The Failure of Liberal Politics

Michael Sandel has been one of America's pre-eminent political philosophers for more than two decades he has spent a career probing the limits of liberalism and democracy he's also pressed the hundreds of thousands who have watched his lectures and talks broadcast from Harvard University to engage with the tough questions that face citizens of modern democracies Michael Sandel is Harvard's professor of government theory and were delighted to welcome him to our studio tonight nice to see you again good to be with you thanks for making the trip and I guess well we may as well say this right off the top you were brought here by the Institute for Canadian citizenship yes this is the organization that was started by our former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul you're participating in the 6° citizen space so we thank them for getting you here and equally as much to our studio here okay with that homework out of the way two decades ago you wrote a book called democracy's discontent and you wrote that without a stronger civic spirit liberalism would collapse giving way to those who would shore up borders banish ambiguity hardened the distinction between insiders and Outsiders and promise of politics to take back our culture and take back our country I'm going to infer from that you're the only guy in America who wasn't shocked when Trump won last year I was not shocked I was dismayed but not shocked and here we are yeah here we are but I think it's been a few decades in the making you predicted it though last year when you put that out there I wonder what kind of feedback you got from sort of progressive smart maybe a tad sanctimonious people who thought you don't know what you're talking about well you've already guessed yeah two decades ago when I wrote the book that you just generously quoted from I got a lot of resistance from my liberal and progressive friends who who thought I was worrying unnecessarily that liberalism was more or less intact and that the the embrace by liberalism of the global economy and even of market mechanisms would be a way to avoid controversy in politics a way of avoiding the contentiousness that arises when we engage in morally robust questions in public life I thought that was a mistake I thought that was hollowing up public discourse creating a kind of vacuum that was dangerous and so we see somebody filled a vacuum yes and not only in the US but with the rise of right-wing kind of ultra nationalist populism in many European countries I think we see this vacuum being filled people sense that after three to four decades of a kind of faith that markets would decide tough public questions for us Democratic citizens are impatient with too empty of public discourse they want politics to be about big things and also about values about moral questions about justice and inequality and what it means to be a citizen and when liberal and progressive voices failed to offer that kind of politics when they became largely technocratic in their approach that vacuum was filled by narrow intolerant voices and and the kind of strident nationalism we see today Hillary Clinton quite famously during the last campaign in your country called those who sort of supported and that part of the political conversation the basket of deplorable x' and we know in hindsight that was a very ill-advised thing to say right was she right about it though I think she was she was wrong about that now there is a portion of Trump supporters who are deplorable who who partake of the kind of racist sentiments we saw in displaying Charlottesville all right stuff yeah that kind of thing so that's to be sure but I think it's important to distinguish especially important for liberals and progressives to distinguish between Trump himself and the people who support him because many of the people who supported Trump were working-class and middle-class people who who were angry at liberal elites and who had presided over two to three decades of a kind of neoliberal global capitalism that rewarded those at the very top but left most ordinary people feeling disempowered we need to listen to the legitimate grievances I think of ordinary working people men and women who feel excluded who feel left out who feel rightly the diversion of global capitalism we've had has left them behind and that I think that many liberals and progressives have had had been tone-deaf now I get that but but the notion that Donald Trump would somehow become the champion for that group of people right I mean did you see that coming well not that he himself would but it's understandable in retrospect he is a master of the politics of resentment he understands humiliation as a political sentiment and so he was able now his PUC he was able to tap into that resentment to that anger with a lease very successfully in the way that the proponents of brexit did in Britain in the way that marine lepen in France has done there and the way that the far-right nationalist party in Germany succeeded in getting 13% of the vote so I think the politics of resentment speaks to some legitimate grievances that the mainstream parties had better figure out how to address if we're going to try to stem this kind of strident nationalist populist uprising I don't want to push this too far yeah but the guy who represents that political way of thinking today is clearly Donald Trump the guy who represented at 25 years ago I think was a guy named William Jefferson Clinton there's a bit of a through line between those two isn't there well there I'm not pushing it too far but you know what I'm saying well in some ways yes because Bill Clinton came from the south he understood working-class grievances and he was quite adept at appealing to them while at the same time embracing Wall Street donors he he opened up the Democratic Party to substantial support from Wall Street and from the financial industry and his policies once in office turned out to be very Wall Street friendly and this was one of the charges against Hillary Clinton a charge pressed not only by Trump but before him by Bernie Sanders and he could talk to african-americans too in a way that Trump clearly did not Bill Clinton could yes so it was a more generous politics of course and it was pre populist in a way there was not the nationalism in fact there was the the embrace of not only the financialization of the economy but also of global trade both of which have been sources of the anger and grievances that Trump in his way and Bernie Sanders in his articulated during the last campaign let me get your take on something that the British writer George Monbiot recently said which was that the problem with politics today is that there is quote no new story you know throughout history says we've had stories like the New Deal in FDR's time the Reagan Revolution right they've driven politics but he says today liberalism has become kind of story less and boring do you share that view yes yes I think that narrative and story is important in politics because political argument in political rhetoric at their best enable us to make sense of ourselves of where we are in a given moment of how democracy is faring and and how we fit and liberals have not succeeded liberals have turned largely in their public discourse to be managerial and technical oral argument in politics for fear of disagreement or controversy and the result is a kind of story lusts politics that lacks resonance that lacks the capacity to inspire and I think that's the the great challenge for liberalism today you couldn't say that about Barack Obama though that wasn't story listen that wasn't boring at all yes and no yes or no how so during the 2008 campaign he had a powerful sense of story and AB narrative and he projected and articulated a civic idealism that inspired the country and many people around the world and he promised a rejuvenated kind of public discourse that did not shy away from moral and even spiritual argument in politics this was his 2008 campaign but he was not able to translate that civic energy and idealism into governing and he fell back this was partly because he took office at the time of the financial crisis he brought in with him economic advisors who had presided with Bill Clinton over the deregulation of the financial industry who had declined to regulate derivatives who had set the stage for the financial crisis they were now being brought in to address and so the bailout that he endorsed which bailed out the banks while not really holding them to account didn't do much for ordinary homeowners that created deep anger and resentment that cast a shadow I think over the rest of his presidency and deprived him of the moral voice that was his great promise in 2008 thus yes or no yeah God let us now then go through four themes which you have advanced that you think liberals need to better understand if they're going to you know be players in this right new era of Trump I guess we're gonna call it right what a liberals need to know about income inequality let's start there well they first will need to address in a more serious way than they have the growing inequality the gap between rich and poor liberals cast their lot with the kind of global capitalism we had over the last three to four decades but they ignored the growing inequality that it created now one response is to say well let's have job training and improved access to education to help those left behind and that's all to the good but that's not enough because people feel people worry not just about wages and jobs but also that this the the new financialized globalized economy doesn't really respect the kind of work that ordinary men and women do that working people do and Democrats in the u.s. liberals generally have not been very effective at speaking to the Civic the corrosive Civic consequences of inequality in a way that would resonate you want to go back to the Eisenhower confiscatory 91% income tax rates well I don't think we need to do that okay but III do think that we need to we need to pay more attention to inequality not only for its effect on the spending power of people whose incomes stagnate but also we have to focus and I think liberals should focus on the way in which inequality is corrosive of a sense of commonality and common purpose it creates almost segregated segregated society where the affluent and people of modest means increasingly live separate lives they they send their children to different schools they live and work and play in different places and it's very hard to have a sense of shared citizenship when when the Equality destroys the public places in common spaces of democratic citizenship let me yes since you and I are both huge baseball fan yes you use the baseball metaphor that speaks quite well well this is this is my idea of the skybox of vacation of civic life when I was a kid I grew up in Minnesota and I was a Minnesota Twins fan and we'd go to the ballpark and there were always box seats which were more expensive and seats in the bleachers but do you know what the difference in price was back in the mid 60s maybe this is before your time they tell me it was a dollar for the bleachers and four dollars for the best seat behind home plate about that the effect was going to a baseball game was a kind of class mixing experience CEOs set side by side with mailroom clerks everyone had to eat the same soggy hotdogs and drink the same stale beer and when it rained everyone got wet and this changed beginning in the 90s and 2000's when more and more sports stadia created these luxuries boxes VIP corporate sky boxes which separated those who the privileged who could watch from air-conditioned comfort high above the common folk in the stands below and this is what I call the it's it's the skybox off' occasion of sport no longer the case that that everyone eats the same food waits in the same long lines for the restroom it's no longer even true that when it rains everyone gets wet now it wouldn't matter so much if it only happened in baseball stadium but this skybox application has been unfolding throughout our social and civic life and that's what worries me theme to meritocratic hubris yes it's a tendency of those on top to inhale too deeply of their own success to believe that if I landed on top or if I'm very financially successful it's my own doing by golly it's a reflection of my merit my virtue and by implication those less disadvantaged than me maybe they don't work so hard maybe they aren't so talented and when this idea seeps in then those in the bottom resent those on the top and we see this in the backlash against elites with populism also the disadvantage begin to absorb some of that message and they begin to wonder that they begin to ask not only well is this system rigged that's about justice and fairness but it might somehow inadequate and there's something galling and demoralizing about that sentiment that further fuels the anger in the resentment very much of the kind that we've seen with the the populist backlash the resentment against elites let's before we play or excuse me before we talk about theme number three yeah I want to play a little clip here the historian you've all know a Harare don't ya you know him yes dude okay here's what he had to say when we talked about some of this a year ago shall roll the clip please within twenty or thirty years we may see the rise of a new massive class the useless class just as the Industrial Revolution created the urban working class so the new revolution will create the useless class people who are not just unemployed but unemployable and the social and political implication of that could be catastrophic you could have billions of people without economic importance and without political power those are the seeds of a revolution all the seeds of a very frightening dystopia do you share his fear about a so called useless class yes meritocratic hubris gestures toward the the the the worry that this is already upon us that in not so many words that those on top increasingly view less advantaged fellow citizens as more or less useless or as less valuable and that's deeply destructive to the solidarity and the sense of common purpose the sense of community that democracy requires so it's damaging not only for those on the bottom who feel they're looked down upon it's damaging for all of us insofar as we all have a stake in the health of a democratic civic life would a guaranteed annual income go some distance to addressing that it very much depends on the how whether it were presented as an alternative to the messy welfare state which is what some would would have or whether it's a way of buying off people who are rendered quote-unquote useless by robotics and artificial intelligence as some in Silicon Valley anticipate my worry about the universal basic income which some have proposed is that it would simply be a way of buying off those who are seen no longer to have an important role to play through work in a democratic society and political economy if it were truly a generous stipend that expressed a shared sense that we are all in this together and that different people contribute in different ways that would be different but I doubt it would be sufficiently generous to convey that sense of common spirit and purpose and inclusion my worry is that it would be a way of signifying the supposed uselessness of those rendered obsolete by modern technology and robots and and that I think is is a great worry indeed let's do what one more on this and that is patriotism a national community your country is going through one hell of a debate right now but what it means to be a patriot yes you know some people taking the knee during the national anthem at football games and that kind of thing right what a liberals need to know about patriotism and community the most important thing liberals need liberals need to know about it is that patriotism in a sense of national community are not right-wing causes that should be kept at a distance there's a source of embarrassment many liberals often speak as if they were allergic to patriotism I think this is a great mistake because it's given right-wing xenophobic nationalist political parties and politicians that kind of monopoly on patriotism and national community and I think that's a terrible mistake I think what liberals should do is to articulate a version a progressive version of patriotism and national pride and sense of community and to show its connection to the mutual obligations of citizens embodied in the welfare state in mutual provision in health care systems in public transportation in public schools the public spaces and institutions and practices that liberals and progressives should be advancing in defending but I don't think that they we can successfully do that by ignoring patriotism by ignoring the language of national pride and national community let's just make sure we understand that because your president at the moment says that if you take the knee during the National answer right you are disloyal and not patriotic at all and he actually use language stronger than that yes but we'll just leave it there yeah what's your view on that that is wrong can you be a patriot and take the knee during the anthem absolutely in fact patriotism sometimes requires protest and dissent and when some of the NFL players are taking a knee during the national anthem they're not expressing hatred for their country or indifference they are expressing a care and concern for the injustice that their country is perpetrating in communities especially toward racial minorities that is an act of patriotism that is an act of caring about the fate of the national community and wanting to improve it to make it more just not less that is a harder patriotism to describe and defend then hand on the heart salute my country right or wrong right well I'm not so sure now Steve if you look back at the speeches the most resonant speeches of Martin Luther King jr. who was arguing for civil rights who was leading demonstrations engaging in civil disobedience sometimes and getting arrested there were of course those who said that's unpatriotic that's anti-american but if you listen to his political rhetoric it was deeply American he was recalling America to its highest ideals to the principles of equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence as was Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg for heaven's sakes so I think that the some of the most powerful movements of political protest in descent including Kings have been appealing to the highest principles of one's country and that's patriotism a far deeper patriotism than the kind Donald Trump invokes when he condemns those NFL players for taking a knee fascinating here's you probably know Mark Lilla from Columbia University here is writing the New York Times about the end of identity liberalism he says the fixation on diversity has produced a generation of liberal and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self defined groups and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life at a very young age our children are being encouraged to talk about their individual identities even before they have them by the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class war the economy and the common good identity politics he writes is largely expressive not persuasive which is why it never wins elections but can lose them he's got it in for identity politics which of course has been a calling card of the Democratic Party for decades now yeah what's your view well I think he over states it i I think that expressive politics and persuasive politics can and should go together I think it's a mistake for the Democratic Party to define itself in too thorough going away in terms of identity politics or even the diversity agenda but I think that racial justice and gender equality are very important moral and political causes and there's no reason why a civil rights agenda can't be made compatible with an agenda that speaks about national community and solidarity and public deliberation and I think that's the challenge that the the Democratic Party in the u.s. faces and that progressive and social democratic parties in democracies around the world need to think through let's go back 20 years again and finish up with a quote from your book democracy's discontent you wrote the hope of our times rests with those who can summon the conviction and restraint to make sense of our condition and repair the civic life on which democracy depends okay who's going to do that well Oliver that's our task as Democratic citizens I don't think we can rely on national little parties or politicians to do that for us they are so given over to a kind of narrow managerial technocratic discourse which seems to avoid controversy I don't think we can sit back and wait for inspirational leadership from on high so I think what has to happen has to happen in civil society in educational institutions in NGOs in the media and in civic gathering places and in public spaces where citizens gather in smaller groups to reason together to argue together about the common good perhaps in a small sphere initially but in ways that will equip them to be effective citizens and to project those debates above the common good beyond the small settings in which they sometimes find their first and richest occasion don't they need a leader don't they need Bobby Kennedy riding in on a white horse over the hill somewhere well Bobby Kennedy was a great hero of mine and and he understood the importance of connecting liberal public purpose to moral and spiritual argument and since then the distances his tragic death the Democratic Party has lacked such a figure except we thought for a moment with with Barack Obama so we do need that kind of leadership but we can't wait for it and we can't expect that it will arise on its own we need to create the seed beds for a morally more robust public discourse than the kind to which we've become accustomed and that begins in civil society I appreciate that but as you look out at the political environment in your country right now yes do you see anybody who remotely looks like RFK the second coming up not at the moment but one never knows these figured the figures who best embodied these hopes and aspirations often come on the scene suddenly and seemingly unbidden we didn't know much about Barack Obama until a year or two before he ran and so it remains to be seen but I think to to connect progressive public purpose to moral and spiritual argument that's the challenge for political leadership whether at the national level or among everyday citizens within the common spaces and public places we find in which to gather we're always so delighted when you can find time for us here because you give us a hell of a lot to think about and we like that on this program that's Michael Sandel from Harvard University professor of government Theory there thanks so much for visiting us at TVO - thank you Steve it's been a pleasure helped EVO create a better world through the power of learning visit t v-- org and make a tax-deductible donation today

Channel: The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Views: 135,987

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Keywords: The Agenda with Steve Paikin, current affairs, analysis, debate, politics, policy, liberalism, populism

Id: ZT89fPK22EI

Length: 27min 30sec (1650 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2017