Twilight of the Elites
America After Meritocracy
Hayes argues that a decade of elite failure, from Iraq to the financial crisis, has broken public trust, and that meritocracy itself keeps producing the rot.
Hayes argues that the American faith in meritocracy, the idea that talent and effort rise to the top, has curdled. A cascade of elite failures in the 2000s, from the Iraq intelligence to the Catholic Church scandals to the financial crisis, shattered public trust in nearly every major institution. Worse, he contends, meritocracy is self-undermining: those who reach the top rig the ladder behind them, hardening into an insulated class. It is a diagnosis of the crisis of authority that has defined the years since.
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