(NP) nepotism, meritocracy, affirmative action

[Michael Bailey]

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/jan/28/campos-to-the-manner-born/

I once heard a recording of a BBC broadcast announcing the birth of
Queen Elizabeth II of England's son. The announcer intoned, "Her
Majesty has given birth to . . . a prince."

This struck me as a particularly stark illustration of how one's place
in the world can be determined by the accident of birth. At least, I
thought, I live in a country where it's never announced that someone
has given birth to an electrical engineer or a pastry chef or an under
secretary for East Asian affairs.

America, after all, is a meritocracy, not an aristocracy. We have no
princes of the royal blood, and whatever position a person enjoys in
life must be earned.

This, indeed, is the basis for one of the most common criticisms of
affirmative action: that it represents a return to bestowing social
benefits on the basis of one's status, rather than one's talents and
achievements.

On the other hand, you have the career of William Kristol. Kristol,
the son of neo-conservative doyen Irving Kristol, was just fired by
The New York Times, for which he had been cranking out an opinion
column since last January (technically, his contract wasn't renewed).

A few months ago, my blogging colleague Robert Farley pointed out that
"in the modern configuration of the conservative media machine,
Kristol occupies an unparalleled central position of power . . .
Right-wing journalism and punditry is absurdly nepotistic; everything
depends on relationships, (and) Kristol always seems to be" at the
center of these relationships.

Farley went on to observe that this central position made Kristol
difficult for other conservatives to attack, "even though Kristol
played an important role in many of the most disastrous elements" of
the George W. Bush administration and the John McCain campaign.

Nothing illustrated Kristol's influence and importance better than the
Times' decision to add him to their Op-Ed page. As his previous stint
at Time magazine had already demonstrated, Kristol was a horrible
columnist. His writing was boring, he made a lot of factual errors and
his point of view was invariably about as surprising as that of a
member of Stalin's Politburo.

His work was, in the cruel but fair judgment of Salon's Glenn
Greenwald, "sloppy, error-plagued and incomparably hackish."

So how did he end up with such a sweet gig? (Especially given that the
Times already employed an incomparably more talented conservative
columnist in the person of David Brooks.)

The answer goes back to Farley's observation about the extreme
nepotism of the contemporary right-wing media machine. Kristol may be
an utter mediocrity, but he's an extraordinarily well-connected utter
mediocrity. (Indeed, as this column went to press it was announced
that the Washington Post Writers Group had hired Kristol.)

Which brings me to this charming vignette, courtesy of blog commenter
Harry Hopkins:

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent
political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture.
Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during
the first Bush administration.

"The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff,
and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to
his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place
there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat
Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an
internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC
[Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he
got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for
William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he
thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It
subverts meritocracy.' "

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"Frenesi's eyes, even on the aging ECO stock, took over the frame, a
defiance of blue unfadable."