If every meritocracy sees non-whites on the bottom of the totem pole, then it only makes sense that non-whites would embrace alternative standards for success... If you want to defeat communism, you are necessarily going to have to take various “unpopular” identity politics positions. There’s no escaping it.

I think this is the most important takeaway from your comment, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I interpret this to mean that a pure meritocracy can't work and is doomed from the start to fail - in any sufficiently "diverse" society - because you'll always have one group that dominates others, and one group that is worse than the others. The failing groups will always unite around identity politics or some other non-meritocratic politics to seize power, because that's the rational thing to do when forced to play a game you can't possibly win. This will always cause cultural instability and a sense of "injustice" at best.

In that case, the only nations meritocracy can work in are where:

• it's mostly homogenous, there are no subgroups at all
• one group (minority or majority) so absolutely dominates the others that the inferiors cannot even gain a foothold in the "cultural narrative"
• the national culture somehow trains minority groups to accept their status as inferior
• there is strict balkanization or even a caste system that keeps the groups separated - some can be meritocratic within their in-group, the others can do whatever the fuck they want - nobody dominates and it really isn't a single nation.

So we'll have to choose what we want to be, stop pretending everyone is the same, and engage in the culture war on realistic terms.