How meritocracy and populism reinforce each other's faults

The evidence of our own era suggests that they might not be so capable. It suggests, in fact, that when meritocracy loses credibility and legitimacy, the result is a political impasse. The official elite becomes too arrogant and self-deceiving and unpopular to govern effectively, but the populist alternative is much as Young’s narrator describes — disorganized, ill-led, susceptible to snake-oil salesmen and vulnerable to manipulation by factions within the upper class.

In this situations, which is ours, the meritocrats have no mandate and no sense of why the public hates them — believing, with Sikorski and the Macron apparatchik, that their governance was wise and just and there’s nothing wrong with meritocracy that can’t be fixed with more of it. But the populists have no competence and no coherent program, and so all their revolt can win is stalemate.

Different versions of this impasse exist in Britain, France and the United States. In the British version the forces of populism won a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum but lacked real leaders (save hacks and opportunists) and a clear plan for pushing forward (save implausible promises). The result is Theresa May’s shambolic attempt to deliver the impossible, a job she’s graced with because nobody else wants it — save Jeremy Corbyn, whose left-populism seems entirely unready for power in its own way.