Should Catholics oppose the meritocracy?

Image via Wikipedia

 Ross Douthat doesn’t like the American meritocracy. Like Christopher Lasch and Front Porch Republic, he believes that it is intellectually conformist, saps local communities of their intellectual vitality, and prevents rival power centers from emerging. He just doubts that dethroning or overthrowing it is possible:

[C]entralization is very difficult to roll back … some sort of broad national elite is probably here to stay, and … given those premises it may make more sense to create more room for real diversity within that elite — by holding meritocracy to its professed ideals — than to hope vainly for a localist revolution that undercuts the ruling class’s political and cultural authority …

This sounds to me like pessimism disguised as realism. Rolling back centralization is difficult, but less so than this paragraph assumes. Until the economic crisis, federal spending as a share of GDP had declined since 1980. Individual federal tax rates are lower than 30 years ago. Yes, Uncle Sam is fighting more wars today than three decades ago and everyone is connected to a computer. But as recent history suggests, centralization has hardly been an unstoppable force. It can and has been stopped and reversed.

The more interesting question to me is whether the national elite that Ross identifies, the meritocratic elite, should be opposed. (His analysis of our elite, as well as that of Angelo Codevilla and Andrew Sullivan, equates the meritocratic elite with the entire American elite. In fact, as Nicholas Lemann showed, there are two other elites in America vying with the meritocrats). For Catholics, I think the answer is yes.

Look at what the last four decades of American history have wrought. Catholics once ran the country. They controlled the Democratic Party. They controlled the big cities. And they controlled Hollywood. Today Catholics run none of those institutions.

Guess who overthrew them? The meritocrats did. Sure, the talents helped take away Catholics’ control of the big cities. And more importantly, American Catholicism has withered for institutional and intellectual reasons. Yet the meritocrats played a major role. The result, though beneficial to many Jews and women, has been to make America a more secular and socially liberal country.

If American Catholics want to restore the best parts of the old order, such as that existed in the mid-sixties, when blacks had achieved civil rights and popular culture brought lowbrow and highbrow together, they should consider taking on the meritocrats.  Some American Catholic leaders, perhaps most notably Bishop David O’Connell, the former president of Catholic university, recognized the moral problems of meritocracy and rebuilt Catholic institutions accordingly. Others have only their mortarboards from elite schools and hosannas from the meritocratic class to lose.