The speeches by President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth before a compelled in-person meeting with all our nation’s admirals and generals properly have been criticized on many grounds: improperly shifting the military mission to internal threats, explicitly declaring our cities as dangers to be met with military tactics, and rambling political diatribes irrelevant to our non-partisan military. One other item, however, deserves mention—the wholesale misuse of merit as the rationale for some of Trump’s most egregious policies.


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Trump blurted, "Merit. Everything's based on merit...We're not going to have somebody taking your place for political reasons, because they are politically correct and you're not." Hegseth also bloviated buzzwords, criticizing anything associated with diversity and assailing what he claims was a “woke” culture.
Trump and Hegseth may seem like odd messengers. After all, Donald Trump is a son of privilege who evaded military service through dubious “bone spurs” claims. His choice of Hegseth elevated a Fox News weekend host over literally thousands of more qualified candidates. They could, of course, just be abusing the same stale white male privilege arguments from the 2024 campaign in a new venue, but let’s suggest to them a better way to look at the true state of meritocracy.
In September of last year, Daniel Laurison, Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, and Sam Friedman, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, published important research on class and professional and managerial jobs. They used the U. S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics to analyze class position during childhood to adult occupations and earnings. They discovered that even when people overcome class barriers and become upwardly mobile, pay did not follow quickly or well. They wrote,
“[W]hen people who are from working-class backgrounds are upwardly mobile into high-status occupations, they earn almost $20,000 per year less, on average, than individuals who are themselves from privileged backgrounds.” Even when the researchers adjusted for education, race, and other earnings predictors, a substantial gap of around $11,700 a year lingered.
In other words, there is a “class ceiling” every bit as relevant as the glass ceiling for qualified women or the lingering effects of discrimination for black and brown job seekers. The audience for the Trump and Hegseth remarks seems a particularly mismatched one for their messages. For decades the military has served as a path to the middle class for young men and women from underprivileged and working poor backgrounds, people for whom the private sector opened only a few doors because so many spots (as well as promotion and pay raises) effectively are reserved for the sons and daughters of privilege.
If Trump and Hegseth really wanted to advance meritocracy, they’d expand upon the G.I. Bill of Rights. The original G. I. Bill moved an entire generation of high-achieving veterans into higher education, expanded the middle class and contributed to post-World-War-Two prosperity for decades. It was far from perfect, however, in its implementation, leaving behind many minority veterans who could have benefitted. Correct that now--as it is far better to thank and reward our military families than to call them names in frenzied nonsense chatter about warrior ethos.
Higher education itself is an area to show a commitment to meritocracy. Instead of cutting funds anywhere Trump allies find any hint of diversity, just add assurances that diversity and inclusion programs include commitments to first-generation college-attending students. Many universities already do that. Further, the next step would be to act against legacy admissions, opening more doors for meritorious students to advance.
We see no hint of these steps from Trump or Hegseth. Instead, we get minor variations on the old playbook of pitting poor whites against poor minorities (and men against women) so no one notices the grift of using government tax breaks and other policy changes to expand the power of corporations and billionaires.