A cartoonish version of meritocracy is popular with many conservatives. Newt Gingrich, for instance, during the recent controversy over black athletes kneeling for the national anthem, castigated them on Fox and Friends because they justified it by appealing to the importance of equality and diversity: “All this left wing rhetoric, but the fact is what has made America extraordinary is that we reward winners.” Gingrich argued that rich black athletes are ‘winners’ and invited them to embrace his Darwinian version of America.
The Gingrich view is in fact the opposite of what really makes America extraordinary. “Rewarding winners” is a good definition of the way most of the world has always worked: some set of tough/smart/lucky men win a no-holds-barred, violent, struggle for mastery. They fend off rivals and upstarts. They institutionalize their victory with an army and laws and legitimizing rituals and voila, we have a ruling oligarchy, dressed up as Kings and Queens and courtly aristocrats. In this society, where the losers are castigated as natural inferiors, a lesser order of human beings, the Winners rule indefinitely–until taken down by a new set of tougher/smarter/luckier men.
America was meant to be a standing affront to this world. It was meant to be the first society where you didn’t need to be a “winner” to have dignity, to possess rights, to make a decent living, to have a voice in public decisions. You might gain great wealth and high office, but that wouldn’t mean you were better than other citizens, and it didn’t give you any entrenched privileges or let you pass your status on to your sons and heirs. You didn’t take power by killing your rivals and their families, and you didn’t keep it by using your immense wealth and power to keep your boot on the neck of every possible challenger.
Our love of the rugged individual is perhaps the American version of original sin. Nurtured by centuries of frontier society, a Protestant emphasis on a one to one relation with God, and the priority placed on individual rights at our founding, it is easily fanned into flame by special interests seeking to hide their pursuit of privileges under the cloak of meritocracy. Affirmative action is the most common but not the only target. Consider for instance how corporate campaigns against unions play up supposed infringements on individual rights if workers are ‘forced’ to support unions in a closed shop, or how attacks on the Affordable Care Act often start with how the individual mandate violates fundamental freedoms.
In all these cases we are being asked to sacrifice some of our autonomy to achieve a collective good. Americans may claim to ask “What Would Jesus Do,” but often what they really want to know is “What Would John Wayne Do.” Scratch the average American male and you discover that they imagine themselves alone in the saddle, fighting off Injuns and horse-thieves with their trusty Winchester. When this manifests itself as self-reliance, it can be a source of strength and confidence; but it can easily slide into a self-destructive shame at accepting help or acknowledging weakness. When it manifests as winner-take-all selfishness, it corrodes bonds of community and country. The unrestrained love of “winners” leads to the despicable picture of candidate Trump daring to criticize John McCain because he was a ‘loser’ who allowed himself to be captured and made a prisoner of war.
The better image of America is not John Wayne riding off alone into the sunset, but the wagon train: a community of regular folks working together, sharing, moving forward but leaving no one behind. It is the Statue of Liberty inviting to our shores the tired and poor. It is every Frank Capra movie. It is rich successful people kneeling to draw attention to those left out of the American story. There is no room in it for Newt Gingrich.