Russia waits, no longer ideological, but moving slowly and gingerly toward the Christian heritage that once made her a nation, even as we stupidly toss our own culture away. Is the United States becoming like the old Soviet Union in a way that people fail to see because of the noise and the distractions of electoral politics, mass entertainment masking as news, and mass indoctrination masking as entertainment? We are becoming a meritocracy that punishes merit and rewards folly. We have all the disutility of a meritocracy—the snobbishness, the restless ambition, the inclination to see merit only in what can...