heard too many stories about his demanding standards and his enormous ego, how it was company policy to hire two people for the same position, place them at opposite ends of the office, and then summarily fire the one that showed the lesser promise within his or her first few days on the job. And I knew that resumes and pedigree always meant a lot in their corporate culture, and that this could be traced all the way back to the Man himself.

Their basic argument is simple, and on the surface at least somewhat compelling: In an interconnected world where there are thousands of potential employees for any particular position, a large corporation needs a simple heuristic with which to sort the wheat from the chaff. By inculcating managers to look for a prestigious degree as a prerequisite for that first interview, the corporation may lose a little wheat in the initial sorting, but it will also get rid of a lot of chaff, the assumption being that anyone who can get into an Ivy League school in this day and age is, at the very least, not a blooming idiot.

I admit that in some ways this may just be sour grapes. I staked my life on the rather indolent, hippy-fried notion that pursuing your true path was not just what mattered in life but was also the best way to have influence. Growing up as a kid in 1970’s California, we were all trained to be little transcendentalists. If we wanted to have meaning and purpose, first we had to go off and explore the world and get to know ourselves. Sure, that was all a crock, but so is the facile meritocracy we have become.

Now, if the only downside to the iron grip of our contemporary meritocracy is that just a narrow band of academic workhorses are being recognized by the established social institutions, you would probably be correct in regarding this as at worst an acceptable misfortune. But what this new meritocracy has been doing to our country is more sinister than that. From the NYPD’s late-night assault on the Occupy Wall Street camps to the city’s aggressive harassment of cigarette smokers and recreational pot users (for which a whopping 50,000 arrests were made across NYC in 2010), the supposedly tolerant Mayor Bloomberg has, if anything, looked to put an even tighter rein on the city’s lifestyle than did the more openly oppressive Giuliani administration. Similarly, Rahm Emmanuel is currently seeking city council approval to further restrict free speech rights ahead of Chicago’s hosting of the G8 summit this May.

Bloomberg and Emmanuel are fascists for the New Millennium. They are totalitarians who also happen to believe in gay rights, progressive urban planning, and the perfectibility of man. They may be assholes, but they’re our assholes. At least so they want you to believe.

The new meritocracy is creating a brave new world, and they are doing it for your own good. As the Dead Kennedys presciently quipped about an imagined President Jerry Brown over 30 years ago: “Zen fascists will control you/ 100% natural/ You will jog for the master race/ and always wear a happy face.”

Health, happiness, and tolerance have become cultural obligations. And if after your trip to Whole Foods and the yoga studio you are still lacking in either of the first two of these, don’t worry, whatever your malady, they probably have a pill for it. And don’t be surprised if a tolerance pill is on the way. Or more feasibly, some geneticist will uncover an intolerance gene, and we will shuffle all the kids with the gene off to Tolerance Camp, where they have their ways to make you into an acceptable citizen.

My biggest problem with many of my progressive friends is that they continually mistake symmetry of belief for nobility of soul. So they repeatedly fall for the appeal of, or at the very least tolerate, the likes of a Michael Bloomberg, a John Edwards, a Jon Corzine, power hungry egotists whose antics should have sent off their bullshit detectors years ago.

After years of playing their game, I’m starting to come around to the belief that the Meritocracy which increasingly runs the United States of America poses the gravest threat in my lifetime to our country’s long-held freedoms. As far as the meritocrats are concerned, a vigorous dissent from their policies is not conducive to any of their larger societal goals. Dissent is messy. And inefficient. Within the absolute surety of their fevered minds, they probably don’t understand why we inefficient little beings won’t just submit to their vision of the world. Little wonder they are trying to slowly but firmly squash us.