February 15, 2025

We love our myths. They bind our cultures together. Whether they are creation myths or heroic myths of the eternal return, they resonate with our collective senses of self, what Carl Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness. This is certainly true of the “exceptional” myths of America.

We’ve been hearing a lot about “merit” lately. Trump/Musk has tried to make the case that anybody in a job who is not a straight white man is a “DEI hire,” who got the position because of some imagined quota instead of their inherent qualifications for the job. After the DC air collision last month Trump railed on former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (who is gay), saying, “We can’t have regular people doing this job. They won’t be able to do it, but we’ll restore faith in American air travel.” Then he went on about how dwarves are being hired to be air traffic controllers.

The message was clear. Only straight white able-bodied cis-gendered men are qualified for the job. Everybody else is a diversity hire. White men have “merit.”

When I explain the value of meritocracy to my sociology students I describe it basically as the combination of talent and effort. Meritocracy is the belief that anyone in America can make it up the economic ladder and what you lack in talent can be made up for with extra effort. If you want to be an NBA star or a Shark Tank entrepreneur, just put the work in and you’ll get there. And if you’ve got lots of talent AND drive, the sky is the limit. I use the example of Taylor Swift as someone who has loads of talent and an insane work ethic.

But Taylor also has had the advantage of being an attractive white woman. Just look at how Beyoncé has had to work twice is hard for fewer accolades. It might not be the best example but race is a major factor in the merit calculation and it translates to the fact that white men have a much lower bar to be seen as having merit. 

Just look at the range of completely unqualified nominations that Trump has put forward, like Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and Robert Kennedy, Jr., just to name a few of many. Their complete lack of merit makes Marco Rubio look like a supreme statesman in comparison. (Maybe that was the intent.) Perhaps Pam Bondi has the resume to be the U.S. Attorney General, but we know how attractive blondes are promoted by beauty pageant CEO Trump. The Trump administration has an Affirmative Action program for bootlickers. Merit matters less than loyalty. (Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s recent comments on Ukraine demonstrate how supremely unqualified he is for this job.)

The kleptocracy of the Trump regime is an illustration of the myth of merit in America, where women, people of color, and other marginalized populations have to work twice as hard for half as much and then see their accomplishments chided as the result of of some set-aside DEI program. It’s not surprising that many white men see valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion as a threat to their path of privilege, because it is. These men have always had an advantage and they are not about to relinquish it so easily.

But as Jim Morrison sang in 1968, “They got the guns but we got the numbers.” These men are a shrinking demographic and a unified effort will pry the keys out of their creaking fingers.