The Moral Dithering of the Meritocracy: Why Democratic Leadership Hesitates in the Face of Authoritarianism

When I published this essay last February, Musk’s Hitler salute revealed something far greater than a major public figure’s disturbing political leanings. It exposed a media unable to witness publicly what we all saw with our very own eyes. Musk wasn’t a distraction; he was an omen. He exposed a widening inability across the professional and political classes to name authoritarian markers because doing so would destabilize the stories they tell about their own discernment, virtue, and competence. In the background, Democratic Senators confirmed blatantly unqualified candidates for cabinet positions, as if the new government promised to be a gentleman’s game. The deeper analysis in this essay remains unchanged. Musk was simply the most visible rot at the moment.

“Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

– 1 Timothy 6:9-10

Elon Musk dominated the news recently with his newfound national and international influence. In addition to delivering the Hitler salute at President Trump’s inauguration with “almost orgasmic intensity,”1 Musk also spoke before the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland. He told them to be proud of their German heritage and disavow “multiculturalism.”2 Separately, a first-hand account of Musk visiting Auschwitz published on X described a reaction of indifference. While many commentators and commenters here in the US or abroad dithered over interpretation, American far-right organizations saw the signal and emerged from their bunkers.

In this essay, however, I’m not interested in discussing neo-Nazis or their sympathizers. My interest is in those who chose to prevaricate, equivocate or dismiss what was right before their eyes. It has to do with financial aspirations and the allure of proximity to power.

“From a traditional Labour background, my mother rejected the politics of solidarity and communality, always voted Conservative, for the left could not embody her desire for things to be really fair, for a full skirt that took twenty yards of cloth, for a half-timbered cottage in the country, for the prince who did not come.”

– Carol Steedman Jones, Landscape for a Good Woman

How do those who struggle to make ends meet position themselves vis-a-vis the comfortable or the rich? In the above quote from Landscape for a Good Woman, British writer Carol Steedman Jones describes how her mother, a shop assistant in a department store, saw middle-class existence as almost a failure. The careful attention to moderation as comfort, the satisfaction in managing an income without excess, was not something she aspired to. Instead, Steedman Jones’s mother wanted to purchase the necessities of life without care. She wanted the total freedom that seems to come with wealth, that is, not just the freedom to spend, but also the freedom from worry.

For those with little sense of agency, a wealthy man like Musk appears to have control not only over his personal and professional affairs. His financial success and corporate leadership seem to offer him a variety of other freedoms that many lack. Leadership positions are traditionally associated with greater autonomy in judgment, creativity, and flexible hours that go hand-in-hand with personal fulfillment. A job, on the other hand, is often heavily surveilled, rigidly disciplined, and is unlikely to be integrated into a sense of self. Working conditions, not just income, matter.

Today, well-educated professionals are finding themselves in the same social position as Steedman Jones’s mother. More and more Americans who aspired to a career are no longer enjoying the financial and personal autonomy they came to expect in the twentieth century.

This shuffling of class expectations is why I am purposefully not using categories like “working class” or “middle class” in this otherwise traditional materialist analysis. A wider swath of the American public cannot find the proverbial extra $400 for emergencies, even though they share the credentials and cultural expectations of those who can. It’s not just the loss of discretionary income, but the separation from the ideals and attitudes that once gave them their sense of self and status. This separation from social circles can be as simple as being forced to downgrade socio-economic experiences when restaurants, retailers, and vacation spots are no longer in reach.

Perhaps this sea change helps to explain why Democratic politicians and platforms have been more focused on ideas, intellectual concerns, and identity over the last twenty years, rather than bread-and-butter issues. To focus on income and working conditions risks alienating those who hold fast to the belief that they have careers, not jobs. The old Bill Clinton self-disciplinary campaign slogan, “It’s The Economy, Stupid,” isn’t going to play well with people who don’t want to be reminded of their personal financial disappointments.

“[I]n the absence of the conditions of material possession, the pursuit of exclusiveness has to be content with developing a unique mode of appropriation.”

— Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

And this is where my materialist analysis dovetails into intellectual causes: With less and less access to the financial signals and behaviors that once defined professionals, those with expensive degrees and empty titles need to find new ways to separate themselves from the hoi polloi. The appearance of moral authority is an easily available and inexpensive alternative.

Disbelief in Musk’s fascist turn, therefore, is about more than just the financial and professional freedoms that come with his particular brand of success. It is also a threat to the shared illusions of virtue as the basis for real-life access to wealth and power. Until very recently, Musk appeared to meld the literati with the glitterati in his embodiment of the meritocracy. Knowledge is not only power, but also conveys the moral authority to lead, a proposition that dates back to Plato’s Republic.

Today’s professional classes may not have the money and status they wish for, but they can still hold themselves more virtuous and, in doing so, maintain a proximity to status and power that has diminished severely in a changing socio-economic landscape. Thus, the extraordinary cognitive dissonance we witnessed after Musk’s Hitler salute. It came from the sudden and immediate crumbling of one of the great tenets of the Protestant work ethic: “The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue … .”3

It is no accident that this essay is ending with a quote from Max Weber. His publications from 1900 until his death in 1920 explored the interplay between evolving political and economic systems as he witnessed inherited power give way to more representative forms of government. His concern was how these changes would affect human freedom and political participation. Today, the meritocracy as envisioned in the first half of the twentieth century is morphing severely, if not dying. The question is whether and how the chattering classes will continue to believe in and promote a system that a significant number of Americans no longer identified with last November, regardless of whom they voted for. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”4

© R. T. Greenwald, 2025. The ideas, arguments, and original frameworks presented here are the intellectual property of the author and require formal citation when referenced or adapted. For permissions, collaborations, or inquiries about appropriate use, please send me a DM.