<em>The Atlantic</em>’s December Cover Story: David Brooks on How the Ivy League Broke America

For The Atlantic’s December cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” contributing writer David Brooks argues that America’s meritocratic system is not working, and that we need something new. The current meritocratic order began in the 1930s, when Harvard and other Ivy League schools moved away from a student body composed of WASP elites and toward one of cognitive elites: “When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.”
As well intentioned as this was, Brooks argues, the new meritocratic system has produced neither better elites nor better societal results. We’ve reached a point at which a majority of Americans believe that our country is in decline, that the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,” that experts don’t understand their lives, and that America “needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” In short, Brooks writes, “under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.” Furthermore, the system is so deeply firmly established that it will be hard to dislodge. “Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street,” Brooks writes. “Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s … All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.”
Brooks goes on to describe the six sins of meritocracy, concluding that “many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates. This has reshaped national politics. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines: Less educated people vote Republican, and more educated people vote Democratic … Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs.” Brooks continues: “When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money. When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture.”
Brooks argues that the challenge is not to end meritocracy, but to humanize and improve it, with the first crucial step being how we define merit. In reconceiving the meritocracy, we need to take more account of noncognitive traits. Brooks writes: “If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.”
“We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower,” Brooks concludes. “After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.”
David Brooks’s “How the Ivy League Broke America” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Brooks on his reporting.
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