Three recent things on meritocracy

I noticed three recent things about meritocracy and related topics:
1) An essay in the Chronicle, written by Rita Koganzon, aka Miss Self-Important.  In short, she follows de Tocqueville's reasoning and argues that intense competition for top colleges is a sign of greater equality and less privilege, not more privilege and less equality.  I'm not sure that her analysis is applicable to all of society, but certainly the top tier is becoming more competitive rather than less.  It's possible, of course, that that bottom whatever percentage are more shut out than ever, but the top 0.1% or 1% or whatever now feel far more competition from the next few percentiles.

2) The movie "Yesterday", which is essentially a sci-fi love letter to the Beatles, inspired this hot take in Vox:

The problem is that people often don’t see the myth of meritocracy as a myth; they really believe in it. And when they do, it can have some unfortunate effects. The myth of meritocracy, according to Frank, can make us less willing to invest in the collective good. If you think that all it takes to gain renown is skill and effort, “you have a sense of entitlement to whatever comes your way,” he says.

The basic premise of the movie is that some weird sci-fi event happens and suddenly just about everyone on earth has forgotten the Beatles.  Their music disappears from the internet, their records disappear from people's collections, and when a struggling musician covers one of their songs for his friends are amazed by these songs that they'd never heard before.  He sees his chance to make it in the music industry and rises to stardom as the world marvels. The Vox writer's point is that it's naive to think that somebody got where they are just because they wrote great music.

On one level the writer is completely correct:  Success requires in a creative endeavor luck and hard work and people willing to help you promote whatever you've created.  It requires a creation that is not just good but also matched to the spirit of the time.  And it requires not just good creation but good performance.  Compare the first commercial recording of the song Wild Thing with the second.

First recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxDOncgSrY
Second recording:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiqkcyLZrg4

The second is far better.

Nonetheless, the point of the movie was not to legitimize the social order that the Vox writer hopes to better fit into by critiquing it.  The point was to produce a romantic comedy about a guy who feels like he's a fraud, and play some fun music along the way.  The Vox writer knows, though, that they'll get more clicks with a hot take explaining that this movie is a problematic work that defends the evil meritocracy.  And in critiquing the current social order they'll paradoxically fit in better with the gatekeepers of respectable opinion.

3) This tweet by Cathy Young, a writer who grew up in the USSR before coming to the US in the late 70's or early 80's (I don't know her exact bio):

https://twitter.com/CathyYoung63/status/1136788880173215747

So there's a fine @NewYorker article by Alex Ross on the Mozart/Salieri myths & recent Salieri revival, and ....
This is starting to remind me of how every Soviet essay on art or literature had the obligatory graph on Marxism-Leninism & the class struggle

She's referring to this passage from a New Yorker article that is otherwise an account of Mozart and Salieri, not the allegedly problematic notion of genius:

The danger of the word “genius” is that it implies an almost biological category—an innately superior being, a superhero. It is probably no accident that the category of “genius,” an obsession of the nineteenth century, coincided with the emergence of the pseudoscience of race, which held that certain peoples were genetically fitter than others. At the same time, “genius” easily becomes a branding term used to streamline the selling of cultural goods. The perils of the term become clear when the authorship of a work is uncertain. In 1987, the musicologist John Spitzer published an amusing and edifying article about the Sinfonia Concertante for Winds, K. 297b, which was long thought to be by Mozart. In its heyday, the Sinfonia was said to be “truly Mozartean” and as “monumental as a palace courtyard.” Once uncertainty about the attribution set in, the piece was called “cheap and repetitive.” The notes themselves had not changed.

I'm not terribly knowledgeable about classical music, so I can't say if the rest of the article is any good, but this sudden diversion into a very peripheral issue of the modern zeitgeist is jarring.  It feels like an obvious attempt to suck up to a certain kind of liberal near the end of an article that is otherwise unrelated to the signature issues of certain kinds of liberals.

I mean, if they want to critique ideas of intelligence, merit, fairness, etc. then have at it.  Say something interesting.  Pick a jumping-off point and then make an interesting connection with the bigger topic(s).  But don't shoehorn it in so as to flatter a certain kind of liberal.  It just ruins the flow of the piece and feels jarring and forced.