Words and Phrases we could do without

“Meritocracy”—with Pete Hegseth?

Each week, as an installment and mainstay of The Contrarian, I will look at words or phrases that are so misused, distorted, or misunderstood that we might consider banishing them from political and policy parlance.

This week the term is “meritocracy.”

The new Trump regime throws the term around to contrast with bogeyman of DEI, weaponizing the term to now pull out branch and root of foundational civil rights law, Executive Order 11246, that made it illegal for federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity. (Fortune got it right in the headline: “Trump’s not just going after modern DEI—he just overturned an LBJ-era order safeguarding federal workers from discrimination.”) The aim, the Trump crew would have us believe, is to shift to a “meritocracy.” But is the alternative to a diverse workforce really a “meritocracy”?

“Meritocracy” in the Trump regime is ludicrously distorted. In one of his ridiculous executive decrees Trump declared, “American citizens deserve an excellent and efficient Federal workforce that attracts the highest caliber of civil servants committed to achieving the freedom, prosperity, and democratic rule that our Constitution promotes.” Sounds good. He bemoans that government agencies and departments supposedly “no longer focus on merit, practical skill, and dedication to our Constitution.” Well, we’ve got to fix that double quick!

But…wait. The premise of another executive proclamation concerning so-called “Schedule F,” the substitution of career experts and apolitical professionals in the federal government with political loyalists – seems more akin to the return of Tammany Hall than the creation of a merit-based civil service. When MAGA fan-boys replace scientists, experts, and consummate professionals in government agencies, you just might see a less efficient, skilled, or experienced workforce. We’ll see.

Moreover, Trump’s top executive branch appointees’ (not only the shockingly unqualified new secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth), MAGA-style meritocracy is low on, well, merit. Pam Bondi, nominee for attorney general, seems to have been chosen for reasons not usually attributed to “merit.” Bloomberg Law reported: “Bondi’s lack of federal prosecution experience, efforts to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, and statements echoing his rhetoric about a weaponized Justice Department give some veterans of the previous Trump administration pause.” But, heck, she’s more qualified than Matt Gaetz, right? (I think President George W. Bush called such rationalizations the “soft bigotry of low expectations”.) An attorney general who cannot tell senators who won the 2020 election and does not readily understand that her job demands standing up to unconstitutional orders does not strike me as the product of a merit-based system.

In a merit-based system you would expect the secretary of education to be well-versed in, well, education. Nope! Nominee Linda McMahon, a professional wrestling company executive, has not been a teacher, administrator, or academic.

The HHS secretary in a true meritocracy might not need to be a doctor or public health professional—or at least well-versed in the basics of a K-12 health curriculum (e.g., vaccines are good!). Weirdly, such a supposedly qualified candidate got thumbs down from 15,000 doctors who wrote a letter declaring, “RFK Jr. is not only unqualified to lead this essential agency — he is actively dangerous.” Well, what do doctors know about health anyway, right?

And let’s not forget Trump’s ambassadorial picks. Herschel Walker, Charles Kushner (father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a pardoned felon), and Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Jr.’s ex-girlfriend, do not scream “merit.” As The Guardian put it, “Their lack of credentials has prompted one experienced foreign policy analyst to label them a ‘diplomatic clown car’—and a deliberate affront to the countries hosting them.” But they do. . . stand out. “Some appear conspicuously unschooled in the diplomatic arts; others have business links which experts say risk conflicts of interest.”

The tell-tale sign that Trump “meritocracy” might mean something other than “merit-based”: Many Republicans tie themselves up in knots to describe the nominees’ backgrounds as “unconventional” or “usual.” In other words, they lack the experience, background, or other qualifications to do the job.

Few, if any of these picks pass muster in a merit-based system. Indeed, Trump is creating an anti-meritocracy. “Authoritarian states abound with examples of engineered incompetence, when leaders appoint individuals to Cabinet positions who lack the skill-set and high-level connections needed to succeed,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat explained recently. “This makes those individuals more dependent on the leader and creates more space for the leader’s powerful cronies to influence the institution to their own benefit.” Appointees “whose main credential is the ability to smile and repeat propaganda lines convincingly” allows the autocrat to proceed with “‘hollowing out’ institutions by replacing expert and nonpartisan employees with zealots loyal to the leader.”

When the least qualified batch of Cabinet officials in memory and conversion to a hiring system based on political loyalty are held up as exemplars of merit-based hiring, then we should dump the term “meritocracy.” Defaulting to White, MAGA cultists makes a mockery of the term “meritocracy.” We should not allow Republicans to ridicule women and persons of color as “DEI hires,” suggesting that more meritorious candidates should have been selected. We need not put up with right-wingers’ insistence that colleges and universities that eschew diversity as a consideration but admit legacy students and children of donors have a system based on “meritocracy.” We certainly should not countenance efforts to undo 6 decades of progress in fighting discrimination in the name of creating a “meritocracy.” (The insulting implication: A diverse workforce cannot possibly be as meritorious as a patronage system staffed by White MAGA fanboys.)

Simply put, when “meritocracy” becomes synonymous with “toady,” “crony,” or “billionaire”—or worse, “overwhelmingly White MAGA loyalists of questionable character”—we need to come up with another term to describe the best and the brightest.