The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Michael Sandel: How the Left Paved the Way for Trump

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Why did Trump win? Did the Democrats lean too heavily on identity politics?Are people being driven by economic frustrations? Or cultural and social issues? Have we entered a new political era? Is this the end of an approach to economics that began with Reagan and Thatcher? The questions are endless for trying to understand this political moment and for diagnosing our current political condition. Harvard's Michael Sandel offers answers on all these and more. He explains to Steve Paikin why he thinks the left lost its way, how Bill Clinton paved the way for Trump, and how the left needs to reclaim a new type of identity politics and restore a sense of dignity to all of those that feel forgotten after three decades of hyper globalization. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Matt Nethersole. And I'm Tiff Lam. From TVO Podcasts, this is Queries. This season, we're asking, when it comes to defending your beliefs, how far is too far? We follow one story from the boardroom to the courtroom. And seek to understand what happens when beliefs collide. Where does freedom of religion end and freedom from discrimination begin? That's this season on Queries in Good Faith,

a TVO original podcast. Follow and listen wherever you get your podcasts. It's the economy, stupid, the democratic strategist James Carville famously said. Well, to understand the state of our politics today and Donald Trump's second term, our guest tonight might describe it this way. It's the discontent, stupid.

We welcome back Michael Sandel. He is a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, author of a new edition of Democracy's Discontent, and co-author of the most recent Equality, What It Means and Why It Matters. And he joins us now from Brookline, Massachusetts, just west of Boston, the hub of the universe. Professor Sandel, always great to have you on our program.

How you doing tonight? I'm doing well. It's good to be back with you, Steve. Thank you. We are one week into Trump's second term. This is during a time in which almost every incumbent democratic, small D democratic government in the world either lost or certainly saw its vote share reduced.

How would you characterize this moment in our collective political history? A moment of danger for democracy, and also a moment when the center left seems exhausted, politically but also ideologically, in need of rethinking its mission and purpose, part of what enabled Donald Trump to win a second term in the White House is that the Democratic Party, I think, had lost its energy, its sense of mission and purpose, and in particular,

its alienated working people, the working class voters who once constituted the primary base of their support. I find that an interesting response in as much as I watched the election campaign for president as carefully as anybody, I guess, and you know, weren't we told Kamala Harris had returned joy to politics in the country? There's certainly a lot of enthusiasm at all of her rallies. It didn't look like the Democratic Party was out of touch. It looked actually like after Biden left and Harris came in, they'd recaptured a bit of mojo. So why are you saying what you're saying? Well, it's true. She did energize the campaign after Biden's disastrous debate performance revealed the, the advancing age and its infirmities. But that energy proved short lived because while it was a morale booster for a time,

it wasn't based on any fundamental rethinking of what the Democratic Party had to offer, especially the working class voters who had faced nearly five decades of wage stagnation, and the sense that elites were looking down on them. The Democrats, Steve, haven't figured out a way to speak to the sense of grievance, the discontent with democracy. I dare say this is true of center left parties in many democracies around the world. The sense of discontent, even the anger and resentment that Trump is able to exploit, Democrats and center left parties need to figure out what's the source of it and how to speak to it.

We will remember in 2016, Donald Trump winning his first term. And a lot of people at the time said, well, this is just a one off. It's a fluke. He didn't win the popular vote. It's just the way the Electoral College worked out that he ended up winning. Well, clearly that was not the case because he's back. So do you think we have entered what I guess historians will look back at as a new era in politics. Yes.

And what the name of that new era will be remains to be seen. At the moment, the name of it is the era of Donald Trump, because it turns out, just as you say, his 2016 election turned out not to be a fluke. Joe Biden presented himself and many considered him to be kind of restoration of a sane, decent, mainstream politics. But in retrospect, I think the Biden years may be viewed as an interregnum in the age of Trump. Now, whether that is the description that historians will apply to this moment, depends a

lot on what the Democratic Party is able to do in opposition, rethinking its offer to the public, rethinking its economic project, but also how to speak to the anger, the worries, the anxieties of the age. I am happy to tell our viewers and listeners how ahead of the curve you were on these observations. And to do so, we're going to go back almost 30 years. I want to do a quote from the first edition of your democracy's

discontents. You wrote this in 1996. Here we go. To the extent that contemporary politics put sovereign states and sovereign selves in question, it is likely to provoke reactions from those who would banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders,

and promise a politics to, quote, take back our culture and take back our country, to, quote, restore back our culture and take back our country to quote, restore our sovereignty with a vengeance. Well, for a lot of people, 1996 was a time of great optimism. The Cold War was over. Democratic capitalism had pretty much shown that it had prevailed.

Frank Fukuyama told us it was the end of history, admittedly with a question mark at the end, but still you get the idea. You were not quite so optimistic even three decades ago. How come? Well, first, thanks for recalling that passage, Steve. Beneath the peace and prosperity of the 1990s and amidst the hubris that our version of democratic capitalism had won the day, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the

Soviet Union had given way. Beneath that optimism, and I would say also hubris, were rumbling sources of discontent, having to do partly with the sense that people were less and less in control of the forces that govern their lives. A growing sense of disempowerment, a worry about the project of self-government, that was one source of worry.

The other was a sense that the moral fabric of community, from family to neighborhood to nation, was unraveling around us. So a sense of disempowerment, that one's voice didn't matter, that we didn't have a meaningful say in shaping the forces that governed our lives, and the loss of community. These were palpable if then inchoate sources of discontent with democracy. And now we awaken to a world in which those inchoate sources of discontent have hardened

into anger and resentment, having in large part to do, I think, with the way the market-driven or neoliberal version of globalization was played out and the growing inequalities it created and the deepening divide between winners and losers over recent decades, the mainstream parties, and especially the Democratic Party in the US, and I would say mainstream center left parties in many democracies, were actually among the most enthusiastic supporters of that version of globalization and deregulation. And then we had the financial crash and then we had the bank bailout. And that's what hardened.

That's what hardened the anger, I think. And Democrats and center-left parties haven't figured out how to address that anger. Donald Trump has, even if the solutions he proposes don't really won't remedy that underlying inequality in sense that people are being looked down upon by elites. Well, Senator Bernie Sanders, who's from a state right next door to your own, his explanation for why the Democrats have been losing goes like this, quote, Well, Senator Bernie Sanders, who's from a state right next door to your own, his explanation for why the Democrats have been losing goes like this, quote, it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic party which has abandoned working class people would find

that the working class has abandoned them. Do you agree with Senator Sanders? I think he's right about that. I think that the Democratic Party, by embracing, and this goes back to the 1990s, it began the market triumphalist faith as a governing philosophy. Began with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who argued explicitly that government is the problem and markets have the solution.

But even after they were succeeded on the political scene by center left parties, Bill Clinton in the United States, and the new Democrats, Tony Blair in Britain, Gerhard Schroeder in Germany, what these center left successors to the Reagan era did was they softened the harsh edges of a pure laissez-faire system, but they never challenged the fundamental premise of the market face, the idea that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and

achieving the public good. And as a result, we never really had a debate about the role and reach of markets. Instead, we had free trade agreements. We insisted on the free flow of capital across national borders, all in the name of globalization. It was a very particular version of globalization. And yet it was presented as inevitable, as a force of nature. And so people felt not only that inequality was deepening, but that they really, their voices didn't matter.

They weren't really being consulted. We weren't debating whether this new set of economic arrangements and the deregulation of the financial industry, whether that really served the public good. And so this is why I think the Democratic Party has been the primary target of the populist backlash against these arrangements. I suspect you could add Canada's Prime target of the populist backlash against these arrangements. I suspect you could add Canada's Prime Minister of the Day,

Jean Chrétien, to that list of center-left first ministers, presidents, and so on, because he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement with Bill Clinton. And I guess my question is, if we could go back in time, would your recommendation to them have been, let's not do these free trade agreements. Let's stop globalization, because 30 years from now, you have no idea what headache you've got waiting for you.

Well, depends what you mean by globalization. If you mean developing economic and political and social relationships among countries. That's a good thing. Generally speaking, trade is a good thing. But what those free trade agreements of the neoliberal era were mainly about, we're not reducing tariffs, which were already pretty low by that time, they were mainly about enforcing intellectual certain, you know, property rights, intellectual property rights regime so that Disney could continue to patent Mickey Mouse long into the future. Pharmaceutical patents that would be extended to prevent the generic

manufacturer of drugs. There were all kinds of things built into those pre-trade agreements. So the mistake was the kind of hyper-globalization that we had that essentially discredited national national community and disempowered nation states, which are the primary vehicle for enabling citizens to make their voices heard. And so there was an insistence on free capital flows unregulated across borders. This led to all kinds of financial instability.

The system did produce economic growth. That much of the promise, it did achieve. Problem is, almost all of the growth of that period went to the top 10% or 20%. The bottom half, in the United States at least, experienced in real terms, stagnant wages for nearly five decades. So the gains were not fairly distributed. And then when the deregulation led to the financial crisis,

and then when the same political actors bailed out Wall Street and left ordinary homeowners to fend for themselves, it's no surprise that ordinary citizens were angry. bailed out Wall Street and left ordinary homeowners to fend for themselves. It's no surprise that ordinary citizens were angry. Let me put a new issue on the table here. And to set it up, I'll tell you about a conversation I had with somebody after the American presidential election passed. And they said, I'm mortified that Trump won. Can't stand him.

But on the other hand, if the Democrat Party message they take from this is that they need to be more worried about the people, Professor Sandell, you're talking about, and not worry so much about what pronouns we use, well, then it will be all to the good. Question. How much of the Democratic Party loss

is wrapped up in so-called identity politics? I think identity politics did play a part, but I think we sometimes distinguish too sharply, too cleanly between economic issues and identity or cultural issues. Here's why. All of politics, almost all of politics, Steve, involves competing conceptions of identity, ultimately. What does it mean to be a citizen? What are our mutual obligations to one another? And so identity and economics are bound up together.

During the age of globalization, there was a message, an implicit message about identity that goes beyond woke rhetoric. The message was this, the real divide we were told, you remember back then, is no longer left and right. It's between open and closed, which really meant if you're challenging financial deregulation and capital flows and hyper-globalization, you're kind of closed-minded. You're for closing us off from the world. It's on a par with parochialism at best and bigotry at worst to be closed. Whereas open, you were for free capital flows, the free trade agreements, the deregulation,

the rise of finance and the rest. So even the debate about the economics of globalization carried with it implicitly this certain view of identity. National borders matter less. Patriotism, that's something that the right wingers talk about. The flow of immigrants across borders, we don't really want to get into that

because we sort of believe now that borders don't matter. And by implication, if borders don't matter, neither do national identities. But what about shared citizenship? So here's where economics and identity are intertwined. They go together. And I think the Democrats missed that, and they embraced a certain view of identity that discredited

people's aspiration to belong, to be situated in their world, to feel a sense that citizenship matters, that we have mutual obligations for one another. And so I think it was a mistake for Democrats to cede patriotism sense of community to the right rather than to reinterpret the meaning of patriotism, community, and solidarity to inform a progressive politics. Did they not try to do that though? I mean, the word freedom was all over that democratic presidential nomination race. Why didn't it work? Well freedom was, but freedom understood too narrowly, too individualistically, I would say.

By freedom, Americans generally and the Democrats especially in this campaign really mean the freedom to choose. Now in the context of the debate about abortion restrictions, that's understandable. And that was a potent and legitimate issue. That was the central meaning of freedom in the recent presidential campaign, insofar as Democrats invoked it. But there is also a broader conception of freedom

that goes beyond freedom of individual choice. And that's the freedom we enjoy when we deliberate together as fellow citizens about self-government, about the purposes and ends appropriate to us, to this community. The freedom we enjoy, you might call it civic freedom, rather than the freedom of individual choosing selves, which too often becomes assimilated to a kind of consumerist freedom. And the Democratic Party, and I would say American politics generally, has a hard time retaining contact with the stronger civic conception of freedom bound up with sharing and community and self-government and asking, what are the

economic arrangements hospitable to self-government? That's the debate about freedom, too, about civic freedom. And we too often lose sight of that dimension of freedom, Steve. You will well remember during the Biden administration, there was a train derailment in a small place called the East Palestine, Ohio. And, you know, there was a great deal of controversy about how actively or not the federal government responded to the disaster that was happening there. It was a red state.

It was the kinds of people who were affected are the kinds of people you are talking about right now. And it's, I guess the issue I want to raise here The kinds of people who were affected are the kinds of people you are talking about right now. And it's, I guess the issue I want to raise here is an interview that Joe Rogan did with now Vice President J.D. Vance, which really indicates how changed the Republican Party of our youth is nowadays. Here's the clip, Vance and Rogan, and we'll come back and chat on the other side. Sheldon, roll it if you would. So I talked about this train disaster in East Palestine, and the railroad companies hate

me because I kind of went on a crusade against them afterwards. And what I realized is, think of all the costs of that disaster. Think of the healthcare costs, the welfare costs from people who lost their jobs, the declining home values in that community, just all of the costs absorbed by that community, and the railroads are paying slap-on-the-hand fines. And it sort of occurred to me that the reason they're not more serious about these train disasters is because they're privatizing their wards, but when a major train disaster happens, who picks up the tab?

It's the local residents and it's the American taxpayer. And that's something that fundamentally has to change. Now that's a statement that could have come out of Bernie Sanders' mouth. And I'm wondering, what does it say about politics today that the Republican vice president of the United States and one of the more left-wing senators in your country seem to be in complete alignment on that kind of thing.

Well, it's an interesting observation, Steve, and listening to JD Vance in that clip, one could almost believe that he's a populist. Now, what's happened and what you're highlighting is that there are strands of populism, that there is a right-wing version of populism and a left-wing version of populism. And the predominant one since 2016 in the United States has been the right-wing version of populism, which as historically is bound up with, well, it's an uneasy amalgam of railing against elites, unaccountable corporate power, and it's historically been mixed up with nativism, racism,

and anti-Semitism. This is not a new feature of right-wing populism. It goes all the way back to the early days of populism in the American second half of the 19th century. And there has also been a left populism. Bernie Sanders represents it now, which is concerned also with unaccountable concentrated power in big corporations, the railroads in this example. the tech companies today, but that it does not traffic in the kind of nativism and xenophobia and racism that some of Trump's

political appeals reach for. So it's this has this connection to populism does represent a departure for J.D. Vance and that wing of the MAGA movement, a departure from the traditional mainstream country club, republicanism, which was mainly in support of big business. So the real open question here for the MAGA movement is whether it will develop this strand of populist critique of concentrated economic power, or whether it will simply use populist rhetoric at election time, but govern in a kind of plutocratic populist way, which is what Trump did in his first

term. His only real achievement was a massive tax cut that went mainly to the wealthy and to big corporations. So that's plutocratic populism. And the inaugural tableau, did you see? Yes. Up behind him, right among his family, no less, were the titans of big tech, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. This is not a populist tableau.

These are the big tech companies and moguls that real populists want to challenge and hold a democratic account. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out, the tension between these two strands within the MAGA movement. Indeed. There looked like there were more billionaires

per square inch at that inauguration than at anyone I've ever seen before. the MAGA movement. Indeed. There looked like there were more billionaires per square inch at that inauguration than at anyone I've ever seen before. Sometimes little incidents or little stories can tell a very big story. And you had such an example take part in your life. And I'd love you to finish the story about while you're on vacation in Florida and you get on into an elevator and you get into a very short conversation with a woman from Iowa, which is good old middle America, red state, Donald Trump territory.

Pick up the story from there if you would. She asked me, where are you from? I said, Boston. And she said, well, I'm from Iowa. And, you know, we can read in Iowa. I didn't know where that came from. I hadn't said I'm from Harvard. I hadn't said I'm a professor. All I said was Boston.

And then as she got out of the elevator over her shoulder, she said, we don't much like people on the coasts. And this takes us back, Steve, to the conversation we were having about the politics of identity. And this was not really about, this was not about woke identity. This was about the sense that many people have, many working people, many people who live in rural areas or in the middle of the country, that coastal elites, credentialed elites, well educated elites look down on them. And this is what I've called the tyranny of merit, the way in which the sense among many of the winners of

globalization have not been content only with the winnings, but also want to claim that their winnings are their due, that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit. And so it's interesting that she said, we can read in Iowa, which shows that the resentment against, against elites is not against elites who are in business or wealthy, as Trump is wealthy. It's resentment against credentialed elites, against meritocratic elites, who many people feel look down on them.

And so one way of summing it up is that the market-driven version of hyper-globalization deepened the divide between rich and poor. But the meritocratic hubris of the successful during that same period is what created the divide between winners and losers. That's the divide that's toxic to our politics, that polarizes us. And that recognition, I think, should be the starting point for a bold project of democratic renewal that I hope will lead to a new definition, a more energized definition of what progressive politics can be.

That story is so fabulous because, of course course she would not know that you feel the exact same way about this issue as she does. And do you wish that you had an extra moment with her to say, hey, look, lady, I feel your pain and in fact I've written books about this. I'm with you. You didn't get a chance to say that, I guess. Well, I didn't think quickly enough, but if I had Steve, I would have said, I don't doubt that you can read in Iowa, and I'd like to give you something to read. My book, The Tyranny of Merit, where you're coming from. Exactly right. Well, okay, let's finish up on this

then. Clearly, there is a sense in red state America, particularly that coastal elites are looking down their noses at people and They feel that they have been the big losers since globalization of the last 30 years I'd like your prescription on how we can even begin To kind of restore a relationship where red state and blue state can talk to each other again where people who feel looked down upon can reclaim can reclaim their dignity and where people who feel looked down upon can reclaim their dignity, and Americans can stop these culture, if not stop, at least reduce the culture wars.

How do we do that? Well, I think we need to begin by shifting the political rhetoric, but also the political project, away from saying the solution to inequality and wage stagnation is for you to improve yourself if you're struggling by going and getting a college degree. About 2 thirds of Americans do not have four-year degrees. So it's folly to create an economy that

makes a necessary condition of dignified work and a decent life a four-year degree that most people don't have. So I would shift the terms of political argument toward what does it mean to honor and renew the dignity of work, to make life better, and to honor and recognize everyone who contributes to the common good through the work they do, the families they raise, the communities they serve, whether or not they have prestigious credentials. That would be one starting point. I think we also have to remake civil society. But one of the most corrosive effects of the

deepening inequalities has been that we increasingly live separate lives, a kind of class segregation almost that tracks education to some degree. Democracy does not require perfect equality, but what it does require is that people from different walks of life, different class backgrounds, different ethnic backgrounds, encounter one another in the ordinary course of the day. Because this is how we learn to negotiate and to abide our differences. And this is how we come to care for the common good. And so we need to rebuild those class mixing institutions, the public places and common spaces that gather us together,

even inadvertently, well, to speak of our shared love of baseball, in a stadium, in a sports stadium, or in a library, or in public transit, or in a public park where our kids go to play rather than opting out, seceding from public places by going to the private health club. So rebuilding the civic infrastructure

for a shared democratic mode of life, Steve, I think is an on-the-ground concrete step that could begin to heal the divide and enable us, from time to time at least, to talk to one another. That is so wise. And had you not said it, I was going to say that if you look at any home movies from Fenway Park

from 50 years ago, the rich and the poor were sitting together in the stands, and nowadays the rich are up in their private boxes and the lower income people aren't going to the games anymore at all, because even to sit in the outfield is 75 bucks, which is certainly well beyond the ability of most. Yeah, you're so right. We got to figure that out. Michael Sandel, we always appreciate the fact that you come on this program and share your wisdom with us.

Thank you for taking our calls. And until next time, thank you, sir. Thank you, Steve. Really appreciate it.