Pursuit of Excellence

"Excellence is unifying." 

 —Vivek Ramaswamy, GOP Convention (@3:32)  

We live in two alternate universes. One emphasizes equity, pursuing an elusive equality of results (all athletes finishing first at the exact same time). That’s communism — to each, according to his needs — a goal out there, never to be reached. But this exalted pursuit justifies elite rule, a hierarchy of the chosen, guiding the hoi polloi to a better future. 

Formal hierarchies are as old as Mesopotamia (6000 years). This first universe, ruled by believers in Isaiah Berlin-like positive freedom, would have us accept hierarchy where creme rises to the top. Progressives — Democrats — are comfortable with hierarchy: Plato’s philosopher kings, Catholic pope and cardinal rule in the 500 to 1500 AD millennial Age of Faith, the 20th Century’s Soviet nomankatura or New Class. And now pursuit of affirmative action or DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion). 

The other universe includes people who think God created all humans of equal value, but gave them freedom to pursue happiness along individual paths helped by faith, families, friends, and work (from Arthur Brooks, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier). 

This second universe, that of Berlin’s negative freedom, means individuals free from interference by the state and others, living within a zone where there can be no interference as long as one respects the liberty of others. Negative freedom is found in Jared Diamond’s informal tribal societies of life before Guns, Germs, and Steel, in early Christianity, in the Protestant Reformation that brought books to the common man, in the enlightenment of Adam Smith in economics, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln in politics, Henry Ford in industry. The post-war middle class did make negative freedom meaningful for Democrats and Republicans alike. 

Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK generated mass prosperity, as did Republicans Eisenhower and Reagan, all relying on American workers. Government gave us the GI Bill. Land-grant universities. Inexpensive, FHA-supported housing. Later, Democrat Clinton and Republican Gingrich combined to give us much-needed balanced budgets to 2000. America worked. Excellence. 

No longer should one associate excellence in running the country with Democrats. How could we? Affirmative action discards meritocracy in favor of equity. 

Excellence and Meritocracy 

As Batya Ungar-Sargon writes, our progressive elites don’t want a more equal society. They enjoy today’s imperfect meritocracy—the rule of the smart, the talented and the rich, while believing they earned their status. Progressives see themselves as compassionate. They identify with helping the permanently oppressed. They are “good” without having to disrupt the life they love. They have vested “whiteness” with the moral panic linked to race. It is an immutable characteristic one can do nothing to change. “Anti-racism” is the elite’s “luxury belief,” the burden of which falls almost entirely on whites below. 

For most of history, a tiny noble minority enjoyed status linked to the divine right of kings. Now our elite, operating within a majority-rule democracy, justifies its power using the fruits of superior education and merit-based achievement. Their rule is corrupted, however, whenever "merit" winners create obstacles such as “anti-racism” so that their less-qualified offspring remain elite at the expense of achievers attempting to rise from below.



So where is the real meritocracy? A 2019 article by Liel Leibovitz, titled “Get Out,” argued that American universities’ hostility toward Jews comes from academia’s open rejection of two values that, during the 20th century, made universities places where Jews and other ambitious and open-minded people could thrive: 1) meritocracy;  and 2) free debate. UCLA Anthropology Professor Joseph Manson, as he resigned from his tenured position, said of Leibovitz' article,  “Everything that’s happened since [shows Leibovitz] was spot on.” 

From NYU social psychologist Jamie Napier: 

One of the biggest correlates with happiness in our surveys was the belief of a meritocracy, which is the belief that anybody who works hard can make it. That was the biggest predictor of happiness. That was also one of the biggest predictors of political ideology. So, the conservatives were much higher on these meritocratic beliefs than liberals were. 

Excellence and Biden Administration

Distinguished British historian Naill Ferguson, author of 16 books, writes: 

[Our] much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. . . Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence . . . China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since [former child environmental activist] Greta Thunberg’s birth (2003), and two-thirds of the 48% increase in coal consumption. 

The strongest federal case against Trump, alleging that he had committed a crime by retaining classified government documents and which generated a full-scale raid by armed FBI agents on his Florida home, has been thrown out by presiding judge, Aileen Cannon. Cannon found that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not correctly appoint Smith. She grounded her dismissal on two violations of constitutional clauses: the appointments clause and the appropriations clause.“The Superseding Indictment is dismissed because Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution,” Cannon wrote in a 93-page ruling. The decision means that the classified documents case against Trump will no longer proceed. 

The Biden administration has failed to manage the outpouring of protest against Israel and hatred toward Jews stemming from a subset of students, professors, and outsiders on elite college campuses. Why?  

According to Commentary’s Clifford Asness: 

Israel’s prosperity, its stunning success—in the absolute and especially when judged against its neighbors—is something that must be defeated. Progressives would otherwise be compelled to admit that Western civilization, democracy, and capitalism produce the most human flourishing and also the fairest distribution of it. 

The root cause is the far left’s worship of failure and a concomitant hatred of success and merit—an anti-free-enterprise, anti-Western, anti-progress, anti-prosperity dogma married to a love of power and control. . . At the core of today’s progressivism is the idea that success comes only from plunder and that failure is the ultimate sign of virtue. . . The Balzac quip that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime” is their Lord’s Prayer. 

Asness adds, “No society that worships failure and abjures success can long endure.” 

And about the latest federal failure. Erik Prince, Civilian Warriors author, argues that 

Unserious and unworthy people in positions of authority got us to [the Trump shooting] near disaster. Merit and execution must be the only deciding factors in hiring and leadership, not the social engineering priority of the day. Sadly nothing in Washington reflects that any longer. [We must] question the competence of those protecting him because [on July 13] they failed in almost every way. Nature abhors a vacuum and there are always other options. Most importantly, as Americans let's come together and run a proper valid election so we can get back to what matters a merit based society that judges on character and skill. Nothing else. 

The Spectator’s Charles Lipson sums up Biden administration lack of excellence: 

[Biden’s] failures have a political meaning, and it’s not a good one for Democrats in this election cycle. First, the failures lay at the feet of the administration, damaging any lingering reputation for competence. Second, they represent yet another failure of the administrative state to perform its core duties effectively. DHS hasn’t protected the border. The CDC didn’t protect the public during Covid and didn’t give the public accurate information. [] The CIA’s former leaders told the public that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the earmarks” of a Russian disinformation operation, which gave Joe Biden cover to declare [it] was Russian disinformation. 

These failures hurt Democrats because [] they are the party of the permanent bureaucracy. They created it [and] take credit for its successes. Now, they are tagged with its failures. When those failures are obvious and dangerous, as they are with the Secret Service’s failure to secure the “line of sight” from a rooftop to Trump’s podium, they damage the “party of the [] federal bureaucracy.”  

Excellence and Affirmative Action 

The history of Affirmative Action goes back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At that time, notes former New York Times columnist John Tierney, 

black leaders pivoted from demanding equality to demanding special treatment. In 1966, Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King launched Operation Breadbasket, a boycott campaign against companies that failed to meet quotas for hiring blacks. The NAACP, whose original mission was to provide blacks with “employment according to their ability,” fought for affirmative-action programs.

Tierney reminds us affirmative action was supposed to be a “temporary measure,” but it has become a permanent civil rights cause, first demanding government money for antipoverty programs, then direct reparations to descendants of slaves. King and other leaders called for  a “domestic Marshall Plan” that has since cost an estimated $20 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars. While King predicted these antipoverty programs would cause a “spectacular decline” in welfare rolls, the opposite happened, eventually gaining bipartisan criticism. 

The movement eliminated the legal barriers facing blacks. Popular attitudes about race underwent a sea change. In the 1980s, The Cosby Show was the most popular program on television for five years. Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell became two of the most respected figures in America. 

To explain how affirmative action took a wrong turn, Tierney went back to 1891 and Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer’s law: “The more things improve, the louder become the exclamations about their badness.” 

The better that things get, the harder we look to find something bad. [S]ocial psychologists [demonstrated the law] in 2018, in a study published in Science. In one of the experiments, the psychologists showed people photos of faces and asked them to identify the ones with threatening expressions. As the series of photos progressed, fewer and fewer hostile faces appeared, but the people were so determined to see the negative that they started misclassifying the neutral faces as hostile. 

Affirmative action’s eternal pursuit of equity has meant progressive political activism displacing government pursuit of excellence. 

 * * * 

“[the] spirit that emboldened our founders has kept us strong throughout our history.  To this day, that spirit runs through the veins of every American patriot.  It lives on in each and every one of you here today.  It is the spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love that built this country into the most exceptional nation in the history of the world,” 

— President Donald Trump (July 4, 2019)  

Of Senator J.D. Vance (from Selena Zito): 

Vance’s life story shows the value of meritocracy, Youngstown State University’s Paul Sracic said. “He rises up not because of the privilege (priv· i· lege: a right, license, or exemption from duty or liability granted as a special benefit, advantage, or favor) that he was born in but because this is a country that gave him the opportunity to prove his worth, to prove his merit,” he said. In short, none of us would’ve ever heard of Vance if he hadn’t tested well enough to get into law school through these largely neutral testing regimes. 

Excellence found.