It is, the song says, “the most wonderful time of the year”, but it’s a bit different if you’re Jewish. Thus, from generation to generation, the thoughts of Jewish Americans turn towards the traditional Christmas Day time-killers: going to the movies and eating Chinese food (though preferably not at the same time. Do please think of the other cinema-goers).
Before I retire for the duration to the House of Chang, a word on the US and meritocracy: an American ideal that was invented in Britain, a place where people aren’t always judged on merit. In this, the concept resembles other American ideals such as the Bill of Rights, the constitutional theories of John Locke and the blues-inspired rock of the Rolling Stones. Now it appears that meritocracy isn’t ideal at all.
Michael Sandel is a Harvard professor of sociology. As Maureen Lipman’s Beattie taught us, his field is one of those “ologies” that claims to be a social science but isn’t scientific, because it selects its data to conform to its prejudices, not the social facts. Professor Sandel has crunched his data along with his morning granola, and concluded that meritocracy is unfair because it doesn’t reward people on their merit.
I’m willing to bet a year’s worth of Harvard tuition that Professor Sandel believes he got his job on merit. Actually, I won’t, because I might lose $78,000 plus $3,700 health insurance. Anyway, if Professor Sandel thinks he didn’t get his job on merit, then he should consider resigning, to make way for more worthy and less privileged data-crunchers.
Regardless, he might ask how he squares his commitment to real meritocracy with the sociological fact that Ivy League colleges reserve places for “legacy” applicants: students with an ancestral connection or, if you, like the Kushner family, didn’t get your foot on the rock early enough, a chunky parental donation.
I believe the legacy system is what Ivy League students would otherwise call “structural racism”. It may even be “white privilege”, because the legacies in question are the children of the old WASP elites. Come to think of it, meritocracy in America really isn’t that meritocratic. Even Oxford and Cambridge don’t admit well-bred halfwits because their parents went there (or at least not in such numbers).
The biggest beneficiaries of meritocracy in America have been the “model minorities”. Jews were only the first minority to model the necessary behaviours: family values and academic ambition.
They did it so well that in the early 20th century, Harvard and other Ivy League schools erected non-academic fences in the status-seekers’ steeplechase: assessing applicants for “character”.
The impertinent success of Asian Americans has led universities to revive these tests in a sneaky way. They cap the number of Asian applicants, lower the standards for black and Hispanic applicants, and call it affirmative action.
The Jews are caught in the squeeze as “white-adjacent” and too self-sufficient for their own good. Their presence in the Ivy League is shrinking. From 20 per cent in 2010 to 13 per cent in 2016 at Penn. From 10 per cent in 2015 to six per cent at Harvard in 2020. Either the Jews became thick, or they’re not being judged on individual merit.
The Supreme Court is about to decide whether to take up the case of Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, which alleges systematic discrimination against Asian applicants. Harvard’s defence is that it discriminates with the right kind of racism (affirmative action), not the traditional kind.
The American public is not stupid. A majority of Americans see affirmative action for what it is: social engineering that rejects merit and undermines equality before the law.
Naturally, the Biden administration is pressing the Supreme Court not to take up the Harvard case. The Democrats know that a negative ruling might bring down the corrupt architecture of affirmative action.
They seem untroubled by the possibility that the children of Jews, Asians and other strivers are collateral damage, or that blocking the best and the brightest might be a really stupid way to run an economy.
Jews comprise only two per cent of the US population. If the criterion isn’t individual merit but race, then Jews should get only two per cent of the tickets to the upper strata of American life.
That is exactly where the figures are currently heading – cutting access to the conveyor belt that turns out rulers of the American establishment to a trickle. Just how hard will you have to look to find America’s once plentiful Jewish brahmins within a generation?
Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition
