"Meritocracy" --> "Identity"
A New Take On Being American
This is less a polished essay, more a series of connected thoughts based on some things I’ve read this week, other things I’ve written in previous years.
A very perceptive passage from
in her latest Substack post, The Anti-Meritocracy of MAGA:What Trump wants are people who would not succeed without him, and whose positions are courtesy mostly of things they cannot control — their gender, their race, and him — save for the one thing they can: Their loyalty. People who know they are only where they are because of the whims of one man are going to cater to that one man.
I think she’s absolutely right. Her description also feels like a Black Mirror reading of a famous Talmudic passage (Niddah 16b) that describes what a person can and cannot control and what is predetermined.
Rabbi Ḥanina bar Pappa interpreted: That angel that is appointed over conception…presents it before the Holy One, Blessed be He, and says before Him: “Master of the Universe, what will be of this drop? Mighty or weak? Clever or foolish? Wealthy or poor?”
But the angel does not say: “Wicked or righteous?” This is in accordance with a statement of Rabbi Ḥanina, as Rabbi Ḥanina said: Everything is in the hand of Heaven, except for fear of Heaven.
God, according to Rabbi Hanina bar Pappa, and Trump, according to Filipovic, both demand loyalty. The differences, of course, are obvious. For one thing, God demands loyalty despite the pre-determined, unchangeable conditions of a person’s life. Trump demands loyalty specifically because of those factors.
(Also, obviously: God demands integrity and virtue. Trump demands obedience. Fear of heaven confers dignity. Fear of Trump confers ritual humiliation.)
I think Trump’s own easily apparent disqualifications for the leadership role he occupies reinforces this dynamic. Nobody would offer Trump unconditional loyalty based on his personal qualifications. By offering that loyalty in exchange for their seats around the table, his cabinet is putting the lie to their insistence on “meritocracy.” Trump, himself, being the source of political power means that identity is more important than merit.
This idea of identity shows up as well in
’s latest post for The Bulwark, analyzing JD Vance’s view of immigration. Saletan writes:That phrase, “who Americans are,” captures the way Vance thinks about immigration and foreign policy. It’s about identity, not values.
Values develop and change. Identity is essential, immutable.
Saletan demonstrates how Vance has no patience for support for Ukraine, as there is not a major American ethnic or cultural connection to that country - shared commitment to democracy notwithstanding. It’s not part of “American identity,” as he understands it.
It is interesting that, as Vance continues, it is especially clear that American support for Israel has nothing to do with support for the Jewish people or even shared “Judeo-Christian” values, but rather for Israel’s connection, as the birthplace of Christianity, to American identity:
A big part of the reason why Americans care about Israel is because we are still the largest Christian-majority country in the world, which means that a majority of citizens of this country think that their savior—and I count myself a Christian—was born, died, and resurrected in that narrow little strip of territory off the Mediterranean. The idea that there is ever going to be an American foreign policy that doesn’t care a lot about that slice of the world is preposterous because of who Americans are.
In contrast, MAGA has very little use for actual Jewish people in their nationalist (white, christian) America. See Steve Bannon, just this past week at CPAC:
The number one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA," Bannon said in the video. "MAGA and the evangelical Christians and the traditional Catholics in this country have Israel's back. They have the Jews' back. The biggest single enemy to the Jewish people are not the Islamic supremacists. The biggest enemy you have is inside the wire, progressive Jewish billionaires." (Haaretz)
Also see Rabbi
’s latest post, which responds to the reemergence of the violent ultra-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jewish discourse, both in the U.S. and in Israel. Rabbi Kahane advocated a strict identity-based nationalism of a type that Trump and Vance would probably feel very comfortable with. Truboff cites the 19th century German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who essentially said Jews could have no real part in Germany because being Jewish meant being essentially not German.(I’ve written about the disturbing understanding, shared by many in the Orthodox community, that American Jews are “guests” in a “host country” and how that view of what America is aligns closely with Trumpism. They would have also agreed with Fichte.)
Truboff concludes:
If Kahane was right, then so too was Fichte, and the nearly endless array of anti-semitic nationalists who followed. But if we reject Fichte—if we insist that Jewish survival should not depend on the elimination or removal of groups, even those we see as threats— then we must also reject Kahane. The challenge for Zionism is not to outdo the nationalists of Europe in their exclusionary fervor, but to prove that a Jewish state can be something more than what they believed possible.
Or, as I wrote in 2020:
It is not hard to draw the conclusion that Trump sees Jews as outsiders in his America. That is perhaps most evident when, in speaking to American Jewish audiences, he serially describes Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu as "your Prime Minister," and refers to Israel as "your country."
Trump’s language appears to emulate other ethno-nationalist leaders he admires, such as Vladimir Putin or Viktor Orban, who may performatively protect Jews in their respective countries, but not as "real" Russians or Hungarians, and in the case of Orban, campaign on antisemitic tropes. Disturbingly, in the ultra-Orthodox community, this perspective seems to resonate.
Seeing the world in stark "us" vs. "them" terms underscores a basic lack of commitment to American democracy itself, which is at the core of Trumpism. As Holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder warns, encouraging the breakdown of the social contract and inciting ever-sharper ethnic and class conflicts are crucial elements of Trump’s constant, albeit unsteady, march towards ethno-nationalist authoritarianism.
It is no coincidence that the Trump administration has overseen a sharp increase in racial tensions, racist and antisemitic attacks, and the further Republican dismantling of the social safety net
Or, as Filipovic concludes:
In pushing women and people of color out and replacing them with less-qualified white men, and in making those men into loyalists bowing before the king, Trump has created a new sort of identity politics.