MERITOCRACY BEGAT OLIGARCHY.

Last night, Tucker Carlson went off for a full segment on the Watergate Babies class reunion known as the Biden presidency, drawing attention to the ways in which that collection of ancients was engaging in blaming the victim.

The Cold Spring Shops condensed version focuses on two of the points he makes.

First, he correctly observed that the legacy media fawning over a "diverse cabinet" comprising a person of one color (Yale Law); another person of another color (Kennedy School); a hermaphrodite (Wilson School, or whatever Princeton calls it these days); a lesbian (Smith: finding alternative lifestyles in Northampton is about as newsworthy as finding seagulls in Boston); and the "two Jews and a cripple" that got James Watt tossed for insensitivity nearly forty years ago elides the more important point, which is that for all the chromosomal and epithelial variations, there's going to be a lot by way of shared values, worldviews, and policy approaches.  There's nothing quite so sure to go wrong as the course of action that's Everybody's Consensus.

Second, he sort of correctly observed that you'd probably be hard-pressed to find anyone among those appointees who could clean the fish she caught, field-dress a deer, let alone fire a tobacco barn or carry water for a patternmaker.  But his call for a "real meritocracy" as opposed to the fiefdoms protected by moats missed the point.  Yes, there is reason to believe that the Swamp comprises a sclerotic inbred oligarchy these days, but that's because the people first up the ladder figured out how to get their spawn onto the ladder ahead of the strivers from the hinterland.  Consider, dear reader, how many children and grandchildren of the sports and entertainment stars of yesteryear are themselves in the bigs or on the big screen.  In academic economics, we can find enough family ties to fill out a chapter or two of the Book of Numbers; and my skepticism of estate taxation stems in part from my understanding of incentives, specifically those that favor the transmission of human and social capital in ways the tax-man can't touch.

Thus, although on occasion, somebody without the Proper Credentials (as the oligarchs understand them) does break through, the more general outcome is the mediocre spawn of the conventionally minded get on top.

The botched policy response to the Wuhan coronavirus has done much to heighten the contradictions, but the work is not yet done.