The Bootstrap and the Oath: How America's Meritocracy Myth Explains the Current Moment

"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

It is the most famous piece of advice in American culture — and it was originally a joke. The phrase dates to the 19th century, when "pulling oneself over a fence by one's bootstraps" was used to describe something physically impossible, an absurdity. James Joyce used it in Ulysses to denote the ridiculous. Only in the 20th century did it harden into a moral lecture delivered to people who were born with less.

That journey — from absurdist joke to national creed — mirrors the story of American meritocracy itself: a promise that the data has never fully supported, now being quietly abandoned by the very people who lectured us about it loudest.

This article examines the meritocracy myth in three parts: what the country's founding actually looked like, what the mobility data actually shows, and what happens when a government that preached merit replaces it — explicitly and openly — with loyalty.

Part 1: The Founding Was Not a Bootstrap Story

The romantic version of the founding has ordinary colonists rising up to build a nation where anyone could succeed. The documented version is different.

The 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were, in the words of historians, the postcolonial economic elite: wealthy planters, successful lawyers, and merchants. More than half had trained as lawyers. Several of the wealthiest men in the new nation — George Washington among them — presided over the proceedings. John Hancock, the wealthiest signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a shipping magnate whose fortune was partly built on smuggling during the colonial era.

Historians estimate that at least 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved people at some point in their lives. Several of the founders — Washington, Jefferson, Madison — were among the largest enslavers in their states. The wealth that gave them the leisure, the education, and the standing to found a republic was, in many cases, built directly on uncompensated labor.

None of this means the ideas in the founding documents were not radical for their time. It means the men who wrote "all men are created equal" were not themselves proof of the bootstrap theory. They were proof of its opposite: advantage compounds.

The meritocracy myth also obscures who was permitted to participate at all. At the founding, most states required citizens to own property — or pay taxes on substantial assets — simply to vote. The Constitution itself left voting qualifications to the states, and the states overwhelmingly imposed property requirements. The National Constitution Center's own scholarship notes that most Constitutional Convention delegates supported property qualifications for voters.

In other words: the founders did not believe in rewarding merit regardless of circumstances. They believed the already-advantaged were the proper governing class. The vote was extended to white men without property gradually in the early 1800s — and to Black Americans, women, and Native Americans only after centuries of organized struggle that the founders themselves did not undertake.

The point is not to dismiss the founding. The point is to correct the record: the "self-made" nation was made by men who inherited, married into, or extracted their starting capital. The bootstrap was not their story. It is a story their descendants told everyone else.

Part 2: What the Mobility Data Actually Shows

If America were a functioning meritocracy, talent would rise regardless of starting position. The research says otherwise.

The Brookings Institution's economic mobility studies, drawing on Pew research, found that just 6 percent of Americans born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution ever reach the top fifth. Meanwhile, 42 percent of children born at the bottom stay there — on the bottom rung — as adults. Roughly two-thirds never reach even the middle fifth.

Harvard economist Raj Chetty's landmark work — "Where Is the Land of Opportunity? The Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States," published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics — found that a child's chance of rising depends heavily on where they grow up. In some American cities, the odds of a bottom-quintile child reaching the top quintile are around 4 percent. Chetty's Opportunity Insights team also documented that children of parents in the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than children from the bottom fifth.

Compared with peer nations, the United States is not exceptional — it is middling. Studies of intergenerational mobility consistently find that a child's adult income is more predictable from their parents' income in the U.S. than in Canada, Denmark, Norway, or Finland. The American Dream is, statistically, easier to achieve in Copenhagen than in Charlotte.

The strongest critique, however, comes from inside the tradition. Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel's book The Tyranny of Merit argues that even a perfect meritocracy would be morally corrosive: it teaches winners that they deserve everything and losers that they deserve their loss. "What makes merit a kind of tyranny," Sandel has explained, "is the way it attributes deservingness to the successful" — as though luck, inherited wealth, and timing were not the largest variables.

Sandel's point is not that we should abandon merit. It is that we should be honest about what actually determines outcomes — and humbler about what any individual can claim credit for.

The data makes one thing plain: the United States has never been a pure meritocracy, and its own founding class never intended it to be one.

Part 3: Loyalty Replaces Merit

If the myth was always shaky, the current moment is something new: an administration that has stopped pretending.

Reuters reported in November 2024 that Trump's second-term cabinet selections were defined by "loyalists with few qualifications for top jobs." The pattern has since been documented across the government:

1. AP News reported on the White House's intense screening of federal job applicants — describing "loyalty tests and MAGA checks" deployed across agencies, with screening teams probing applicants' political allegiance.
2. The New York Times documented a questionnaire designed to test loyalty in the hiring of career government employees — the professional civil service created precisely to insulate governing from patronage.
3. Federal employee unions sued the administration over a "loyalty question" added to federal job applications, which asked applicants to opine on the personal significance of the president's executive orders.
4. The Washington Post reported that candidates for intelligence and law enforcement positions faced explicit loyalty screening.
5. The Fulcrum reported YouGov polling showing nearly all of the administration's second-term political appointees are net-unpopular with the public.

The civil service — the system that hires on merit, established after generations of spoils-system corruption — is being converted back into a patronage machine. That is not a repair of meritocracy. It is its replacement.

The Pentagon as Case Study: Pete Hegseth

The clearest illustration is the Department of Defense.

Pete Hegseth's résumé for managing the largest employer in the United States: a Fox News weekend co-host, an Army National Guard major with combat deployments, and the former head of small veterans nonprofits that, per investigative reporting, experienced financial and management problems under his leadership. He had never managed an organization remotely approaching the Pentagon's scale. The Center for American Progress concluded before his confirmation that he "lacks the qualifications, credibility, and leadership experience to steer the Pentagon."

He was confirmed 51-50 — the narrowest margin for a defense secretary in American history, requiring the first-ever vice-presidential tiebreaker for the post.

His own history complicates the merit narrative further. A fellow National Guardsman, Sgt. DeRicko Gaither, flagged Hegseth as a potential insider threat in 2021 over his "Deus Vult" tattoo — a crusader phrase that has been adopted by white supremacist groups. The Washington Post and CBS News reported that Hegseth was subsequently pulled from the security detail for President Biden's inauguration. Scholars of religion have since documented his open ties to white Christian nationalism, including in his book American Crusade.

The Purge of the Professional Military

Once installed, Hegseth presided over the most extensive removal of senior military leadership in modern American history:

1. February 2025: The administration fired Gen. C.Q. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — only the second Black man to hold the post — along with Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as Chief of Naval Operations. Hegseth had publicly called for Brown's removal, accusing him of a "woke" agenda, before he was ever confirmed.
2. The New York Times analysis found that Hegseth has now fired or blocked the promotions of more than 80 generals and admirals.
3. Early 2026: Hegseth struck four Army officers from a one-star general promotion list — two women and two Black men, as reported by The Hill and analyzed by Georgetown's Institute for Women, Peace and Security.
4. June 2026: The New York Times reported that Hegseth removed female and Black Navy officers from a captain's promotion list. The resulting slate of 22 nominees was all male and overwhelmingly white.
5. Senator Cory Booker and colleagues formally demanded answers from the Defense Department after Hegseth personally blocked the promotions of qualified officers. ABC News has reported that many of the senior officers fired or sidelined since Hegseth took office have been women or people of color.

None of the officers removed from these lists were accused of professional failure. Their performance records — in some cases, decorated careers spanning decades — were not the issue. What changed was the definition of what the administration was screening for. The unifying thread in the reporting: officers perceived as insufficiently aligned with the administration's ideology, or associated with diversity initiatives the secretary had publicly pledged to eliminate, were passed over regardless of qualification.

A defense secretary who was flagged by his own unit as a possible insider threat, confirmed by the narrowest margin in history, is now deciding which career officers are "meritorious" — and the officers being removed are disproportionately women and Black men.

That is not a meritocracy malfunctioning. That is meritocracy — quietly and openly — being abandoned.

The Pattern

Put the pieces side by side:

1. The federal civil service is being staffed through documented loyalty tests.
2. Career professionals across agencies are screened for political allegiance.
3. The most lethal institution in the government has seen 80+ of its most senior leaders removed or blocked, with women and Black officers disproportionately struck from promotion lists.
4. The officials doing the removing owe their own positions not to records of relevant achievement but to demonstrated personal loyalty.

When loyalty replaces merit at the top, the word for that system is not meritocracy. It is aristocracy — a court. The founders, whatever their flaws, built the impeachment power and the confirmation process precisely because they feared a government of unaccountable favorites. Their fear has a name in 2026.

Part 4: What an Honest Meritocracy Would Require

The answer to a fake meritocracy is not to give up on the ideal. It is to tell the truth about what actually creates opportunity — and then build it.

1. Tell the truth about the founding. The nation was founded by an economic elite, many of them enslavers, under property qualifications for voting. Honoring them does not require romanticizing them.
2. Fund what actually moves people up. The research is clear that mobility tracks neighborhood, school quality, and family resources. Policy that improves those three — housing, public education, child tax supports — does more for "merit" than any speech about bootstraps.
3. Protect the professional civil service. The merit-based civil service was one of America's great anti-corruption achievements. Dismantling it returns the country to the spoils system of the 19th century.
4. Protect military promotion boards from political screening. A military that promotes for ideology rather than competence is a weaker military — the point former officers of both parties have made publicly.
5. Call loyalty tests what they are. Government jobs staffed by allegiance rather than ability are how institutions fail the people they serve.
6. Refuse the humiliation ritual. Sandel's warning stands: a real meritocracy would be humble, because it would admit how much of any success is luck, timing, inheritance, and the labor of others — including enslaved labor at the founding.

Why This Matters to a Clothing Brand

Because the bootstrap myth and the loyalty-court reality share one message: the rules are written by and for the connected, and your job is to accept that quietly.

We do not accept that quietly.

A shirt cannot rewrite the tax code or restore a passed-over general. But a brand can say out loud what the data says: the system was never purely fair, and the people now dismantling merit are the same people who spent decades lecturing the rest of us about it. Visibility is the first act of resistance. Conversation is the second. Voting is the third.

Wear what you believe. Say what you mean. And never let them redefine merit as obedience.

Stay loud. 👑🇺🇸