The Revolt against the Elites – Glenn Loury
GLENN LOURY: So what is the core concern at the root of your argument in Tyranny?
MICHAEL SANDEL: It goes back, really, four decades, during which time the divide between winners and losers, Glenn, has been deepening, poisoning our politics, and setting us apart. I think this divide has partly to do with the widening inequalities of recent decades, but it’s not only that. It has also to do with the changing attitudes towards success that have accompanied the rising inequalities. Those who’ve landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing, the measure of their merit, and that they therefore deserve the whole bounty the market bestows upon them and by implication that those who struggle have no one to blame but themselves. So it’s these attitudes toward success, I think, that have created a society of winners and losers and that this explains a lot, I think, of why we are so deeply polarized.
So elites will pretend they think they don’t really deserve their high status, all the while really thinking that they do, and working hard to shore up the anti-competitive structures that helped put them in place and assure their children will find similar positions.
The problem isn’t meritocracy, but false meritocracy. Our current elites want to declare the game is over, now that they’ve won. It should not work that way.