And ascend they often did, because the older American system was both hierarchical and permeable, with room for actual merit even without a meritocratic organizing theory.

Those advancing groups included non-Anglo-Saxons, and eventually non-Protestants and non-whites. In the middle of the 20th century, you could find elite Catholics who imitated WASPishness — think of William F. Buckley Jr. or the Kennedys. You could even find WASPish African-Americans: The oldest summer colony for black Americans, and not coincidentally a place where the somewhat WASPy Barack Obama liked to hang out in the summer, sits on the shores of the WASP isle of Martha’s Vineyard.

These imitations existed in the shadow of racial apartheid and residual anti-Catholicism. But their example suggested that an aristocratic spirit was transferable to a more diverse elite, that there could be Catholic and African-American and Jewish aristocrats — like, say, the family that has long stewarded this newspaper — who could adopt the WASP establishment’s upper-class virtues without the ethnic and religious chauvinism.

But then the WASPs themselves decided to dissolve their own aristocracy, and transform their once-Protestant universities into a secular mass-opportunity system — a more democratic way of education, in which anyone with enough talent could climb the ladder, and personal achievement and technical expertise would be prized above all else.

This was meritocracy, the system that we now take for granted. And for several reasons it didn’t work as planned.

First, meritocracy segregates talent rather than dispersing it. By plucking the highest achievers from all over the country and encouraging them to cluster together in the same few cities, it robs localities of their potential leaders — so that instead of an Eastern establishment negotiating with overlapping groups of regional elites (or with working-class or ethnic leaders), you have a mass upper class segregated from demoralized peripheries.

Second, the meritocratic elite inevitably tends back toward aristocracy, because any definition of “merit” you choose will be easier for the children of these self-segregated meritocrats to achieve.