“What is the matter with the Democrats?” asks Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker.
Two-in-five 2020 voters were college-educated. Even if you suck at math, that’s clearly not enough to win an election with the college-educated alone. What are Democrats planning to do about it in 2022? Have the college-educated urban sophisticates lobby the rural less-educated? Yeah, that ought to go over like a lead Zeppelin.
Harvard political philospoher Michael Sandel offers more than a critique of Democrats’ political positioning:
On the eve of Joe Biden’s election, Sandel argued, in a book titled “The Tyranny of Merit,” that the rise of authoritarian populism in countries from the United States to Germany to China had been made possible by a confusion of success with merit. Élites, Sandel argued, had come to believe that if they came out ahead it was because of talent and hard work; this left working-class people with the impression that if they had not come out ahead they lacked those things. All the hopeful talk about opportunity and talent rising in a system that did not really provide opportunities was a recipe for working-class alienation. Sandel writes that he is often asked how his students have changed during his forty-one years at Harvard, and that he can detect no consistent pattern save one: “Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present, more and more of my students seem drawn to the conviction that their success is their own doing, a product of their own effort, something they have earned.” This development, Sandel points out, took root even as studies were showing that there are more students at Harvard from the economic top one per cent than from the bottom fifty per cent.
The tyranny of merit, Sandel argues in his book, operates in two directions at once. “Among those who land on top, it induces anxiety, a debilitating perfectionism, and a meritocratic hubris that struggles to conceal a fragile self-esteem. Among those it leaves behind, it imposes a demoralizing, even humiliating sense of failure.” That isn’t a bad psychological sketch of the two political tribes right now. Though Democrats now view Barack Obama as a uniquely exceptional politician, and Hillary Clinton as a profoundly flawed one, Sandel writes that they shared an essential messaging strategy—to contrast their own “smart” policies with their opponents’ “dumb” ones. In “The Tyranny of Merit,” he assembles a tally: during his Presidency, Obama called his own policies “smart” more than nine hundred times.
Among the interested readers of “The Tyranny of Merit” was a German politician named Olaf Scholz, a onetime labor lawyer who, in the fall of 2020, had just been selected as the Social Democratic Party’s candidate to replace Angela Merkel. Last December, Scholz and Sandel held a public dialogue, during which Sandel was simultaneously translated into German. “He was deeply familiar with the themes of the book and in sympathy with the themes of the book,” Sandel told me when we met last week. “Olaf Scholz seemed to have absorbed and agreed with the diagnosis, as well as the prescription that flows from it, which is to shift the terms of public discourse from the rhetoric of rising—‘You can make it if you try’—to the dignity of work.” The rhetorical idea that Sandel urged on Scholz was simple: respect.
There is something to this. We have devalued manual work and overvalued white-collar careers. We define excellence by financial remuneration, by things easily measured, not by intrinsic worth. It was not always like this:
In discussing arête, Plato leads the examination of humankind’s quest for excellence. Henry Marrou describes arête as “the ideal value to which even life itself must be sacrificed.” Although Marrou considers ludicrous the translation of the word from ancient Greek to mean virtue (he prefers valor), virtue is the term used by translator W.K.C. Guthrie in two of Plato’s dialogues to describe this quality that is made and not born in us, the quality of excellence toward which we strive in our daily conduct in society.
I wrote sometime back:
My best friend’s dad when I was in high school repaired military aircraft in WWII. He spent the rest of his life reparing cars. His proudest moment from the war was the time he worked on Gen. Eisenhower’s plane. He was a simple man. That did not mean he was not damned good at his job.
But he gets no respect in this society for being the best auto mechanic he can be, for excellence in that. Perhaps what Sandel is reaching for has Greek origins.
Sandel turned out to be more optimistic about the Democratic plight than nearly any other liberal I’d heard recently, perhaps because he saw Biden as a fellow-traveller. “He’s in a way the first post-meritocrat, post-neoliberal Democrat since before Reagan,” Sandel said. In part, he said, this was a matter of personal background—Biden, he pointed out, was the first President in thirty-two years without an Ivy League degree—but it was also one of political orientation: “The standard Democratic slogan about ‘If you are able to go to college, you can rise as far as your efforts and talents can take you’—Biden didn’t talk that way. Neither, by the way, did Bernie Sanders.” If the parties of the center left had lost touch with the twentieth-century tradition that celebrated “the dignity of work,” then Scholz and Biden, according to Sandel, shared a helpful characteristic: “Each of them, it turns out, had an ear for this missing dimension of politics.”
A September article in The Guardian takes note of the shift:
… Covid seems to have led to a greater concern and emphasis on “common welfare”. A new vocabulary of respect and dignity, and a focus on “ordinary” occupations and lives, points to a post-pandemic politics of the left focused on redistributing status as well as income.
Rural America where Democrats are losing ground was hungry enough for it that Joe Biden became Everyman in the age of the gilded Trump. It was hungry enough for it that Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in the rural district now represented by Madison Cawthorn.
Wallace-Wells adds:
When I asked Sandel what he thought Biden ought to learn from Scholz, he listed three lessons: to reconnect with the working class, to adopt policies that reinforce the dignity of work, and “to give up on the neoliberal economic orthodoxies and technocratic meritocracy that prevailed in his party and set its tone for four decades.” But that didn’t sound to me very much like the real-world Biden, who had helped lead that same Party during that exact period. (It sounds more like Bernie Sanders.) The bracing part of Sandel’s argument lies in his conviction that Democrats must break with the meritocratic liberalism—the preference for the smart over the dumb, the slogans about believing in science, the cool technocratic ease—that defined Barack Obama. But the figure in whom Sandel places his hopes is Obama’s Vice-President, who publicly venerates the former President and employs much of his staff.
Sandel seemed to sense my skepticism. He grinned. “What I’m reading into Biden as post-neoliberal, post-meritocratic—it’s a work in progress,” he said. “I’m not suggesting that this is deliberate. He’s feeling his way as a politician—reading the possibilities.”
As are we all. Some more perceptively than others.