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Michael J. Sandel, philosopher: "The left must offer a positive view of patriotism"

2023-05-14T10:49:58.521Z

Highlights: The American thinker, author of the acclaimed essay 'The Tyranny of Merit', argues that progressives must articulate a sense of community around concepts such as universal health care or tax justice. The democratic discontent he dealt with nearly 30 years ago was then a rumor, he writes in the new edition of the book, and is now a loud, raucous sound. Much working people see the working people aligned with the values of the middle class and working people appealed to Trump. Right-wing populism is historically a symptom of the failure of progressive policies.


The American thinker, author of the acclaimed essay 'The Tyranny of Merit', argues that progressives must articulate a sense of community around concepts such as universal health care or tax justice.


Almost 30 years ago, Harvard professor Michael J. Sandel (Minneapolis, 1953) scratched the golden surface of the nineties and, just under that layer of prosperity and euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War, found a rumor of anxiety. He heard below an incipient rejection of the globalizing project of the elites. A project that was imposed as inevitable and was extracted, therefore, from the democratic civic debate. The professor picked up this discomfort in El descontento democrático (1996), which soon became a classic of premonitory dyes.

Today Sandel is the closest thing to a rock star of philosophy. His talks burst audiences and his ideas on how to resolve the uncomfortable coexistence between capitalism and democracy are at the center of the debate in which Western social democracy is immersed, from Joe Biden to Olaf Scholz, German chancellor who has not hidden the influence that Sandel's book The Tyranny of Merit has had on his project. (Debate, 2020), in which he dismantles the theory of meritocracy due to the absence of equal conditions among citizens that makes it possible. After addressing in that volume that poisonous culture of merit, which sowed in the working classes a legitimate resentment of disastrous consequences, Sandel now returns to his 1996 book to update it after three decades that have exploded that incipient democratic discontent of which he wrote.

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The interview is in the Madrid skyscraper of IE University, where he has been invited to offer the lucky students one of his famous talks on justice. Quite an experience to see live how Sandel generates with students the kind of passionate civic debate that he demands for society as a whole. Before, contemplating the overwhelming views of the city from a 29th floor, philosopher and journalist remember their last meeting, in the desangelados basement of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts that Le Corbusier built at Harvard University. A strange interview three years ago, with two meters of social distance, with masks, in a dystopian reality that today seems distant, and that Sandel also manages to spin in his story. The pandemic, the war, the fight against the climate crisis, everything ends up fitting into the illuminating discourse that Sandel has been weaving about the causes of the deep disappointment that weighs down public life in the West. To get out of there, the thinker has two uncomfortable messages aimed at the disorganized left: one, reconfigure the economy to make it susceptible to democratic control; and two, embrace patriotism. But not the patriotism that the populist right has built on walls and fears, but another that articulates the feeling of community around concepts such as universal health or tax justice.

QUESTION. The democratic discontent he dealt with nearly 30 years ago was then a rumor, he writes in the new edition of the book, and is now a loud, raucous sound. What happened?

ANSWER. During the nineties there was a confidence, even with some arrogance, on the part of politicians and economists that the American version of democratic capitalism had won. And that, therefore, the main political questions were already mere technocratic questions. It embraced the version of neoliberal globalization that included outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries, deregulating the financial industry, all in the name of a certain conception of economic efficiency. What escaped them was the effect that such a project would have on working communities and the growing inequalities of wealth it would produce.

Q. You warn that part of the people who voted for Trump, as for other right-wing populist options in other parts of the world, did so because they shared certain xenophobic ideas, but another part of the support is due to legitimate grievances built over four decades of neoliberal governments. How are those complaints now, when we may find ourselves facing a second assault by Trump against Biden?

A. Those grievances are basically the same as when Trump left office, and that's why most Republican voters accept the big lie that the election was stolen. Much of working people see the left as more aligned with the values and interests of the well-educated professional classes than with those of the middle class and working people. Those were the grievances Trump appealed to. And they persist, unfortunately, because the progressive side has not yet found an alternative answer to those complaints. Right-wing populism is historically a symptom of the failure of progressive policies.

Q. But we've seen clear progressive policies from the White House in these two years.

A. To Biden's credit. His administration has done more than anyone expected to begin to move out of the neoliberal version of globalization. For example, it has not promoted free trade agreements. He was the first Democratic candidate in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university, so he was less attached to meritocratic faith than his predecessors. And he's a little more skeptical of economists who have advised previous Democratic and Republican administrations.

Q. Why does the populist right continue to connect more with the working class?

A. In part, the answer is that politics is not just about redistributive issues. It is also connected with patriotism. People need a sense of identity and strong community. And the left has failed to offer its own positive version of patriotism as an alternative to the narrow, intolerant and xenophobic hyper-nationalism offered by the populist right. Already in the first edition of Democratic Discontent I expressed my concern that people felt that the moral fabric of community is unraveling around them, in families and neighborhoods, but also at the national level. Globalization, or at least market-led globalization, ignored the meaning of national community. And that's something progressives haven't yet figured out how to address. For the right, for Trump, the border and immigration are a way to appeal to that desire for national identity. The left wants another approach to immigration. But it needs to offer an alternative idea of what holds us together as a country, as a community, as a nation.

Q. Proponents of globalization, he explains in his book, despised patriotism as almost atavistic. That is why it was a toxic patriotism, like Trump's or Brexit's, that prevailed. How do you build that other healthy version of patriotism that you defend?

A. We could start by asking what we owe each other as fellow citizens. And this enters into debates such as public health. The universal healthcare debate, at its best, is a debate about mutual obligations between citizens. If you look, Obama's health reform was defended mainly with technocratic arguments: that it was more efficient, and so on. But the underlying sense of national community has yet to be articulated. It is a moral and civic debate, not one of technocratic efficiency. And that's just one example. It is also a matter of national community to decide whether companies can move to other territories to pay less taxes. That can also be framed as a matter of economic patriotism. Circumventing one country's tax rates by moving operations to another country with lower rates. That's not just a technical problem. It's a problem of patriotism.

Q. Is the left afraid to talk about patriotism?

A. Yes. Because of that fear, that allergy almost, the monopoly of patriotism has been handed over to the right as a political argument. Big mistake, the right has exploited it very well.

Q. When we spoke last time, almost three years ago, I was hopeful that the pandemic would help make inequalities visible. It showed how dependent we are on the workers whom, in meritocratic logic, we had looked down on our shoulders. We even started calling them "essential workers." You saw there signs of a change in the way we value the dignity of work. Has this been the case?

A. I fear that moment has passed without there having been any serious reflection on essential workers, on how to align their recognition and their salary to the importance of their contribution.

Q. Another thing the pandemic showed is the importance of the state and politics. Has that, too, been forgotten?

A. I do not think we have forgotten the importance of the state. The fiscal constraints characteristic of the austerity era in many countries were rejected. Governments carried out large-scale fiscal stimulus and spending items that would have been inconceivable in the years after the 2008 crash. Another thing is the role of politics. The era of globalization taught us that there is no alternative to faith in the market. It was insisted that the neoliberal version of globalization is like a meteorological phenomenon. It is not subject to human control and should therefore not be open to democratic debate. But the financial crisis and growing inequalities were the product of deliberate policy decisions that could have been different. In retrospect, it is the space of politics that was eliminated.

Michael Sandel, philosopher and professor, on April 24 at IE headquarters in Madrid. Jaime Villanueva

Q. We now face the great challenge that as societies we must think together: the green transition, the fight against the climate crisis. How can we do this without repeating mistakes, without widening the gap between winners and losers again?

A. How we deal with climate change will be the most important test of what we are talking about, of the scope of genuine political debate. There is a tendency to face climate change as a technocratic problem, to get economic incentives right, market mechanisms. But it is more than a technological and economic problem. Fundamentally, it is a political issue. We need bottom-up climate policy, not abstract models or technocratic solutions. You need to start by having conversations with people, especially in communities where lives and jobs depend on fossil fuels. It will require political leadership and activism. The reason for the resistance to policies that would lead to a green economy is that there is deep skepticism on the part of working people. In large industrial areas, thousands of jobs were lost in the name of economic globalization. They were told: there will be losers, yes, but the gains of the winners will offset the losses of the losers. That worked in theory. But the compensation never happened. Now they will wonder if the same thing will not happen to them. And it's a legitimate question.

Q. In a conversation with Yuval Noah Harari you said that the climate change debate is not about knowing the facts, that it is not about education.

A. People tend to say that the reason for opposition to the green transition is that these people don't know enough about science. That we must teach them. And when we try to do that we get frustrated because they don't know enough to embrace our policies. But it's not about science and it's not about education. This is not about lecturing them about the dangers of global warming. It's about trust, fundamentally. It is a political issue and, as such, requires a genuine kind of grassroots civic participation and discussion.

Q. In Spain we are in an election year, how could politicians find the intermediate dialectical path between technocracy and shouting?

A. Politicians and parties must broaden the terms of the political conversation to include issues such as those we are discussing. But it is unrealistic to expect them to do it on their own. We need to understand that the broadest kind of public conversation can only come from within civil society.

Q. Is social media a suitable forum for that conversation?

A. We need to challenge the way social media works. We need to create platforms for public conversation that don't simply embrace the advertising-driven business model of tech companies. A business model that depends on commodifying attention, on keeping people as long as possible so that we can collect more and more personal data to sell them things that reinforce that cycle of consumerism, that's antithetical to the kind of public conversation we need. It is urgent to cultivate the lost art of democratic public conversation.

Q. If social democracy, with leaders like Biden or Scholz, is finding an economic discourse that looks back to the working class, where are the differences between the center-left and the more radical left now?

A. I think the relationship between the parties of the center-left and those of the more populist left is now in the process of being redefined.

Q. Where should they start?

A. The most powerful combination to rejuvenate the center-left is to connect the seemingly conservative values of patriotism and shared identity with a creative project of reconfiguring the economy to make it susceptible to democratic control, something traditionally associated with the populist left. Powerful notions of community, which seem to drink from conservative thinking, and economic power controlled by citizens. Connecting these two ideas is the future project of progressive politics.

Q. The war in Ukraine was left out of the pages of his book in this review. A war in Europe today, how does that fit into your thinking?

A. I believe that the war in Ukraine is the most dramatic example of the nonsense of neoliberal globalization. That trade ties would make war obsolete was a central idea of liberal globalism. Although it goes back to Montesquieu, who spoke of doux commerce. The more nations trade with each other, the less likely they are to fight each other, because trade ties will give them an interest in peace. We heard it again and again in the nineties and in the first two thousand as an argument for admitting China into the WTO, for example, and certainly in Germany for developing an energy dependence on Russia. That has clearly not been the case. Ukraine has been a reminder that politics and national borders will not disappear. We must develop patterns of trade with some sense of who the reliable partners are, not guided solely by the pursuit of supposed effectiveness. That's another idea that I think the war in Ukraine has brought: the idea that the economy is not autonomous. It is not a fact of nature. It is inevitably a political issue and should be the subject of democratic political debate.

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Source: elparis

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