Meritocracy has never been the way the country has been run.
The irony is that most of the people who clamor for meritocracy failed in a meritocratic system. They are the average people that the meristocrats despise. But someone convinced them that they didn't fail because of their lack of merit, but rather because of brown and black people.
Meritocracy is a good value to have, but it can only be one of many and is not the basis for a system. People who doubt that should consider the following:
I have never worked at a law firm that would even consider hiring a graduate of UNC's law school. It's not nearly prestigious enough. Wachtell would only recruit from and hire from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, Stanford (though it doesn't get many from there) and very occasionally U Penn. That's all. There are a couple of partners who lateraled in with degrees from places like Georgetown -- but there was also one person who was a good attorney but was not on partner track and would never make partner because she went to Brooklyn Law School (which is a Tier 2 school and not terrible). Jones Day would hire a little bit more broadly, but unless someone had a boffo clerkship, not from UNC. Most of the folks at Jones Day from law schools outside the top 10 basically came along when Jones Day bought their previous firm.
When I was in law school, I met a young woman in one of my classes and she and I took an instant liking to each other. We shared a love of international economic regulation -- her specialty was banking (e.g. Basel framework) and she knew her shit. And we had a lot of other things in common too. One night, after we watched a Herzog movie at her place, things started to heat up but when we had our shirts off she backed off. The problem was that she wanted her guy to have a Rhodes scholarship, or at least a Fulbright, and I had neither. I was like, "but I'm going to be clerking in DC and probably at the Supreme Court!" Maybe she was using that as an excuse, but her previous boyfriend had a Rhodes scholarship, and I heard she married a guy who I know to have been Fulbright, so who knows. In any event, she actually said it, which is not something I ever would. Also, in fairness, she was very young (not a law student; she was part of the Wilson/Kennedy crowd) -- but anyway, I digress.
That's what meritocracy means among the meritocratic. They do not give a shit about anyone. I read an article a while back about PayPal. PayPal, as it turns out (according to Thiel or one of the other principal founders quoted in the article, did not hire people who played basketball. One of the guys studied at U of M, and knew some guys who played basketball, and thought they were idiots -- so they decided not to hire anyone who played basketball, I guess because we're all idiots?
Note that the people I'm referring to are generally NOT liberals. They aren't conservatives, either. They are mostly apolitical. George Conway was at WLRK, and so was Bernie Nussbaum (WH counsel to Bill Clinton), but most of them were into making money (the young woman referred to above was a liberal).
All you race warriors who talk a big game about meritocracy blah blah blah have no idea how much the elites hate them. They think it's the liberal professional elite like doctors and attorneys, but we don't hate them (they hate us). We hate their views and the people they become when articulating those views. But the meritocracy elites -- they have no use for the MAGA zombies who stand in lines at Trump rallies. Trump doesn't either, except insofar as they vote for him.