[cross-posted at Medium]
Early in the 1997 film The Fifth Element, the Earth is menaced by a flaming ball of space-evil. The space navy fires its biggest missiles at it, but those only make the flaming evil ball bigger and stronger.
This is an allegory for Donald Trump’s political career. The man is plainly incompetent, illiterate, dishonest, disloyal, pervy, cowardly, and cruel, not to mention increasingly deranged. But no amount of loading these irrefutable accusations into our missile tubes and firing them at him or his supporters has diminished the Trump menace. If anything it has made it worse. Why?
Paradoxically, the answer is: meritocracy.
What could be more just than a society where success is based on merit? Maybe nothing, and that’s a tragedy.
We’ve tried the system where what you deserve depends on who your parents are. (By “we,” I mean humans.) That’s not very fair.
We’ve tried the one where what you deserve depends on the whims of a strongman. That’s not very fair either.
Neither are the ones where success comes from how many enemies you can defeat in battle, or how many serfs or slaves you can subjugate, or how closely you can hew to what this era’s priests say are the divine rules of the universe.
In America we are rightly proud of overthrowing those earlier systems and organizing ourselves as a meritocracy.
But here’s the thing: all of those systems pick winners and losers. (We’ve also tried doing away with winners and losers, but that never seems to work out.) Meritocracy is no different in that way. But it is different in one important respect: if you’re a loser in a dictatorship or a monarchy, you know whom to blame, but if you’re a loser in a meritocracy, there’s no one to blame but yourself.
Now, that’s not really true. “No one to blame but yourself” is just marketing. It’s meritocracy’s brand. The fact is, if you’re a meritocracy loser, there are a lot of things you could blame. Merit can be measured along multiple different dimensions, and in our society some count and some don’t. You could be the best, hardest-working grade-school teacher in the country, but that is never going to make you rich, or even save you from having to buy your own classroom supplies. On the other hand, you could be only a mediocre CEO and have no personal problems worse than where to park your yacht.
Who decides which kinds of merit count, and for how much? Unfortunately the answer is hazy. It’s a diffuse agglomeration of historical attitudes, public policies, and profit motives. It’s hard to point your finger at any one villain, so “no one to blame but yourself” wins out.
With the disintegration of the middle class, we have a lot of losers in America, and that adds up to a lot of people sitting with this toxic idea… and being driven insane by it.
Imagine you’re one of those folks. (Or maybe you don’t have to imagine.) You know what success looks like, especially now that the Internet makes it so easy to compare your life to those of others far away. There is no path to that kind of success for yourself.
Now along comes Donald Trump. He’s flabbier than you. His marriage is in worse shape than yours. He can barely form a coherent sentence. You sometimes leave an ungenerous tip? He skips out on the whole bill. Your work colleagues don’t respect you? His hate and undermine him. You have impure thoughts? He brags about grabbing women by the pussy. Your business is failing? He bankrupted six.
Whatever it is that disappoints you about yourself, whatever you think is holding you back, he’s worse — and somehow he makes that shit work. The more others point out his flaws, the more it endears him to you. At first you are ashamed of this and keep it to yourself, but thanks again to the Internet you get connected to others of like mind, and you are all emboldened.
He is your champion, because a world in which even he can succeed is surely one in which you can, too.