The Merit Illusion

I don’t recall if someone else has shared Amanda Taub’s fine article on mediocrity as the handmaiden to fascism…

In Russia, Vladimir V. Putin needs his circle of handpicked oligarchs; in Iran, the Revolutionary Guards and its allies in the business world protect the regime’s power; Viktor Orban transformed Hungary into an “elected autocracy” with the help of a few crucial judges, political enforcers and friendly tycoons. But to actually carry out the dirty work of consolidating and maintaining power, such leaders rely on help from a far greater number of lower- and midlevel people: military officers, secret police and bureaucrats.

Yet until recently, researchers paid little attention to how leaders convince and recruit ground-level workers to go along with their demands. The incentives for elites to stay loyal have been studied extensively, but the rank and file have remained something of a black box. In the absence of real data, researchers have tended to assume that they cooperate because of ideological extremism, fear of persecution or some combination of the two.

New research, drawing on an extraordinary data set from Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and ’80s, suggests a very different explanation. It turns out that the kinds of career pressures familiar to employees everywhere — the desire to revive a stalled career or obtain a minor promotion — can be enough to incentivize lower- and midlevel officials to violate professional obligations, fundamental norms and even basic morality. The people who make those decisions, the research suggests, are neither extremists nor victims. They are often just middling workers looking for a way to get ahead.

If you’re nodding vigorously, it’s because all of this is a way to make sense of Trump’s authoritarian cult; from Pete Hegseth on down, it’s all mediocrities who have been given a new lease on their sad, sufficient-but-not-fulfilling lives.

Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf found that superiors in the Nazi bureaucracy skillfully exploited career pressures to recruit commanders for the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads that carried out the “Holocaust by bullets” in Eastern Europe. Many of the recruits had backgrounds that placed them at a disadvantage, such as records blemished by disciplinary proceedings, unclear “racial purity” or lack of military and policing experience. Zealous service in the killing squads helped them improve their careers.

In the Soviet Union, the NKVD, the secret police who killed hundreds of thousands of people during the so-called Great Terror of 1937, “deliberately recruited individuals with poor formal skills and knowledge,” Mr. Glassel and Mr. Scharpf write, often with no more than a primary school education. Senior commanders nurtured their subordinates’ fear of failure by instigating competition between different offices to see who could arrest more people.

I’m pretty sure that Solzhenitsyn touched on the Soviet aspects of this phenomenon this in Gulag Archipelago. The sad fact of life in a modern bureaucratic state is that nothing really runs on merit, which is to say that nothing really needs merit in order to run. In the American context the conversation about “merit” has become fatally entangled with questions of affirmative action and racial justice, but this serves simply to give a lot of people excuses for why their “merit” has long been overlooked… and makes the appeal of a fascism that will finally enable them to show their worth crystal clear.