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The rise and fall of the Meritwokecracy
10 February 2025
By trying to compensate for inequality while neglecting to tackle its causes, we risk fiddling while Rome burns
Meritwokecrat (noun): someone who believes, consciously or not, that trying to compensate for disadvantage, without action being taken to tackle the underlying causes of the disadvantage, will provide people with fair opportunities to succeed.
We live in tumultuous but confusing times. President Trump has cancelled all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, on the basis that they are anti-meritocratic. In the US, the UK and most other developed countries, we venerate the idea that we live in a meritocracy, where people’s life outcomes owe more to hard work and talent than to luck (including the good or bad luck of being born into wealth or poverty). Even though most Britons recognise that we don’t live in a fair society, the ‘meritocratic myth’ continues to exert a strong grip on the collective psyche, because we want to believe that the system is fair. Never mind that the concept of meritocracy was famously coined by Michael Young in the 1950s as a dystopian satire.
Of course, the gap between meritocratic vision and anything-but reality continues to widen, and this fact has not gone unnoticed. We live in a period characterised by chronically low trust. Last month, Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer found that 70% of Britons, behind only Spain, Nigeria and South Africa, feel that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and that wealthy people benefit unfairly from the system. An event that we co-organised last week with the Policy Institute at King’s College London examined the ways in which inequality is fuelling support for right-wing populists in the US (leading to the re-election of President Trump) and in the UK. Unfairness and inequality corrode not only our democracy but the very fabric of our society, with potentially catastrophic consequences, as we explored in Inequality Knocks.
Inequality on its own doesn’t necessarily lead to social unrest or democratic decline. What powers these effects is the perception, and the reality, that the inequality – in its extent, its causes and/or its consequences – is unfair. And they are turbocharged by the meritocratic myth, which leads those who have achieved material wealth to attribute their success to merit, and to underplay the role of luck. The unavoidable implication is that people who do not share their success have failed for reasons within their own control, rather than being held back by systems and structures outside their control. Stories of ‘rags to riches’ social mobility serve to legitimise inequality by suggesting that anyone can make it if they try – and, once more, by insinuating that those who haven’t made it simply haven’t tried hard enough. This narrative allows socio-economic inequality to spill over into an inequality of esteem, status and dignity that breeds resentment and disengagement among those who are deemed by society to be second-class citizens.
Just like coffee, there are different strengths of meritocracy. Almost everyone believes in weak meritocracy – the dismantling of formal barriers to opportunity, such as overt discrimination against people based on their ethnicity or gender, for example. We call this ‘shallow opportunity’. Far fewer people are fully signed up to the implications of what we term ‘deep opportunity’ – the idea that the only way to ensure that everyone has fair opportunities is to dismantle all of the barriers to opportunity, such as being born in poverty and growing up in inadequate housing.
As Daniel Chandler observed in Free and Equal, the philosopher John Rawls, whose principle of fair equality of opportunity this mirrors, demanded much more radical changes to society in pursuit of this principle than many have credited him for. Achieving ‘deep opportunity’ would require bold reforms to our tax system and to our housing and employment markets, and significant investments in our public services and social security system. None of this is impossible, as we have laid out in detail in the Wealth Gap Risk Register and in Deepening the Opportunity Mission. We’ll be publishing a report soon with Unchecked on regulatory levers to support fair growth and opportunity, and another one on how to embed long-term thinking into politics.
Nonetheless, these are big changes, and not everyone supports them. Even among those who do, a minority are prepared to say as much. This reticence is caused by various impulses. Some think the necessary changes aren’t feasible. Others recognise their urgency but lack the confidence to discuss them in public or with colleagues. A third group simply haven’t had the opportunity or need to think deeply about the problem and to recognise the need for deep-seated reforms to tackle the structural drivers of inequality.
For all of these reasons, there is a large group of people in society who buy into the idea that we have to do more than simply ensure that all opportunities are theoretically open to all, but who stop short of calling for the really bold action that needs to be taken (largely by government, although employers can do more) to dismantle barriers to opportunity that stem from disadvantage and inequality.
The middle ground that this group advocates is to recognise, and try to compensate as far as possible for, these broader barriers to opportunity. The mechanisms for doing this include familiar components of the DEI agenda, such as outreach programmes, recruitment and assessment practices, and other forms of targeted support for people from disadvantaged or deprived backgrounds (whether defined in socio-economic, racial, gender, regional or other terms - although class inequality has historically been under-represented).
There is lots to admire in the DEI agenda, and many of the organisations doing this valuable work are incredibly effective. But in isolation, without a recognition of the need to tackle the underlying barriers to opportunity as well as trying to compensate for them, it is doomed to fail, and risks doing harm as well as good.
How so? Firstly, because trying to compensate for barriers to opportunity only has a realistic chance of succeeding when those barriers are limited in size. When unequal outcomes grow too large – and we are well past that point in the UK, the US and many other countries – such efforts often amount to little more than a few superficial examples of success. Enough to look good in a corporate report, not enough to shift the dial. The playing field is at too steep an angle to correct.
Secondly, because these efforts to support people from disadvantaged groups, while generally stopping short of what could be described as positive discrimination, are vulnerable to criticism from right-wingers for being unfair and/or inefficient because they offend a simplistic understanding of fair process or merit (simplistic because it assumes that everyone has the same starting point in life). Hence President Trump’s assault on DEI, in which he has gone as far as blaming it for last month’s disastrous plane crash over the Potomac.
Thirdly, and the reason that DEI can do more harm than good, is because taking action to tackle the symptoms of inequality often diverts the focus away from the causes of inequality. This isn’t necessarily a deliberate diversionary tactic, but it has this effect regardless of the intention behind it.
The word ‘meritocracy’ is already a portmanteau of ‘merit’ and ‘aristocracy’. Not content with shoving two words together, I propose to crowbar in a third, ‘woke’, resulting in the unlovely term ‘meritwokecracy’. This is the idea that trying to compensate for disadvantage, without action being taken to tackle the underlying causes of the disadvantage, will provide people with fair opportunities to succeed.
I’m not suggesting that efforts to compensate for disadvantage are futile, or self-serving, or dishonest. They are valuable, and necessary, and often effective, up to a point. But they aren’t sufficient, and they’re coming under fire from an emboldened right, and, by legitimising inequality through the meritocratic narrative that you can make it if you try, they’re allowing us not to have a conversation that we really need to have. We need to talk about the deeper structural changes that are needed to reduce or remove barriers to opportunity, rather than just trying to compensate for them at the individual level when it’s too late to make much difference.
Musa Al-Gharbi has written in We Have Never Been Woke about a class of ‘symbolic capitalists’ who (without bad intentions) profess a commitment to principles of social justice and equality but “regularly engage in behaviours that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities”, such as hoarding opportunities for their children, crowding out working-class communities from gentrified neighbourhoods, and failing to understand and act on the deep underlying barriers to tackling inequality.
The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. The problem is not that causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are “bad.” The problem is that, in the name of those very causes, symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavors.”
Symbolic capitalists, argues Al-Gharbi, believe in fairness and equity, but use the language of social justice to “legitimize and obscure inequalities”, allowing people who are part of the elite (but claim not to be) to “reinforce their elite status… often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized and disadvantaged”.
Louise Ashley has written about how workplace DEI initiatives serve to keep debate away from the impact of companies (especially in the financial sector) on the structural drivers of inequality.
Some of the organisations most likely to express their commitment to DEI are also implicated in generating these inequalities. I researched diversity and inclusion practices in elite financial and professional service firms. These firms have played a key role in orchestrating a form of “rentier capitalism”, where small elites control the means of generating wealth.
But this isn’t just about the City of London, or about ‘woke capitalism’ more broadly. There’s a broader question about how knowledge workers, or ‘symbolic capitalists’ to use Al-Gharbi’s term, use values and symbols, including those of social justice, sometimes to serve their own ends. These knowledge workers include academics, think tank and NGO professionals, and many public servants. Al-Gharbi borrows from Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” to argue that highly educated young adults use the egalitarian cultural values of social and economic elites to secure or protect their own positions in the class hierarchy. Again, this isn’t necessarily a deliberate or cynical tactic, but it does have the unfortunate side effect of distracting from, more than illuminating, the substantive social justice issues at play.
At the same time, we’re seeing an organised fight back against these cultural values from the political right and left. Alliances are springing up in surprising places – witness ‘blue’ Labour peer Maurice Glasman’s recent trip to Washington DC to attend Trump’s inauguration, his introductions to Trump’s team (and to Steve Bannon) brokered by none other than Nigel Farage. Right-wing populists are using the language of economic inequality, while promoting a cultural worldview that is very much at odds with elite ‘woke’ values. As our recent event explored, this approach is generating results, especially with working-class voters who feel that elites have failed them while embracing a set of alien values and looking down on them.
What is needed in response? I would argue that we need an approach rooted in values of fairness that transcend political and cultural boundaries. We need to make a strong moral case for a society based on genuine opportunity, enabled by much less inequality of outcome. And we need to make an aggressive economic and empirical case for the risks of inaction on the substantive drivers of inequality, and for the benefits of bold action now.
The status quo won’t deliver. The ESG agenda is collapsing under its own contradictions, but the ‘red in tooth and claw’ alternative form of capitalism is just as much of a dead end. Both will lead to economic stagnation, environmental catastrophe, social breakdown and democratic retreat. We need to build an economy that gives people real life chances, that shares profits fairly, that restores the social contract, that treats everyone with respect, and that operates within ecological limits.
But before we can do this, we need to win the argument. We have to sell the vision in ways that don’t put off non-progressives, for example by tapping into concerns among conservatives about the impacts of inequality. We need to make a compelling case for radical change, rather than a case for incremental change that over-promises while under-delivering on both the persuasion and impact fronts. And we need to understand the cognitive biases and mental barriers that exist in our own minds, too. We need to persuade ourselves that compensating for inequality is not enough, before we can persuade our sceptics that inequality is a problem that cannot be ignored.
