In a review I wrote recently of the book Corruptible by Brian Klaas I talked about the problem of kakistocracy, or “rule by the worst,” and saw it as “the complement to the failure of meritocracy in our time. As many recent commentators have pointed out – see, for example, my reviews of Twilight of the Elites by Christopher Hayes and The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel – meritocracy, which from the get-go was a hard sell (with roots going back to a dystopic satire), has conclusively failed in the Age of Trump.” Near the end of my review I related the following anecdote:

Thirty years ago I was chatting with a professor friend of mine who was sitting on a committee overseeing applications for tenure-track appointments to the department he taught in. I mentioned the long odds that candidates even then were facing and that the successful ones would have to be truly remarkable. What he said has always stayed with me: “You’d think with so many people applying for so few jobs, the people we’d be hiring would be great. Only the best. But they’re not. We’re hiring the worst people. I don’t know why that is.”

This anecdote came to mind yesterday when reading an essay online by Hamilton Nolan on the low quality of thought coming out of opinion columnists even at prestige publications. His main example is Pamela Paul, who writes a column for the New York Times.

There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of the sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?

This is a subject that interests me, and I quote from Nolan’s piece only because it chimes so well with what I (and many others) have been saying. It never ceases to amaze me how in so many fields today we see people who are scarcely even competent at what they do being lionized as geniuses or an “elite.” As Nolan’s example suggests (and I’ve made the same point several times over the years), about the only field where the term “elite” can still be assured of meaning anything is sport.

This might signify a more dangerous shift in public thinking than at first seems. We often decry the current lack of trust the masses have in “expertise,”  but the fact is that the institutions that we have traditionally looked to for guidance and to lead public opinion (the media and academia) are now so compromised and even corrupt that you can understand people turning away from them. In order to have faith in elites or experts you have to believe in the process that elevated them to that station. With meritocracy exposed more and more as a myth, that faith has been lost.