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I'm a liberal who's been here for a while but doesn't post very frequently. I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum. Specifically, whether this disagreement is real or just against a strawman, and if it is real, what are the best reasons why the disagreement is not serious enough to justify conclusions like "despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".
I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms
Individualism means people should be judged based on their own personal qualities and actions instead of based on groups that people assign them membership to. Since the groups someone belongs to often give you information about their personal qualities, this needs to be made more precise as a conditional independence statement: conditional on someone's personal qualities and choices, judgements about them, their obligations, what they deserve, etc. should be independent of the groups they belong to.
Meritocracy means that positions of influence and power should be given to those best able to wield them in service of society's goals. While you can get into a lot of arguments about what society's goals should be in corner cases, for most practical decisions---who should become a doctor/lawyer, who should get research funding, who should run a company---this rounds off to two soft consideration: competence, that when someone wants to do something related to their position, they actually can, and personal virtue, that people don't use their position in ways that help themselves at the the expense of others.
The first point of argument is whether these definitions are reasonable and deserve the good connotations that "meritocracy" and "individualism" have. Therefore we should discuss what the point of these terms is and why they're considered good things:
Individualism is important for motivation---if people know that they're life outcomes are dependent only on them and their choices, then they have the strongest possible motivation for improving themselves as much as possible. Secondly, most people are happiest when they have a sense of agency and control over their lives. Individualism maximizes this control.
Meritocracy is important to make society as effective as possible in achieving its goals---this is the standard "if a surgeon is operating on you, you want to surgeon to be as competent as possible" argument.
Note that neither of these justifications are about "fairness" or anything like that (even though they line up with a many widely-held intuitions about fairness); they're both just very powerful instruments for achieving whatever terminal values society actually has at the bottom.
Now as for why I think this place does not follow these values, it might be most productive to focus on a very specific example instead of a billion arguments about racism, skilled immigration etc. A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:
I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies. Now, in the quote the the alternative is judging based on if "you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025" for rhetorical punch, but the way it's framed, he likely would also be against the alternative of e.g, "whether you agree with 1995 tolerance and colorblindness"---otherwise the entire frame of the argument wouldn't be against deciding belonging based on personal choices.
So now the specific questions:
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
Taking a step back, I think you are begging the question by smuggling in the premise that the principal test of someone's stances on individualism and meritocracy should be whether they are in favour of granting or withholding American citizenship on individualistic and meritocratic criteria. I think that most right-wingers, and many people more accurately described as "left-wing heretics", disagree with the idea that citizenship is or should be anything like an award, reward, occupation, office or responsibility, which are the things whose distribution based on merit are what is usually taken to define a meritocracy.
Imagine a strange world in which there is a real broad-based political movement holding that family membership should be treated like a public-sector job. Your sister, who is an adherent of this movement, says she got a strong application from India for the position of your father - the candidate is stronger and healthier than your current dad, has better educational credentials (a degree from an IIT in parenting, even!), and in fact a narrow majority of your present family members were polled and found to have much better alignment with his values. In that world, if you were deeply opposed to the idea of replacing your dad with the Indian candidate (or even just admitting him as a second dad), do you think you would have to hand in your individualist meritocrat card?
If yes, sure, you are at least consistent - get in touch so we can work on putting out some ads for any family positions our present system might let us legally fill with better-qualified individuals. There are however strong arguments for the "no" answer here: the uses and expectations of family membership are so far removed from any standard transactional notions of merit that it is nonsensical to award it based on them - you are expected to spend all your time around family members, sacrifice for them even to your own straight detriment if they need it (and expect that they would to do so for you, even if this hypothetical is one that will never come to pass in reality; your washing and clothing a paraplegic relative is not in expectation that they might actually repay it), and share illegible life experience that is only cross-applicable because you are actually genetically similar.
Many will hold that citizenship is the same! After all, you do have to spend time around your countrymen, benefit from illegible cross-applicability of life experiences (progressives would be the first to tell me that something as random as skin cream formulations might unexpectedly not work as well for people who are genetically far from those that they were optimised for!), and sometimes sacrifice for them in the purely hypothetical expectation that they would do the same for you (whether it is a small sacrifice for someone else's big benefit, like paying taxes that go into medical benefits, or a big sacrifice for everyone else's small benefit, like going to war and dying).
Of course, there is also a sort of third answer, that the family example was contrived because the notion of merit was not right. All these things - genetic similarity, giving other family members the lizard-brain reassurance that comes from looking and smelling like them, willingness to sacrifice for them - are what is asked of family members, so your slightly deadbeat dad is in fact the most meritorious candidate. Only, if you lift this answer back to citizenship, you get an answer that you may not be happy with either, which is that JD Vance was also being perfectly meritocratic there! It's just that the main qualifications for American citizens are "convince yourself and others that your ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War", "be genetically close to white Anglos" and "be someone the current residents of America would like as their neighbour".
(@OracleOutlook had a similar response so I hope this works as a reply to both)
First, since citizenship in certain countries has such a huge material impact, it is a "reward" whether people want to think of it that way or not. I think your argument boils down to saying that citizenship has some extra, special qualities that make thinking of it as a reward misleading word games.
The special quality you're focusing on is an analogy to family membership. There are two reasons why I think family membership is special
Of these two, only the first really applies to citizenship---that's easily resolved by rules against making someone stateless. So with that one exception, it should be fine to reason about citizenship as other rewards, particularly positions in other sorts of large organizations. Sacrifices happen in these too!
Are there other important special qualities of citizenship over other material rewards that would change this?
P.S. I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that genetic similarity is the best way to judge if you can relate to someone. Here, education, values, and interests seem to matter much more. It's way easier for me to relate to a random mathematician of any race than a random person of the same race as me. I don't think this is that unusual---at the very least, having a college degree is probably more relevant to relatability for you than race.
I don't understand your argument there - these rules exist as international agreements that are generally fairly well-respected, so doesn't that in fact make citizenship more like family, and therefore make moral intuitions about family membership more applicable to citizenship?
I think @OracleOutlook's response below already addressed the most important ones, so I'll just +1 it.
I think that in saying this, you also betray an interesting conflation of two different understandings of what meritocracy is. One of them is a sort of deontological one, under which to be a meritocrat is to hold that it is morally right that boons go to the most meritorious, while the other is more utilitarian, where to be a meritocrat is to say that granting awards and positions to the best is the optimal way to organise a society.
Your responses seem to place you in the former camp, while many of your interlocutors consider themselves to be meritocrats in the latter sense. As usual, non-central examples are the ones that really put the differences between deontologists and utilitarians in relief. The utilitarian case for meritocracy seems strong, but in reality most of its strength is concentrated in theoretical argument and precedent for the beneficial effects of central examples of it, that is, meritocratic distribution of awards and public positions within a nation. There is little to no precedent for meritocratic award of citizenship (outside maybe of the occasional microstate selling it), and a good volume of theoretical argument against it that is unique to the nationality case (see OracleOutlook's and my own response). Accordingly, the utilitarian who sees himself as a meritocrat because the benefits of meritocracy are well-supported will be parsing this label as referring to the well-supported core of meritocracy only, and not feel particularly compelled to support meritocratic award of citizenship either on the basis of "meritocracy is good" (deontologism!) or "how can you claim to be a meritocrat otherwise" (word games? virtue ethics?).
On an individual level, I don't deny that background winds up being more relevant (though it is by no means everything - my SO is in fact a random mathematician of [not my ethnicity], and for the least controversial example where genetic distance still rears its ugly head, when we are both sick, we can not eat the same things), but nobody is about to run a country that is all mathematicians. On a population level, all these individual values and interests and social niches level out - the Japanese mathematician and the Mexican mathematician might get along swimmingly, but if the Mexican mathematician then has a kid with his Mexican mathematician wife and it is sent to a kindergarten to be watched by the Japanese mathematician's kindergarten teacher cousin, I figure there will be friction.
This is interesting! I do think I disagree with the deontological case for boons going to the most "meritorious." It's usually sheer luck and good external factors (genetics, environment) that puts people on the top. It's not always the "most diligent" person who gets the best compensation. And if we did sort society based on something that is within people's control, (like "works hardest") instead of things outside people's control (like "is smartest") then it would overall be a worse society.
People didn't actually do anything worthy of merit to be the smartest, best looking, most talented, etc. At best they worked hard to improve on something that was already there, but that doesn't mean they worked harder than someone who is disabled and works twice as hard to do half as much.
But if you want to incentivize the best to do their best, you need to give them the best rewards. And it is one of the jobs of society to incentivize the best to do their best, partly because a rising tide lifts all boats. In this regard I follow the utilitarian model it seems.
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(this didn't ping me but fortunately I saw it while scrolling.)
See, here the analogy deepens further! Citizenship in certain countries has a huge material impact, but so also with families! I hit the jackpot by being born into a family where they didn't beat me, prioritized my education, didn't molest me, etc. I did not earn this. It was not my reward to be born into a good family or a good country. How can someone earn such a thing? To describe it in such terms cheapens it.
I'd like you to elaborate on what you mean a family membership is special compared to. Compared to Rousseau liberalism where everyone is born as individuals with no prior obligations who only relate to each other through contracts? Special compared to something else?
There are more than a few other traits that make a family and a nation special. For one, I would die for my children and I would die for my country. This makes absolutely zero sense if you view a country as a community of like-minded individuals who can be swapped around if their opinions shift. If your country has no relation to you after you are dead, buried, and opinion-less then there is no reason to die for it. But if your country will also be the country of your nieces and nephews, second and third cousins, dearest friends and their children, then perhaps it is possible to die for it.
And countries need people to die for them lest they will be ruled by those willing to die for theirs.
That's just one thing, perhaps the biggest. But there are so many ways in which a nation is different than a free market meritocracy - common goods like roads and utilities and schools and on and on. And these items are paid for collectively, sometimes financed on the futures of generations to come. Which implies, for these goods to exist, that these generations do come and have a pre-existing duty to the land of their birth to pay for the good things that were given to them and their forefathers.
Would you like an anarchy instead? Because only in an anarchy is there any kind of liberalism to the extent that a country could be just like a "large voluntary organization."
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