“Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.”

So writes New York Times columnist David Brooks (“The failure of the educated elite,” The Seattle Times, May 30, 2018).

The old system of power depended on who your parents were and on the hereditary passing of power. We exchanged it for a more just one based on merit.

Yet, Brooks points out, the old system had qualities that the new system lacks.

Blue bloods from the older system like George H. W. Bush “won World War II and built the American Century.”

In contrast, those put into power under the new system, based on merit and education, are passing down advantages to their children but not to the nation as a whole. Our society has become more unequal than ever, says Brooks.

What the new meritocracy lacks is “a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community . . . ”

The new system will work when we pass good things not just to our children, but to our neighbor’s children as well.