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[...] With the eras of aristocratic and plutocratic legitimacy gone (at least in their pure forms), the contemporary mythogenesis of the university degree, as Bourdieu repeatedly insisted, struggles to hide its own indifference to content and its only true mission, which is to certify ‘elites’, namely, to provide alibis to the distribution of individuals within the social division of desire.

At the same time, we should recognise that this production of subjectivity was not simply an external imposition. Hegemony, in all its forms, operates not as an illusion, but as something that builds on the very real desires of the population. Neoliberal hegemony has played upon ideas, yearnings and drives already existing within society, mobilising and promising to fulfil those that could be aligned with its basic agenda. The worship of individual freedom, the value ascribed to hard work, freedom from the rigid work week, individual expression through work, the belief in meritocracy, the bitterness felt at corrupt politicians, unions and bureaucracies – these beliefs and desires pre-exist neoliberalism and find expression in it. Bridging the left–right divide, many people today are simply angry at what they see as others taking advantage of the system. Hatred for the rich tax evader combines easily with disgust for the poor welfare cheat; anger at the oppressive employer becomes indistinguishable from anger at all politicians. This is linked with the spread of middle-class identities and aspirations – desires for home ownership, self-reliance and entrepreneurial spirit were fostered and extended into formerly working-class social spaces. Neoliberal ideology has a grounding in lived experience and does not exist simply as an academic puzzle. Neoliberalism has become parasitical on everyday experience, and any critical analysis that misses this is bound to misrecognise the deep roots of neoliberalism in today’s society. Over the course of decades, neoliberalism has therefore come to shape not only elite opinions and beliefs, but also the normative fabric of everyday life itself. The particular interests of neoliberals have become universalised, which is to say, hegemonic. Neoliberalism constitutes our collective common sense, making us its subjects whether we believe in it or not.

For years, I’d tried to believe in the story of Kleiner as a place where we were really trying to help entrepreneurs to build awesome companies and products. I’d believed that we were this team of people working together and that we were trying to be missionaries, not mercenaries. But eventually I’d come to see all that talk as a big lie. My parents raised me to believe that the world was a meritocracy, that if you worked hard enough you could get ahead. But that wasn’t true at Kleiner. It just wasn’t fair.

Yes, in theory, a shoeshine boy from a poor provincial town in Peru can go to Stanford and do a PhD, as the former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo has done, but for one Toledo we have millions of Peruvian children who did not even make it to high school. Of course, we could argue that all those millions of poor Peruvian children are lazy good-for-nothings, snice Mr. Toledo has proven that they too could have gone to Stanford if they had tried hard enough. But I think it is much more plausible to say that Mr Toledo is the exception. Without some equality of outcome (of parental income), poor people cannot take full advantage of equality of opportunity.

If technology belongs to the people only insofar as the people are consumers, we beneficiaries had better believe that luminaries and pioneers did something so outrageously, so individually innovative that the concentration of capital at the top is deserved. When founders pitch their companies, or inscribe their origin stories into the annals of TechCrunch, they neglect to mention some of the most important variables of success: luck, timing, connections, and those who set the foundation for them. The industry isn’t terribly in touch with its own history. It clings tight to a faith in meritocracy: This is a spaceship, and we built it by ourselves.

In more mainstream forms, such attempts to define whiteness as pathology often focus on the character traits that accrue to “unearned” privilege. (As soon as we say “unearned,” we have baked in the idea of meritocracy—which is some white bullshit.) The white person, especially the white man, is inescapably mediocre, as if by hereditary taint. She or he or they are entitled, neurotic, fragile, narcissistic, vain. He is named Bryce or Heath or Connor and wears shorts in the winter—so severed is he, at a basic level, from the truth of things. (Perhaps he just doesn’t care if his knees are cold.) She is named Karen unless her hair is good.

This approach, too, has a crude descriptive power. Stereotypes often do. In an extension of this process, “white” becomes a name for certain varieties of bad politics: the conservative, the nationalist, the NIMBY progressive, the can’t-we-talk-about-this-later socialist, the you-looked-at-me-so-I’m-calling-the-cops feminist. In all these cases, “white” functions as a name for a kind of secular American freedom: freedom-from that has become freedom-over. It’s the freedom of the minor aristocrat—this being the type of person who gave us far too much of the Enlightenment political thought that permeates our institutions—or the freedom of the children of the southern rich, the group that disproportionately, has given us that bizarre and misnamed American political tendency known as “libertarianism.” (The word has a far nobler meaning in European contexts.) The libertarian is, spiritually speaking, a plantation owner’s son. He wants his taxes lowered, his employees free to work for free, and—with an eye toward those employees’ daughters—his age of consent abolished. His freedom requires that no one else be free of him. But all of these are positions, not traits. Many whitened people reject them, and many people of color buy into one or another of them. Given that the forms and shapes of exploitation are likely to shift in a world that America no longer dominates, this is important to keep in mind.

If you had to construct a higher education system de novo, and you were given only two prerogatives—to transmit generational privilege while projecting an air of meritocracy—it would be hard to improve on the current setup. If the emotional well-being of young people were a priority, however, you might want to start fresh.

Students at high-achieving public and preparatory high schools have suffered a historic escalation of stress and burnout at application age. Guidance counselors see college-going students treating stress as a sort of “cultural currency” among their peers. Public health researchers have identified admissions anxiety as a cause of teenage substance use.

[...] in the US, heritage is mobilized as an individualistic, institutional myth. It would have us believe that by reviving our family narratives and traditions, by demanding representational equity, indeed, by raising "awareness" of our ethnic differences, we can address, even eradicate, the scourge of racial inequality.

Heritage would have us believe that if we receive truly equal opportunities, we can finally excel and secure the better futures we seek. From best-of Asian-American lists, governmental grants, and foundation awards to affirmative action, heritage works best when it's visible, and often presents as progress toward a miraculous meritocracy. [...] heritage, as part of a societal belief in the narrative of "it gets better," would have us look away. It would proclaim that racial equality alone can eradicate everything from poverty to violence, when in fact it's nothing but part of a Band-Aid solution to the problems of late-stage capitalism. [...]

Identity - we worship at its shrine even as it keeps us docile, all the while declaring itself infallible because of its authenticity.

Why was it so hard to see ourselves as people who might need a union? Gramsci had observed that any individual’s personality was “strangely composite,” made up of a mixture of beliefs, thoughts, and ideas gleaned from family history, cultural norms, and formal education, filtered through their own life experiences read through the prevailing ideology of the time. Hall had taken this up to argue that when the working class failed to espouse revolutionary thought, women to embrace feminism, or people of color to advocate antiracism, it wasn’t because they suffered from false consciousness. The idea that consciousness could be true or false simply made no sense: it was always, Hall stated, “complex, fragmentary, and contradictory.” This was just as true for those on the left as for anyone else. “A tiny bit of all of us is also somewhere inside the Thatcherite project,” Hall had warned in 1988. “Of course, we’re all one hundred per cent committed. But every now and then — Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration—we go to Sainsbury’s and we’re just a tiny bit of a Thatcherite subject.”

The Thatcherite project was since then much advanced, and we had internalized its dictates. For our whole lives we had learned to do school very well; in graduate school we learned to exploit ourselves on weekends and vacations before putting ourselves “on the market.” Many of us still believed in meritocracy, despite learning every day how it was failing us. The worse the conditions of academic life became, the harder everyone worked, and the harder it became to contest them. Plus, we were so lucky to be there — at Yale! Compared to so many grad students, we had it good, and surely jobs were waiting on the other side for us, if for anyone. Who were we to complain? Organizing a union of graduate students at Yale seemed to many like an act of unbearable privilege — a bunch of Ivy League self-styled radicals doing worker cosplay.

Behind all this frenetic policing of culturalized class authenticity is a deep and worsening contradiction at the heart of Anglo-American politics on the right. Modern conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic has frequently bedecked itself in an of-the-people rhetoric in the face of a range of hard-to-refute egalitarian and redistributive critiques. We know this much about the spread of right-wing populism across the generations: it’s what happens when elites can no longer excuse their status on the grounds of kingly magnificence and exceptional genealogy. Instead, they have to turn to a range of bogus emotive rhetorical strategies to arrogate authority from below. Historically, liberals—as distinguished from the socialist left—have been swift to object to this sort of thing, priding themselves on their rationality, fairness, and ironclad faith in meritocracy. In the United States, Trump is a bogeyman for liberals precisely because he is regarded as the zenith—or nadir, as the case may be—of a uniquely unmitigated strain of demagogic truth-avoidance; the same can be said in the United Kingdom for Robinson and the Bad Boys of Brexit. But this placid and complacent mode of counterattack sidesteps, perhaps deliberately, the question of why liberals throughout the Anglosphere—and, indeed, beyond—are engaged in almost precisely the same thing they want to hang Trump or Farage out to dry for.