This had been laying on the dining room table for several weeks, owing to the fact that since November I’ve wanted to try to understand what went wrong in the past four years, eight years, sixteen years, whatever the case may end up being made someday. Wanted to, but slow to. When I do work on it, I’m just as interested in hearing from the wilderness Republicans like DB as well as the Democrats, since it’s their failing as much as ours that has to be parsed.

Here, as elsewhere, I read DB at the NY Times also, and in the past I’ve watched him on Fridays on NewsHour, he implicates the American elites as having driven everyone else away from their institutions on the one hand and their progressivism on the other. I tend to read his essays when he’s on this throughline because he means me: I make my living in the knowledge economy, from within an industrial institution, and I have plenty of progressive values. 

This piece is long but it’s worth reading. Driving young people to believe that the only way to succeed in life is to get a prestige college degree has been a disaster, because it’s meant that for decades, Americans have hyperoptimized their formative years to conform to a formula to try to enter the topmost ranks of society. Edcuation geared towards getting students to score well on standardized tests is destined to be mostly terrible, and plenty of capable kids can see that for themselves and check out of it, and then they really do have a harder time making a go of it than they would otherwise. 

Washington’s current administration and its allies have liked to throw around the word meritocracy. DB is arguing here for meritocracy also, but that there is a terrible need to change he definition of merit so that way more people are interested in striving for it.