Meritocracy, it bears repeating, was a word invented in a satire of the idea that you can do it.

Different interests have different merit functions. Even given a merit function there are huge gaps in actually applying the function to get a measure of merit out of a person. And even if you have a group of people falling into a well ordered list of true merits, there's a lot of difficulty in actually translating that merit into success.

From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize."

He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack.

Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).

I believe he's using meritocracy in an ironic sense, since on multiple occasions he notes that his only merit was being good at test-taking and displaying "aptitude".

By that notion, America doesn't know what Democracy is, nor does China understand what Communism is. The definition isn't what's necessarily the problem - its the implementation of it. And by his account, that IS how we, as a people, tend to implement meritocracy.