Meritocracy vs. Anti-Indian Racism

Conservative stalwart Christopher Rufo used to be all for meritocracy:

The principle, first promised by the Declaration and supported today by a large majority of Americans, would mean that the state would treat all Americans equally, regardless of ancestry, and leave as much discretion as possible to individuals to determine their own futures, without the government imposing or requiring racial favoritism of any kind. . . . Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader national identity.

But that was back when the big issue was woke attempts to carve out special treatment for minorities. Today the issue is the stunning success of immigrants from India (and to a lesser extent the rest of Asia). These days Rufo sounds very different.

Recently, however, Rufo has backed away from his previously forthright defense of meritocracy, and by all available evidence, he has done so because the principle turns out to contain a fatal flaw: Many of the Americans who benefit from meritocracy have brown skin. More to the point, a lot of Republicans resent those brown-skinned Americans. Given the right’s commitment to anti-intellectualism and populist resentment, and President Trump’s open embrace of job promotions based on loyalty or appearance (“central casting”) rather than qualifications, Rufo’s turn against race-blind merit might have been inevitable. 

This is from Rufo's appearance of the podcast of Jonathan Keeperman:

Indian Americans, Rufo argued, are “going to grind on spelling-bee words like unlimited hours,” whereas American culture says, “You’re not supposed to study for the spelling bee.” Keeperman agreed: “What actually makes America so dynamic—it’s not the kid who studies all night for the spelling-bee test. It’s the kid who is the fullback on the high-school football team, who puts his head down and is willing to run through a freaking wall on behalf of his teammates and then spends the night drinking beers at the kegger and wakes up in the morning and gets a 1500 on his SATs, okay?” . . .

“The right always says”—here Rufo adopted a mocking tone—“Oh, meritocracy, meritocracy, meritocracy. You morons. Meritocracy, the origin of the term meritocracy, it’s pejorative. It’s satirical. It’s not good. You actually don’t want meritocracy, because it perverts these unspoken cultural assumptions in ways that aren’t always visible, aren’t always, say, rationally defensible or problematic, but they strike at an essential component of the national character.”

It's almost self satire: the problem with immigrants from India is that they study too hard and don't play football.

Twitter warrior Richard Hanania has been all over this issue for past two years, arguing the MAGA crowd were all for meritocracy and capitalism when they seemed to benefit white people but turned to racial privilege when open competition meant they were losing out to immigrants from India. Anti-Indian rhetoric, he wrote, is "the dumbest form of racism and socialism."

I believe that all policies based on dividing people into groups and calling one of those groups "us" are inherently corrupt. So of course a policy based on trying to advance "heritage Americans" is inevitably going to collapse from self-contradiction. It is simply hate, and deserves nothing but scorn from people who care about creating a thriving world.