The revolt against meritocracy, or why Obama won't win in November

No amount of spinning is going to make either Barack Obama or his wife average Americans. He is no everyman, and why should he be? He is an extraordinarily gifted member of his generation who was offered every opportunity for success by the Meritocracy, a system of social promotion of high scoring students. Obama has known adversity, but he has always been smart. He was an A student.

I benefited from the same system of promotion. High SAT scores and an Ivy League education permitted me entry into a cultural, if not economic elite, and even if I chose to get a Humanities Ph.D. and not a law degree.

Why does meritocratic make Barack Obama fundamentally unpopular with white working class Americans?

Because meritocracy was designed to overturn the principles of economic and social justice, replacing redistribution of wealth with rationalized distribution of opportunity. I am writing about this in my next book, which I hope will find a publisher soon. Meritocracy breaks the promise of social and economic justice and replaces it with a form of allegedly transparent and progressive scholastic triage.

What we are experiencing, what we have experienced in the past twenty years, is a populist revolt against this system, one that Labour Leftist Michael Young mocked in a satire in which meritocracy as a neologism was coined.

Rather than offering working class Americans free tuition to our best institutions, we tracked students according to their scholastic aptitude so that we could channel the best and the brightest out of their communities and into the elite institutions that would divorce them from local relations. A return to community organizing is characterized as a sacrifice of the fat corporate lawyer salaries that Obama and his wife could have earned.

We have only elected one meritocratically promoted President – Bill Clinton. Every other President was culled from the economic elites or the school of hard knocks. For some reason or other, the Republicans have become the party of the “averaged American,” and he or she will resent Obama’s polish and poise. The average American will identify with John McCain’s blunders and his C average – once again.

James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard, promoter of the SAT’s as a general college entrance examination and persecutor of our fellow travelers and Leftist professors is responsible for reshaping the way in which we think about higher education and democratic values. Rather than arguing for the best education for all, the College Board, under his direction, implicitly promoted the idea that best education should be reserved for the meritorious few. Average students would have to settle for less.

As we pick up ourselves up after this election, we should be thinking about Nicholas Lemann’s and Walter Benn Michaels’ ideas that a truly democratic and just country, quality education should be a right and not a privilege.

The Real Obama analyzes Reagan Revolution

The Clinton Machine spun me yesterday, right round, right round...until I saw what Obama did say in an interview in which he ANALYZES and interprets why Reagan and the Republican Party APPEARED to contest the conventional welfare state wisdom during the 80s and 90s, I believed the Bill and Hillary spin machine that Obama had praised Ronald Reagan.

The Real Obama Quote

Now if you look at the video above, you'll see that Obama is saying that Reagan was able to crystallize and ride public discontent, turnin the country away from (I'm adding this -- Keynesian economic policies) welfare state bureaucracy driven social solutions to the appearance of a dynamic entrepreneurialism that Bill Clinton did not fundamentally disagree with. Obama is saying, but in perhaps too subtle a way that a moment for a real change of direction in government has arrived where a political RETURN to progressive economic policies can be made, and that Hillary won't be able to make good on it. Obama says that he isn't invested in the political struggles of the 60s and that he can galvanize cross-party consensus in much the same way Reagan did.

It's hard to encapsulate in a 30 second sound bite -- but the Clintons are acting as if they are "encapsulating" Obama's position -- they're playing dirty and if that's that they think they need to do, we need to denounce it. If my experience in academia holds, those post 68 Boomers, the Clintons will not cede their false vanguardist position to younger, less radical peers who are less ideologically impatient and dishonest.

my plug for Obama

I've come back to blogging to make the following plug for Obama -- I do this as a private citizen, exercising my right to freedom of political expression. Many have expressed ambivalence about his lack of substance and experience.

I concede some part of truth to those objections. That said, I will say that Obama represents the first possibility of a radical remaking of the Democratic Party. He talks about the powerful ethics of national unity and the positive potential of solidarity rather than the language of "pride" and ethnic difference. He represents the real possibility of breaking the back of the identity politics of cosmetic diversity in Democratic politics, which has alienated the white working class, as well as young people, and he has at least in rhetorical terms, taken on progressive national affirmation, and progressive political renewal.

I know the Devil is in the details and the Democratic Party is a juggernaut. Nothing is going to move it quickly. But with Edwards populist economics and Obama's rejection of divisive and false "pride" -- we may see some hope for political mobilization.

And yes, I am no fan of Hillary's establishmentarian politics. I read that her campaign spent 2 million dollars polling Iowa, which barely boasts more than two million inhabitants...