Eichenberger: Meritocracy
by Dan Eichenberger M.D.
The word “meritocracy” was born as an insult. In 1958, British sociologist Michael Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy, a dystopian satire warning that a society ruled by intelligence and effort would create a new, more arrogant elite and a resentful underclass. The Left later embraced the term’s pejorative spirit. Today the Democratic Socialists of America and progressive intellectuals treat meritocracy as a dangerous myth and an ideology that legitimizes inequality, stigmatizes the unsuccessful, and must be transcended in favor of equity and collective control. Conservatives should reject that narrative and reclaim the virtuous concept. Properly understood, meritocracy is the practical expression of limited government, personal agency, and equality under the law.
The idea is far older than the word. Plato’s Republic envisioned rule by those educated in wisdom and virtue rather than birth alone. Aristotle argued that offices should be distributed according to axia which he meant as worth or excellence. Rome emphasized dignitas earned through public service and competition. Confucian China built the world’s longest-running institutional meritocracy through civil-service examinations that, in principle, opened the bureaucracy to talent regardless of pedigree. Thomas Jefferson spoke of a “natural aristocracy” of talent and virtue as the best hope for republican government. These traditions recognized a basic truth: societies function better when positions of responsibility go to those capable of discharging them, and individuals flourish when their efforts and abilities shape their outcomes.
John Locke and Robert Nozick provided the key ideas behind classical liberalism, a political philosophy that values individual freedom. Locke argued that people own themselves and their own labor. When someone works on something that no one else owns, like land or natural resources, that work makes it their property, as long as they leave enough for others.
Nozick built on Locke’s ideas. He said a person’s property is fair if it was obtained honestly in the first place or if it was freely given or sold by someone else. The government has no right to take that property and redistribute it just to create more equal outcomes or meet certain needs. Nozick famously compared taxes used purely for redistribution to forced labor.
These ideas support limited government. The government’s job is to protect people’s rights, enforce contracts, and remove unfair barriers. It is not to force equal results for different groups or guarantee specific outcomes.
Conservatives defend meritocracy because it aligns with personal agency and free will. People are moral agents, not passive products of systems. Equal rights under color-blind rules create the conditions for individuals to exercise that agency. Equality of opportunity means the same formal rules for everyone; it does not require equal outcomes. Natural differences in talent, temperament, family culture, time preference, and effort produce unequal results. Attempting to erase those differences through continuous state intervention expands government power, creates dependency, and weakens the incentives that drive excellence. Heather Mac Donald has documented the practical trade-off with clarity: given persistent average group differences in academic skills, strict demographic proportionality and high standards cannot coexist in selective institutions. Insisting on the former means lowering the latter, in medicine, aviation, STEM, and elite education.
The modern Left, particularly its democratic-socialist wing, rejects this framework. The Democratic Socialists of America and the modern “Leftists” have published explicit critiques labeling faith in meritocracy a “false faith.” Drawing on Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, they argue that even a perfectly fair meritocracy remains morally unacceptable. Ranking people by talent and effort creates hubris among winners and humiliation among losers, undermining social solidarity. Outcomes reflect privilege and structural forces far more than individual desert; therefore the proper response is not better opportunity but collective control of the economy, public ownership of key industries, and equity measures that adjust results by group. Merit becomes ideology, an alibi for capitalist hierarchy that must be displaced by democratic planning and needs-based distribution.
This is not a minor disagreement about policy details. It is a fundamental clash over human nature and the purpose of government. One side treats individuals as responsible agents whose choices and capacities should shape their lives under equal rules. The other treats disparities as primarily systemic and therefore as problems the state must continuously correct through preferential treatment, outcome engineering, and expanded public power. The first approach limits government to the protection of rights and the maintenance of a level legal playing field. The second requires an administrative apparatus capable of measuring, adjusting, and re-ranking people by identity categories and statistical targets.
The practical consequences are already visible. When institutions abandon rigorous selection in the name of equity, standards fall. When rhetoric of rising is replaced by rhetoric of systemic victimhood, personal responsibility atrophies. When the successful are told their achievements are largely unearned privilege and the unsuccessful are told their condition is someone else’s fault, both dignity and motivation suffer. Young’s original satire warned against a cold cognitive elite. The greater danger today is the deliberate dismantling of any standard of excellence in favor of engineered parity.
Conservatives should not apologize for defending merit. A free society cannot function without it. Limited government presupposes citizens capable of governing themselves and of accepting the unequal results of free choices. Personal agency is empty if outcomes are reassigned by political criteria. Opposition to the DSA and modern “Leftists” agenda is not hostility to fairness; it is insistence that fairness consists in equal rules and equal rights, not equal results. The alternative is a politics of permanent grievance and permanent administration, the very expansion of state power that limited-government principles exist to prevent.
Meritocracy, properly understood, is not a guarantee that every individual will succeed according to effort alone. Family, culture, health and chance all play roles. It is, however, the only system compatible with human freedom and the only one that treats people as ends rather than as instruments of a preferred social pattern. The Left’s rejection of it reveals more about its appetite for power than about any genuine concern for the common good. Conservatives should say so clearly, reclaim the ideal, and defend the institutions, schools, professions, and markets, that still reward excellence over identity. The alternative is not greater justice. It is the soft tyranny of equity based on Marxist’s philosophy.
Dan Eichenberger, M.D., M.A., an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, is an Indiana native with 30 years experience as a primary care physician, physician executive and healthcare consultant. He is the recipient of the Indiana University Southeast Chancellors Medallion.
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