We need more class traitors

Class treason in its pure and dramatic form means switching sides, like the late British Labor politician Tony Benn, who gave up his aristocratic title so he could keep fighting for the left in the House of Commons, or Franklin Roosevelt becoming the scourge of the bankers and industrialists and the tribune of miners and sharecroppers. Just now, there’s no political side to switch to: our two parties represent the meritocrats of the standardized test and those of the hedge fund.

But we can stop talking as if a good, secure life were something to earn. We can aim at an economy that makes dignity and security a baseline and lets people cut their paths from there. Wherever we see meritocratic extremism, the compulsion to pick and elevate winners (with the corollary of quietly calling the others losers), we should resist it.

An economy that could help us be better than that is possible, not utopian. It would mean reclaiming the New Deal and the Great Society, the mixed economies of the twentieth century that put human beings first, capital returns second. Meritocracy, like markets, was a useful tool in those economies, and, like markets, it has outgrown its right role and taken its competitive logic too far, becoming a prop for inequality and insecurity. To save its better potential, we need to betray what it has become.