Elite Hubris vs. Working Class Humiliation: On Michael J. Sandel's "The Tyranny of Merit"
Michael J. Sandel | The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? | FSG | 2020 | 288 Pages
The political theorist Michael Sandel is an academic celebrity. He holds an endowed chair at Harvard, has taught thousands of students there and around the world (through televised lectures) about justice, and has been a leading philosophic critic of liberalism for forty years.
Although he has said he is uncomfortable with the label, he has been a central figure in the communitarian critique of liberalism. We are not isolated individuals who create ourselves from scratch, who decide for ourselves every aspect of our lives, he has argued in all his work, but rather embedded creatures who derive at least some or much of our identity and our preferences from our surroundings—our families, our location, our religious, cultural, and social traditions. Sandel used this vision of human beings to criticize the thought experiment at the center of the work of John Rawls, the leading liberal theorist of the late twentieth century. In that thought experiment, Rawls says principles of justice should be agreed upon behind a “veil of ignorance” in which people do not know their social location; the result would be principles and policies that are truly just and benefit everyone.
Impossible, Sandel replies; our social location is part of us, shapes us, determines what we value, what we think, what we want for ourselves, our communities, our government. . .and that is how it should be, for, as Aristotle said, we are social animals. Dozens if not hundreds of academic articles and books have explored this liberal-communitarian divide.
In this newest book, Sandel offers his answer to the central vexing and pressing question of Trumpism: why did so many working class voters support him? In keeping with the general thrust of all his work, Sandel formulates his answer to this question in a manner that critiques not just Trump’s Democratic opponents but decades of liberal thinking.
The culprit? Meritocracy. Americans who go to college, especially a prestigious college, get ahead; those who do not are left to flounder. Those who get ahead come to believe they deserve their success, forgetting the advantages that helped them along the way (such as family resources). Those left behind nurse resentment and anger; they then become open to faux populists who say they want to shake things up and stick it to the liberals and the elite. Liberal/elite hubris and working-class humiliation; that is, according to Sandel, the dynamic that shapes the contemporary electorate and brought us Trumpism (which may well continue, with or without Trump himself, long after January, 2021). This argument about meritocracy has entered mainstream thought through venues such as Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times.
Sandel has a point here, an important one. He is absolutely right that the vast majority of Democratic politicians have stressed social mobility, not equality, and that the two are fundamentally different. Democrats have also courted big donors, abandoned unions, stopped talking about a rigged economic system, and urged people to study hard, work hard, and get ahead. That was Bill Clinton’s message, and Barack Obama’s. At the margins, Democrats want to strengthen the safety net and make things perhaps a tad more fair, while Republicans go whole hog for individual responsibility and want to shred the safety net entirely.
Trump, meanwhile, played to the galleries and pretended that tearing up climate accords and getting tough with other nations would save or bring back well-paying American jobs. These were lies, but lies that struck a chord with voters who feel abandoned and disrespected. Working class and rural voters preferred Trump’s performance of exaggerated, crude grievance and toughness to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s Ivy League locutions and widely reported condescension (think of Hillary’s comment about Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables” or Obama’s remark about rural voters “clinging to their religion and guns”). And, of course, both of the Clintons and both Obamas came from relatively humble backgrounds and made it into the elite by way of the Ivy League.
So far, so good; there can be little doubt that working-class resentment of the liberal elite helped put Trump in the White House in 2016. And Sandel is right that college admissions are not random and that the Democrats have ignored their roots and catered to cosmopolitan professionals. He is also right that talent and birth are largely matters of morally irrelevant luck. And he offers a useful history of the idea of meritocracy, which developed in the first part of the twentieth century as a way of countering a self-perpetuating and exclusionary white, Protestant elite, and the stranglehold of that elite on prestigious colleges and universities (for example, through a Jewish quota, in place at some universities until the early 1960s).
Where Sandel goes wrong, however, is that he believes the solution to the cycle of hubris and humiliation lies solely in the realm of philosophy and morals—of how we think about and talk about our fellow citizens and about the dignity of various forms of work. He mentions economic globalization, but briefly. He gestures toward the radical inequality that lies at the heart of the working-class/elite divide, but does not analyze it, nor address the simplest and most obvious question: Can the current economic system be changed in a manner that breaks the cycle of hubris and humiliation?
Certainly, morals matter. Treating people with dignity matters. But is dignity the only thing missing, the key ingredient that fuels resentment? Will the janitorial staff and cafeteria and service workers in the Ivy League (or anywhere else in America) stop voting for the Trumps of the world if the people they serve are simply nicer to them or think kinder thoughts and place greater value on their work? Or do they actually need better wages and benefits and a fairer tax code, livable and affordable housing, good, safe schools for their children, and health insurance that actually works? In the 1950s and 60s the children of the white working class had a shot at the meritocracy through good public schools and affordable state universities, but that world is long gone. Good thoughts alone, valuing all forms of work, no matter how philosophically coherent, won’t bring that world back.
Although Sandel talks a great deal about the problems at institutions such as Harvard, out there in the real world, even the professoriate is being proletarianized. These days only a third of American college courses are taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty; the rest are taught by poorly paid, highly precarious adjuncts, whose economic situation is not very far removed from the people who empty the trash in faculty offices. These are people with PhDs who succeeded in the meritocracy, yet they struggle nearly as much as janitors and cooks.
Take just one other issue, a problem with the current healthcare system: Prescription drugs. Their cost is continually skyrocketing even for those with insurance. Under Medicare, even with the best available privately-purchased supplement, a patient treated with newer, life-saving cancer drugs will be required to fork over tens of thousands of dollars in co-pays just to stay alive. One in three retired Americans will get cancer if they live long enough; the Cleveland Clinic advises patients who have cancer or worry they might get it (which is anyone over 65) to budget $17-21,000/year just for cancer drugs, even under maximum Medicare coverage. That bankrupts people.
This problem, an obscene one when we compare our healthcare system to the rest of the industrialized world, won’t be solved by better thinking about the dignity of work or about the luck that land some at Harvard; it will only be solved by curbing the power of the pharmaceutical lobby in Congress and by asking hard questions about whether the profit motive needs to be wrung out of the healthcare system (which Obamacare did not even attempt).
Thus Sandel does not discuss the most basic questions: Can capitalism exist without classes and without class exploitation? Is the problem less meritocracy than the seeping of the profit motive into every nook and crevice of society? His legitimate and well-described philosophical concerns should lead him directly to those questions.
Sandel spends a great deal of time in this and his other books talking about “the common good” and the need to deliberate about its meaning, but in book after book he has never defined its content nor applied it at any length to any pressing real-world issue. In some cases—extreme cases—the common good may be obvious. There is no question that more Americans would be alive today if Trump had bothered to consider the common good when he first learned about COVID-19. But how many issues are as clear-cut as a deadly pandemic? Very few. Then what? Then voting, and parties, and we are back where we started, with the election of Trump in 2016 and the likely return of Trumpism in some form in 2024 or later. At this writing, American citizens cannot even agree about whether Trump fairly lost the 2020 election. If Americans cannot agree even on basic incontrovertible facts such as who won a presidential election (one that was not particularly close), how exactly are they going to deliberate about “the common good”?
As I have argued elsewhere in these pages, the American system is based on realism about human nature and the inevitability of self-interest in politics. Our constitutional system was put in place in a pre-capitalist society where wealth for free white men was based largely on endlessly available land (requiring slavery and removing Native Americans). That political system has mostly survived wrenching economic and social change (although there was, of course, a Civil War), at least so far. But whether it can survive current economic conditions is an open question, as the 2016 election and its aftermath vividly demonstrates.
As many historians have noted, democracy has preconditions; one of them is a stable middle class. What will it take to restore that rapidly disappearing center of a healthy society?