Michael Sandel Exposes How Meritocracy's Toxic Promise Destroys Democratic Society

Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel reveals how the meritocratic ideal creates elite hubris, working-class resentment, and democratic breakdown in explosive interview on populism's deeper roots.

Key Takeaways

• Meritocracy corrodes social solidarity by creating hubris among winners and humiliation among losers
• Current populist backlash has roots stretching back to 1990s disempowerment and community erosion
• The American Dream narrative masks reality that upward mobility takes five generations versus two in Denmark
• Educational credentialism became a weapon of class division rather than genuine opportunity expansion
• Liberal neutrality toward moral questions created a vacuum filled by fundamentalism and hyper-nationalism
• Technology and social media destroyed civic spaces essential for democratic deliberation and community building
• Trump's authoritarianism exploits legitimate grievances that mainstream politics failed to address for decades
• Democratic renewal requires rebuilding class-mixing institutions and affirming dignity of all work
• Universities became symbols of elite condescension rather than engines of broad-based social mobility.

Meritocracy's Corrosive Impact on Social Solidarity

Sandel argues that meritocracy fundamentally undermines democratic society by creating psychological divisions that destroy the mutual respect necessary for democratic governance.

• The meritocratic ideal "corrodes solidarity" and "induces a kind of hubris among the winners and humiliation among those who lose out," creating unbridgeable social divisions
• Winners develop dangerous overconfidence in their own merit, leading them to "inhale too deeply of our own success to forget the luck and good fortune that help us on our way"
• The system encourages successful people to "forget our indebtedness to those who make our achievements possible" and "look down on those less fortunate than themselves"
• Even in a perfectly fair meritocracy, talent distribution remains unearned: "having the talents that enable me to get ahead, that's not really my own doing, however hard I may work to develop those talents"
• Sandel uses LeBron James as an example: despite training hard, "he's lucky to live at a time when everybody around the world loves basketball" rather than during the Italian Renaissance when "they cared more about fresco painters"
• The philosophical core problem involves recognizing that "living in a society and at a time that prizes my talents, that too is my good luck" rather than personal achievement
• Success depends on complex interactions between effort, talent, and social valuation that individuals cannot control, making moral claims to deserve full market rewards questionable
• The meritocratic mindset transforms necessary job matching (wanting qualified surgeons and pilots) into broader moral judgments about human worth and social contribution

Sandel emphasizes that while merit-based job allocation makes practical sense, extending this logic to moral judgments about who deserves what creates toxic social dynamics incompatible with democratic equality.

The 1990s Origins of Democratic Discontent

Despite widespread triumphalism following the Cold War's end, Sandel identified emerging problems that would later explode into populist backlash across Western democracies.

• Beneath 1990s surface prosperity, Sandel detected "mounting discontents" including "a growing sense of disempowerment" and feeling that "we were less and less in control of the forces that governed our lives"
• The second major concern involved community breakdown: "the sense that the moral fabric of community was unraveling from neighborhood to community to nation"
• People increasingly felt "unmoored" and "not situated in the world," experiencing erosion of "the sense of belonging that the social fabric was eroding"
• These problems remained "intimations rumbling beneath the surface" during the 1990s boom, but mainstream politics "failed to attend to the rising sense of disempowerment and the loss of community and belonging"
• Three decades of political neglect "eventually generated a kind of toxic politics of backlash" where discontent sources "became enlarged, deepened to the point where they upended our politics"
• Globalization's economic benefits went "mainly to the top 10 and 20%" while "the bottom half of our population faced stagnant wages in real terms for nearly five decades"
• The wealthy developed attitudes during this period where "those who landed on top came to believe that their success was their own doing, the measure of their merit"
• This created a moral judgment system where successful people concluded "that they therefore deserve the full bounty that the market bestowed upon them" while "those who struggled, those left behind during those decades must deserve their fate, too"
• The combination of rising inequality with meritocratic justification created "the sense of grievance and resentment that fueled the populist backlash that we now witness and live with"

Sandel's early identification of these trends demonstrates how current democratic crises have deeper structural roots than most political analysis acknowledges.

American Dream Mythology Versus Mobility Reality

Sandel dismantles the comforting narrative that America offers unique opportunities for advancement, revealing how this myth obscures actual barriers to social mobility.

• Americans tell themselves "a comforting story that yes, inequalities of income and wealth may be greater in the United States than in many European countries, but we don't need to worry so much about inequality"
• The mythological thinking suggests Americans don't need to worry about class divisions like "those class-ridden societies in old Europe because in America it's always possible to rise"
• This narrative claims "no one is consigned to the fate of their birth," but "that story, comforting though it is, doesn't match the facts on the ground"
• International mobility research reveals "the societies with the greatest upward mobility across generations are also the societies with the greatest equality to begin with"
• Specific data shows dramatic differences: "in Denmark, for example, it takes two generations" for someone born in the bottom 10% to reach median income, while "in the United States, it takes five generations"
• Sandel concludes ironically that "the American dream is alive and well and living in Copenhagen," demonstrating how "mobility is not an alternative to inequality as the American myth often suggested"
• The relationship proves that "equality is a condition of mobility" because "if everyone in the society has access to health care and to good education and to basic living standards," then even non-wealthy people "have a chance to take full advantage of the opportunities to display their talents"
• Immigration success stories, while worthy of celebration, should not create "complacent assumption that generally speaking it's possible to rise from poor background to affluence in a short period of time"
• Politicians across the spectrum promoted higher education as mobility solution, telling people "if you want to compete and win in the economy go to university" with slogans like "what you earn will depend on what you learn"

The gap between American mobility mythology and empirical reality helps explain why traditional political promises about opportunity and advancement ring hollow for many working-class voters.

Educational Credentialism as Class Warfare

Rather than democratizing opportunity, higher education became a weapon of class division that intensified social resentment and political polarization.

• Research by Raj Chetty's team studied "1,800 colleges and universities in the United States" asking what percentage of students "arrive from poor families (bottom 20%) and rise to affluence as adults (top 20%)"
• The shocking result: only "2%" of students achieve this upward mobility, demonstrating that "higher education is like an elevator, a very effective elevator, but in a building that most people enter on the top floor"
• Elite university demographics reveal the class system's persistence: "in Ivy League universities in the United States, despite generous financial aid policies, there are more students from families in the top 1% than there are students from families in the bottom half of the country combined"
• Political messaging around education created implicit insults: "If you're struggling in the new economy and if you didn't get a degree, your failure is your fault. You didn't improve yourself in the way we urged you to do"
• This rhetoric deflected responsibility from "parties who presided over the version of market-driven globalization that produced the widening inequalities" by treating outcomes "as if they were just a fact of nature"
• The educational divide became the primary political cleavage: "one of the biggest political divides in voting behavior was by education - those who had university degrees and advanced degrees voted against Brexit and against Trump"
• Conversely, "those without degrees voted for Brexit and for Trump and that pattern has continued," creating a new form of class politics based on credentials rather than economics
• Public confidence in higher education collapsed along partisan lines, with Republican support dropping from majority approval to "only 19% consider higher education in American universities on the whole a force for good"
• Working-class anger targeted "credentialed elites, academic elites, elites in the media, the professional classes who now disproportionately vote Democrat" rather than economic elites per se
• The reversal represents a complete political realignment where "traditionally, working people were the primary base of support for the Democratic Party" but now "the majority of working people vote for figures like Trump"

Educational credentialism transformed from a potential equalizer into a primary source of social division and democratic breakdown.

Liberal Neutrality's Dangerous Moral Vacuum

Sandel argues that attempts to keep moral questions out of politics create dangerous voids that extremist movements inevitably fill with fundamentalism and nationalism.

• Liberal theory claims "we live in pluralist societies" where "we disagree about moral and spiritual questions" and therefore "should seek principles of justice that don't depend on any particular conception of the good life"
• Sandel challenges this neutrality aspiration because "it's not really possible to decide many of the hard questions of policy that we face in democratic societies without at least implicitly taking a stand on values or virtues or the good life"
• Contentious issues require moral engagement: "can we really decide whether abortion should be permitted, and if so, under what conditions, without implicitly taking a stand on the fraught theological question of when human personhood begins?"
• Similarly, embryonic stem cell research debates involve unavoidable moral questions about "whether sacrificing a very early blastocyst count or doesn't count as morally equivalent to taking a life"
• The neutrality approach "creates an empty kind of public discourse" that "hollows out public discourse" and "empties political debate of larger moral meaning and purpose"
• When moral reasoning gets excluded, "people feel that issues are being decided without genuine public debate" by "courts or technocrats" rather than democratic deliberation
• The artificial separation cuts off essential elements of democratic participation: "if democratic citizens can't reason from their own moral convictions, it cuts off an important part of what democratic public discourse is all about"
• People naturally "want politics to be about big questions" and "want to be able to give expression to their values and their moral commitments in politics"
• Suppressing moral discourse creates "a hunger to fill that moral void" and "invariably the way it will be filled if we don't have healthy explicit debate about moral questions" involves dangerous alternatives
• "That moral vacuum will be filled by narrow, intolerant, vengeful moralisms consisting either of religious fundamentalism or hyper nationalism"
• This pattern appears globally: "when a purely market society drives out traditional values and spiritual sources of meaning, what fills that space is hyper nationalism"

Sandel's critique suggests that healthy democracies require robust moral discourse rather than technocratic neutrality that pretends values-based questions can be avoided.

Technology's Assault on Democratic Discourse

Social media and digital technology systematically undermine the civic capacities essential for democratic deliberation and community building.

• Sandel instituted a "no screens policy" in his Harvard classroom because "however good a lecturer I might think myself as being, I can't compete for the attention of my students with the scrolling and swiping that is available to them on their screens"
• Students find the policy "extremely difficult" to follow, revealing addiction-level dependency on digital stimulation during learning environments
• Despite initial resistance, many students "appreciated the prohibition because it enabled them to pay attention to focus and to think and to listen and to learn in a way that would not have been possible otherwise"
• Democratic discourse requires "the civic art of listening by which I mean not just listening for the words but listening attentively for the principles and the convictions lying behind the arguments of people especially of people with whom we disagree"
• Social media systematically undermines this capacity: "We're not very good at listening and social media makes this hard" by encouraging reactive rather than thoughtful engagement
• The technology creates broader attention problems beyond politics: "being absorbed together and attentive together" represents "important human powers and capacities to direct our attention to what's worthwhile rather than to what's trivial or merely distracting"
• Sandel worries "that we're losing that capacity" and "we're not really helping the next generation develop that capacity" through constant digital distraction
• The deeper philosophical issue involves human freedom: "by capturing by commandeering and redirecting our attention, social media deprives us of an important dimension of human freedom which is not only about exercising my will, it's also about directing my attention"
• Family dinner conversations suffer similar degradation when "there are people looking at their phone at the dinner table rather than engaging in a family discussion"
• Even shared screen time requires protection from fragmentation: watching movies together becomes problematic "if someone then starts looking at their phone because even though we're not speaking at that moment to one another, being absorbed together and attentive together" has value
• The solution requires institutional support: "I think we need public debate and institutional support for this whether it's within a university or within a school district or a school system"

Sandel views resistance to digital distraction as essential for preserving human capacities necessary for both democratic citizenship and meaningful personal relationships.

Trump's Authoritarian Exploitation of Legitimate Grievances

While condemning Trump's lawless overreach, Sandel argues that effective resistance requires addressing the deeper problems that created conditions for authoritarian appeal.

• Trump's measures include many that are "lawless, unconstitutional" and "it will take a long time for the courts to sort through them all" while uncertainty remains about "to what extent the courts will check and restrain his overreaching in the direction of autocratic executive power"
• Specific authoritarian actions include "revoking student visas of students who are in this country legally but who participated in demonstrations that he dislikes or have expressed political views of one kind or another that he doesn't like"
• The administration engages in "intimidating, even extorting law firms that he considers hostile because they represented his political opponents" and "extorting universities to change their hiring and admissions policies under threat of being deprived of funding for research"
• However, legal resistance alone proves insufficient: "for those who worry about the autocratic direction of the Trump presidency, it's not enough simply to say we'll take him to court and hope they reign him in"
• Effective opposition requires "a broader political reckoning" where Trump opponents "have to ask themselves, how is it that we created the conditions that led so many people to embrace this figure?"
• Self-reflection must examine "what did we in our policies permit that led many of our fellow citizens to feel that they are looked down upon, that the work they do is not dignified"
• Mainstream politics failed to address "the widening inequalities of income and wealth produced by the version of globalization carried out with the outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries and with the stagnant wages"
• The 2008 financial crisis created lasting resentment through "the bailout of Wall Street banks that was endorsed by both mainstream parties" which "produced anger across the political spectrum"
• This anger manifested differently across the political spectrum: "It led to the Occupy movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders on the left and it led to the Tea Party movement and the success of Trump on the right"
• Structural problems include "the outsized role, especially in the American political system, of money in politics" which predictably increases "the sense of disempowerment of ordinary citizens"
• The ultimate solution requires "a bold project of democratic renewal, reweaving the social fabric, rebuilding community and seeking a more elevated, more morally robust kind of public discourse than the kind to which we've become accustomed"

Sandel's analysis suggests that defeating authoritarianism requires not just legal resistance but fundamental reconstruction of democratic institutions and political culture.

Michael Sandel's diagnosis reveals how decades of meritocratic thinking, educational credentialism, and moral neutrality created the perfect conditions for democratic breakdown. His call for renewed moral discourse, rebuilt civic institutions, and recognition of everyone's contribution to collective prosperity offers a path beyond both technocratic liberalism and authoritarian populism. The challenge involves creating politics that affirms human dignity while fostering the shared civic life essential for democratic governance.