Ben Shapiro Says Left and Right Both Treat Merit as a Sham

Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator and co-founder of The Daily Wire, was describing what worries him about young people on the right. They came to politics, he said, not from loyalty to conservatism but from distrust of established institutions, and that distrust has hardened into a belief that the whole system is fixed.

His summary came as a comparison. The left, Shapiro argued, has long claimed that American institutions "have been rigged for centuries and are currently rigged against minorities, sexual minorities, and, and all the rest," and therefore must be torn down. The right, in reaction, now claims that those same institutions are "rigged against young white Christian men," in Shapiro's words.

Shapiro does not dismiss the complaints entirely. He said each story contains what he called a grain of truth. There was historic discrimination, he said, and there were also more recent policies that did disadvantage young white Christian men, with diversity programs cited as the prime example.

The problem, in his telling, is what happens next. Both sides turn a specific grievance into a general theory that the basic institutions of the West are corrupt. On the left, he said, meritocracy is described as a lie pushed so that elites can stay elites, and he hears the same claim now from voices on the right. Both end, he said, by treating success earned by merit as a cover story used by powerful people to stay powerful.

"The purported victims are different, but the general approach to the world is the same," Shapiro said.

As his example, he pointed to Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator. Shapiro said Carlson now makes the same argument the left has made, that meritocracy is a sham perpetuated by an elite to protect itself. In Shapiro's view, the right has come to mirror that thinking.