This is from a new blog that focuses, among a variety of other things, on inequality:

Inequality and meritocracy, by Kathy G.: Yesterday Atrios made this astute observation:

Lots of people in this country are basically born on 2nd and 3rd base and then manage to stay there for the rest of their lives. And many of them look down on those who start at home plate and fail to hit a home run.

This brought to mind an excellent essay about college admissions... The whole phenomenon of college admissions fascinates me, because college admissions is in many ways one of the few overt manifestations of the otherwise often invisible American class system. ...

One of the most pernicious effects of America's so-called meritocracy is ... the attitude of smug entitlement it often produces. ... A distressingly large number of people in our society seem to believe that going to college is proof that they're "smarter" than their non-college-educated fellow citizens, and therefore more deserving of respect, status, and the comforts of middle-class life.

Of course, not going to college is no cause for shame, any more than attending college should necessarily be a cause for pride. In the U.S., low income is likely to be a huge barrier to going to college, even among the highest scoring students.

I saw this entitled attitude ... on display ... during the 2005 New York City transit strike. I remember how some commenters ... expressed disgust and incredulity that people who didn't even go to college (i.e., transit workers) had job security, decent benefits, and salaries of 50 or 60K a year. How dare they! ...

The counterpart to the smug entitlement of the "winners" in our society is the shame and self-loathing of the losers. In her recent book about unemployment, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about the feelings of inadequacy and self-blame of those who, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs. New York Times Louis Uchitelle reported similar attitudes in the laid off workers he interviewed for his book.

The left in this country has a huge task on its hands: to chip away decades of individualistic, right-wing, propagandistic bullshit and explain to Americans how power and the class system work in this country. We need to get through to them about how utterly arbitrary the whole process is, and how where one ends up on the economic ladder tends to be overwhelmingly a product of where one started out in the first place.

Above all, we desperately need to instill some humility and compassion into our overclass -- and some good old-fashioned pride and fighting spirit into the rest of us.