If you've actually read Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, you understand how the many merits of the book were obscured by an unfortunate (if necessary) controversy over their discussion of the hereditary component of intelligence.
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However, the entirety of the controversy over what Murray and Herrnstein said about hereditary and race was a horrible distraction from what was, to me, the most revealing part of their book: How the democratization of educational opportunity and the near-universality of intelligence testing (the SAT and other standardized aptititude tests function, at some basic level, as IQ tests) had resulted in a revolution in American socio-economic class structure.
Specifically a meritocracy has emerged in which attendance at a small set of elite institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, maybe one or two West Coast schools) is considered a prerequisite for high public office. It is the old money / landed gentry arguments of the 18th and 19th centuries moved into the Silicon age.
McCain speculates that it is one of (maybe the main reason) for the press's continuing Savage treatment of Sarah Palin:
If you have read both The Bell Curve and Brooks' Bobos in Paradise, you know how he applied Murray and Herrnstein's ideas -- in a light, breezy, humorous way -- to his study of the lifestyles of the emerging overclass. And every time Sullivan savages Sarah Palin, you are witnessing an expression of Sully's certainty that no one who attended a community college and graduated from a state university can be more fit to govern than a true "meritocrat" like Barack Obama.
Whatever her SAT score, Palin has failed to jump through the proper institutional hoops necessary for validation as a member of the congnitive elite that Sullivan, Brooks & Co. recognize as the only legitimate governing class.
And he does seem to have a point. Although Palin was the only one on either ticket with executive branch experience she was routinely derided as unworthy of office. This despite the fact that her opponents only major accomplishments were too graduate law school and in the case of Barack Obama to have the balls to write a memoir at the age of 30 something about how tough his life was while attending those same elite schools.
Despite that, and despite the fact that every actual project that Obama was involved in - such as the Annenberg Trust's project to improve Chicago schools - Obama was immediately pronounced as more fit to govern. (Admittedly Palin didn't help her case with a series of bad TV interview, but that came later)
McCain believes this doesn't augur well for our representative democracy or federalism:
This view amounts to a repeal of the American founding. If the graduates of elite institutions are exclusively qualified to govern, then most citizens are thereby adjudged incapable of the self-governance which was the ideal of the Founders.
Furthermore, the Sully-Brooks interpretation denies the equality of the states, for Oklahoma produces fewer National Merit Scholars than do Massachusetts and Connecticut, and therefore Sen. Tom Coburn and his constituents are politically inferior to Sen. Chris Dodd or Sen. John Kerry and their constituents.
Finally and most importantly, the Sully-Brooks "meritocracy" theory tends toward the negation of local self-government and the endorsement of unconstitutional centralization of power in Washington, since the national government attracts the "best and brightest" (the meritocrats who are fit to govern) in a way that the governments of Texas or Tennessee cannot.
I agree, although I do have to disagree bit - the founders were not for self-rule by the common man. That is clearly obvious by the original requirements to vote. Male 21 and of the landed class. The general franchise evolved later.
In a way this is the opposite argument that Heinlein made in Starship Troopers. There a meritocracy emerges but it is based on service rather than wealth. Of the two I think I would probably prefer Heinlein's.
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