I'm a huge critic of a lot of uses of "meritocracy" as a sole guide in how things are or should be, but this attack on it still feels lacking. Would be akin to

I'm a huge critic of a lot of uses of "meritocracy" as a sole guide in how things are or should be, but this attack on it still feels lacking. Would be akin to my talking about "the myth of good people", because there have always been bad people. Or because the "good people" we look towards were not perfectly "good" in all ways. It seems it is still very fair that the US approached an ideal meritocracy far more so than many of the other nations that could be looked towards. Is that not at all the case?