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Jason Cowley: Shall we begin with Brexit? It’s
very close here at the moment: the Remain side had big leads in the
polls but it’s narrowed considerably since the conversation moved on
to immigration, porous borders and freedom of movement of migrant
workers within the EU. What forces are driving the desire for
Brexit?
Michael Sandel: As an outside observer, I don’t
feel it’s for me to offer a personal view about how Britain should
vote. I think there are really two questions. One is whether Brexit
would be good for Europe and the other is the question of whether it
would be good for Britain. It seems to me that for Britain to remain
in the EU would be a good thing for Europe, but whether it’s a good
thing for Britain is something that’s for British voters to decide.
A big part of the debate has been about economics
– jobs and trade and prosperity – but my hunch is that voters will
decide less on economics than on culture and questions of identity
and belonging.
JC Superficially, the United Kingdom seems a
becalmed society, but we’re experiencing eruptions. We had the
Scottish referendum in 2014, and we almost saw the break-up of the
British state. Now we’re having a referendum on whether we should
continue to be a member of the European Union. Why are there so many
unsettled questions? Why are the people of the United Kingdom so
restive?
MS I think the restiveness that you describe
reflects a broader disquiet with democracy that we see in most
democracies around the world today. There is a widespread
frustration with politics, with politicians and with established
political parties. This is for a couple of reasons; one of them is
that citizens are rightly frustrated with the empty terms of public
discourse in most democracies. Politics for the most part fails to
address the big questions that matter most and that citizens care
about: what makes for a just society, questions about the common
good, questions about the role of markets, and about what it means
to be a citizen. A second source of the frustration is the sense
that people feel less and less in control of the forces that govern
their lives. And the project of democratic self-government seems to
be slipping from our grasp. This accounts for the rise of
anti-establishment political movements and parties throughout Europe
and in the US.
JC One of the key slogans of the Brexiteers is to
regain control. Why does this resonate with so many? And are you
somewhat sympathetic to that line of argument?
MS Well, I do think it resonates deeply. And I see
this not only in Britain, I see this in the American political
campaign, and I see it looking at the rise of anti-establishment
parties throughout Europe. A theme running through these various
political movements is taking back control, restoring control over
the forces that govern our lives and giving people a voice.
As to whether I have some sympathy for this
sentiment, I do. I don’t have sympathy for many of the actual
political forms that it takes.
One of the biggest failures of the last generation
of mainstream parties has been the failure to take seriously and to
speak directly to people’s aspiration to feel that they have some
meaningful say in shaping the forces that govern their lives. And
this is partly a question of democracy: what does democracy actually
mean in practice? It’s also closely related to a question of culture
and identity. Because a sense of disempowerment is partly a sense
that the project of self-government has failed. When it’s connected
to borders, the desire to reassert control over borders, it also
shows the close connection between a sense of disempowerment and a
sense that people’s identities are under siege.
A large constituency of working-class voters feel
that not only has the economy left them behind, but so has the
culture, that the sources of their dignity, the dignity of labour,
have been eroded and mocked by developments with globalisation, the
rise of finance, the attention that is lavished by parties across
the political spectrum on economic and financial elites, the
technocratic emphasis of the established political parties. I think
we’ve seen this tendency unfold over the last generation. Much of
the energy animating the Brexit sentiment is born of this failure of
elites, this failure of established political parties.
JC One particularly notable trend is the failure
of mainstream social-democratic parties across Europe – the Labour
Party included. Many people who might once have been inspired by or
supported the centre left are now attracted by populist movements of
both left and right. So why is social democracy failing?
MS Social democracy is in desperate need of
reinvigoration, because it has over the past several decades lost
its moral and civic energy and purpose. It’s become a largely
managerial and technocratic orientation to politics. It’s lost its
ability to inspire working people, and its vision, its moral and
civic vision, has faltered. So for two generations after the Second
World War, social democracy did have an animating vision, which was
to create and to deepen and to articulate welfare states, and to
moderate and provide a counterbalance to the power of unfettered
market capitalism.
This was the raison d’être of social democracy,
and it was connected to a larger purpose, which was to empower those
who were not at the top of the class system, to empower working
people and ordinary men and women, and also to nurture a sense of
solidarity and an understanding of citizenship that enabled the
entire society to say we are all in this together. But over the
past, well, three or four decades, this sense of purpose has been
lost, and I think it begins with the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher
era.
JC You mean the neoliberal turn at the end of the
1970s – the advent of what you have called “market triumphalism”?
MS Right. It began there. But even when Reagan and
Thatcher passed from the political scene, and were succeeded by the
centre-left political leaders – Bill Clinton in the US, Tony Blair
in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany – these leaders did not
challenge the fundamental assumption underlying the market faith of
the Reagan/Thatcher years. They moderated, but consolidated the
faith, the assumption that markets are the primary instrument for
achieving the public good. And as a result, the centre left managed
to regain political office but failed to reimagine the mission and
purpose of social democracy, which became empty and obsolete. This
remains an unfinished project.
JC Unfinished even after the financial crisis,
when this was considered by many on the left to be a potential
social-democratic moment?
MS That’s right, and I think many of us expected
that the financial crisis would mark the end of an era of
unqualified embrace of the market faith and the beginning of new
debate about what should be the role and reach of markets in a good
society. What happened, sadly, is that the financial crisis came
and, although we did have some debate about regulatory reform, it
was a rather narrowly cast debate. We have not yet had the more
fundamental debate about what should be the role of markets in a
good society. As a result, social democracy has not only lost the
argument, it has failed to articulate a vision of a just society;
it’s failed to articulate a conception of democracy as
self-government. And so it is understandable that its traditional
constituencies in working-class and middle-class communities lost
confidence that social-democratic parties could be the vehicle
either for a renewed sense of community and mutual responsibility
or for collective democratic projects.
JC Is it also because trust has been lost in the
state – because of the economic failures of the mid-to-late 1970s,
the unravelling of the postwar consensus, stagflation and so on?
MS I think that has contributed to a loss of
confidence in the state but I think a further source of lost
confidence in the state is that, traditionally the democratic state
has as one of its primary purposes to be a vehicle for
self-government, to enable citizens to have some meaningful say in
how they are governed. Whereas today the state seems more an
obstacle to meaningful political participation and self-government
than a vehicle for it. Any revival of social democracy would require
not only an articulation of a conception of a just society, but also
forms of political participation that could renew the democratic
promise.
That’s as important as articulating a conception
of a just society, working out institutions and civic practices that
could revitalise the project of democracy as a vehicle for
self-government. The existing state fails to do that and I think
when people look to the European Union they also feel that it is not
a vehicle for democratic self-government. So I think both the nation
state and the European Union are seen to have failed in this regard.
JC So where does this leave us? I guess it leaves
us in the UK approaching Brexit?
MS Where it leaves us is with a potent backlash.
And it’s a backlash that is understandable. I think it’s a mistake
to view the backlash – and it finds expression in the ways that
we’ve been discussing – simply as people suddenly turning inward and
against immigrants as if this were simply a matter of mindless
bigotry by people, benighted people, who are ungenerous. It’s
important for people who make the case for Remain to be able to
offer a conception of Europe that could begin to address this
unanswered hunger for meaningful self-government, for having a
voice.
JC What about the EU as a social market with its
own social standards and rules? Is that potentially progressive? It
can impose certain transnational legislation on sovereign
governments from outside that benefits workers.
MS It’s potentially progressive in the policy
outcomes but that is not enough. A regulatory state, however
effective and desirable its social regulations may be, is
insufficient to win people’s allegiance unless the regulatory
process is connected to a democratic process with which people
identify as citizens who have a voice, who have a say.
It’s desirable to have the EU promulgate social
regulations that moderate market forces and protect workers and
protect the environment, protect health and safety. All of that’s
good but it’s insufficient and I don’t think it can be supported
politically unless it makes people feel they’re not being dictated
to by faceless bureaucrats from Brussels. Even if those faceless
bureaucrats promulgate very good social legislation, people want a
voice, people want a say, people want a more robust democratic
system. It’s a mistake to neglect that.
JC More generally, can free-market globalisation
be tamed? And could we be entering an era of more protectionist
economics? Consider the rhetoric of Trump.
MS I have no sympathy for Trump’s politics but I
do think that his success reflects the failure of established
parties and the elites in both parties to speak to the sense of
disempowerment that we see in much of the middle class. The major
parties have failed to speak to these questions. What Trump really
appeals to is the sense of much of the working class that not only
has the economy left them behind, but the culture no longer respects
work and labour.
This is connected to the enormous rewards that in
recent decades have been lavished on Wall Street and those who work
in the financial industry, the growing financialisation of the
American economy, and the decline of manufacturing and of work in
the traditional sense. There is also the sense that not only have
jobs been lost through various trade agreements and technological
developments, but the economic benefits associated with those
agreements and those technologies have not gone to the middle class
or to the working class but to those at the very top. That’s the
sense of injustice; but more than that, the fact that the nature of
political parties – I’m speaking about those in the US – have
become, since the time of the Clinton years, heavily dependent on
both sides, Democrats and Republicans, on the financial industry
for campaign contributions.
JC One thinks of the Clinton family’s relationship
with Goldman Sachs, for instance.
MS Well, there you have an example of how the
Democratic Party has become so Wall Street-friendly that it has
largely ceased to be an effective counterweight to the power of big
money in politics or to the financial industry and its influence in
politics. And this is why Bernie Sanders was able, though he will
not win the nomination, to have far more success than anyone
imagined. He was originally thought to be a fringe candidate who
would maybe get 5, 10 per cent of the vote. And yet he fought
Hillary Clinton almost to a draw in many of the Democratic
primaries. No one would have imagined that.
The mainstream of the Democratic Party had so
embraced the financial industry that it was unable to provide an
effective counterweight when it came to the financial crisis or to
the aftermath, the regulatory debate. And oddly enough, Trump from
the right and Bernie Sanders from the left have a good deal of
overlap. They’ve both been critical of free-trade agreements that
benefit multinational corporations and the financial industry but
haven’t in practice helped workers.
Bernie Sanders has been a big critic of the role
of money in politics, and Trump, though he’s a billionaire, also
appeals to the anger about money in politics, when, at least during
the primaries, he was able to claim that he was paying his own
campaign costs and not depending on Wall Street. Despite their
different ideological direction, they are both tapping in to the
frustration that we’ve seen reflecting the failure of the mainstream
parties.
JC What are the limits to markets? And what is the
alternative to market triumphalism, especially when moderate social
democracy is in crisis?
MS The only way of reining in the uncritical
embrace of markets is to revitalise public discourse by engaging in
questions of values more directly. Social democracy has to become
less managerial and technocratic and has to return to its roots in a
kind of moral and civic critique of the excesses of capitalism. At
the level of public philosophy or ideology it has to work out a
conception of a just society, it has to work out a conception of the
common good, it has to work out a conception of moral and civic
education as it relates to democracy and empowerment. That’s a big
project and it hasn’t yet been realised by any contemporary
social-democratic party.
A revitalised social-democratic response to the
power of markets would also try to come up with institutions for
meaningful self-government – forms of participatory democracy in an
age of globalisation, where power seems to flow to transnational
institutions and forms of association. It’s important also to find
ways to promote participatory democracy. This requires political
imagination and political courage. It’s a long-term project that
remains as a challenge, but until we make some progress in that
bigger challenge, I think that democratic politics will still be
vulnerable to the backlash that we’re witnessing, with Brexit in
Britain, some of the populist political movements in Europe, and
Trump in the United States.
There is an alternative – but the alternative is
to go beyond the managerial, technocratic approach to politics that
has characterised the established parties and the elites, to
reconnect with big questions that people care about.
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