Info initially grabbed from a [Claude query](https://claude.ai/share/9182fb82-dc56-4d38-9af8-4bdabfb82a0b): >Provide me with some historical background and information regarding America's apparent fixation on "meritocracy," while also focusing on the idea that it's somehow become inherently connected to the idea of the American Dream --- Interestingly, the phrase "**the American Dream**" wasn't coined until the 20th century. Ironically, it was first used in 1931, only a few years into a period that many would consider closer to "*the American Nightmare*" - The Great Depression. Historian James Truslow Adams invented the phrase in his book *The Epic of America*, and would then go on to use it some 30 additional times throughout the book. - Great Depression: 1929 -> 1939 Despite what we might think of today when we hear the phrase, Adams was explicit that it wasn't about an accumulation of material wealth. For Adams, worshipping material success was actually a total failure of the American dream, not its fulfillment. He wrote of it as: >"(the) dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement." *The Epic of America* closes with an image of the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, space built so that any American, rich or poor, could sit and read together as equals. The American Dream was civic and moral before it was ever economic - about dignity and belonging regadless of birth, not about winning a competition. This American Dream's origin also predates any association with "meritocracy" by at least a couple decades. - [James Truslow Adams and the Orgins of the "American Dream" (Taylor, 2019; Conversable Economist)](https://conversableeconomist.com/2019/07/04/james-truslow-adams-and-the-origins-of-the-american-dream/) - [A Brief History of the American Dream (2021; George W. Bush Institute)](https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/state-of-the-american-dream/churchwell-history-of-the-american-dream) The word "meritocracy" isn't even American - it's British (*booooo*). And, not only is it British, but it was first used by British sociologist Michael Young, when he published *The Rise of the Meritocracy* in 1958, a dystopian novel set in a future United Kingdon where merit - defined as IQ plus effort - had become society's central organizing principle, replacing class and creating a new stratification between the "meritorious" elite and a disenfranchised underclass. Young wasn't proposing meritocracy as an inspiring ideal to be emulated; he was warning against it. Decades later he would go on to write an essay pointedly titled "*Down with Meritocracy*," where he would irritatedly lament the fact that politicians, never ones to waste any opportunity to utterly fuck the meaning and etymology, had turned his warning into a political rallying cry. And, in the 1970's, an American sociologist named Daniel Bell would do the most American thing possible when he encountered the word and stripped it entirely of any satire and trace of its origin and initial intent. Ever since, "meritocracy" has existed in the American political lexicon, representing a positively-valenced concept in American thinking about who deserves what. - [If we must say "meritocracy" (H.W. Brands, 2022; Medium)](https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/if-we-must-say-meritocracy)