Another View on Meritocracy

DSBPI Literary Analyst just read the Toby Young paperback "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", a recounting of the author's five years living in New York and his attempts to get past clipboard Nazi's at the Bowery Bar while holding down (or not) a job at Vanity Fair.

Young fancies himself as a modern day Tocqueville, a British writer ambling through America expounding on the dangers and delights of liberal meritocracy. The interesting thing is that Mr. Young's Dad (uh, Mr. Young) was the chap who first coined the word "meritocracy," originally intending it to possess a negative connotation. Meritocracy, goes the argument, gives the powerful cover from the masses insofar as claiming that their success is of their own making (instead of birth, luck, etc.); while aristocrats on the other side of the pond, with no such rhetorical shield, must get by with some level of noblesse oblige.