REVISTA AMERICANA DE DERECHO E IGUALDAD |

ISSUE 1 | 2021

AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY

LEFT, RIGHT, AND MERITOCRACY
Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit

Jennifer Hochschild*

As one would expect from my esteemed colleague Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit:
What’s Become of the Common Good?1 is provocative and important, ranging gracefully
across space and time and effortlessly from philosophical conundrums to telling anecdotes
or bits of data. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? offers salutary
critiques of its most likely readers, well-educated liberal Democrats: it is our “elite conde-
scension and credentialist prejudice”2 that is largely responsible for pushing less-educated
white Americans into a populist politics frequently expressed as racism, xenophobia,
and authoritarianism. Sandel insists that populism is not at its core racist and author-
itarian; bastante, it is a cry of anger, frustration, and humiliation about being manipulated
into losing a meritocratic race that technocratic, purportedly liberal, cosmopolites both
set up and declared themselves to have won.

That is a crude summary of a textured and nuanced argument, and I have emphasized
the shock value of Sandel’s more modulated analyses. Sin embargo, I don’t think I have
distorted his core assertion. I agree with a great deal of it and have learned even more.3
But because this is a comment and not a review, I will summarize a few key points in order

Author: *Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry Labarre Jayne Professor of Government and a professor of African and
African American Studies at Harvard University. She holds lectureships in the Harvard Kennedy School and Graduate
Escuela de Educación. She is a former president of the American Political Science Association and former chair of the
Department of Government.

1
2
3

MICHAEL J. SANDEL, THE TYRANNY OF MERIT: WHAT’S BECOME OF THE COMMON GOOD? (2020).
Id. en 205.
Anticipating Sandel’s proposal for lotteried admission among all qualified students to high-status universities in
order to blunt meritocratic excess, I once found myself proposing something similar in a job interview at an
excellent, very leftist, small liberal arts college. It did not go well.

© 2021 Jennifer Hochschild. Publicado bajo una Atribución Creative Commons-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00015

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LEFT, RIGHT, AND MERITOCRACY

to set up a few disagreements; coming to terms with The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become
of the Common Good? has sharpened my thinking in ways for which I am grateful.

Although the history of meritocracy winds through Martin Luther and John Calvin,
and then Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan, Sandel locates its
contemporary center in the American Democratic party. Successful coastal Democrats
promote globalization, light control of markets, and moral accolades for the most success-
lleno. Winners deserve their high status, and losers must accept the sting of failure; después de todo,
the magic of Pareto optimality will eventually improve the lot of everyone more than
redistribution or regulation could do. As Sandel points out, Bill Clinton, barack obama,
and Hillary Clinton all described any given preferred policy as “not just the right thing
to do, it’s the smart thing to do.”4 No wonder that those not deemed sufficiently smart
or right—disproportionately white, non-coastal, non-college-educated men—became
defensive, then humiliated, then angry. This dynamic began long before Donald Trump
descended his golden escalator. As I noted in Facing Up to the American Dream, pub-
lished in 1995, in the ideology of the American dream, “failure is unseemly for two rea-
hijos:
. . . [y] if success implies
virtue, failure implies sin.”5 Hence, the rise of populism, with its confusing mixture of
democratic impulses, racism and authoritarianism, communitarian strands, and admira-
tion for (algunos de) the rich.

. . . people who fail are presumed to lack talent or will

This analysis is at least partly correct, but it points to three puzzles. Primero, meritocracy
does not fully define the American left and—symmetrically—it does partly define the
American right. Por un lado, many liberal or leftist politicians, eruditos, and public
intellectuals challenge or reject meritocracy. In her speech accepting the presidential nom-
ination in 2016, Hillary Clinton urged her listeners to “put ourselves in the shoes of young
Black and Latino men and women who face the effects of systemic racism and are made to
feel like their lives are disposable.”6 Democratic candidates and office holders consistently
endorse an increased minimum wage, guaranteed health insurance regardless of purport-
edly bad behavior, affirmative action for “diverse” students, and other policies that are
not at the core of meritocracy. Bernie Sanders presented himself as the candidate of the
working class—twelve percent of his primary supporters later voted for Trump in the
2016 general election.7

4
5
6

7

SANDEL, supra note 1, en 93.
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD, FACING UP TO THE AMERICAN DREAM: RACE, CLASS, AND THE SOUL OF THE NATION 30 (1995).
Hillary Clinton, Address to the Democratic National Convention (Julio 28, 2016), in Hillary Clinton’s DNC Speech:
Full Text, CNN POLITICS (Julio 29, 2016), https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/28/politics/hillary-clinton-speech
-prepared-remarks-transcript.
Danielle Kurtzleben, Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted for Trump, NPR: POLITICS
(Aug. 24, 2017, 2:53 PM), https://www.npr.org/2017/08/24/545812242/1-in-10-sanders-primary-voters-ended
-up-supporting-trump-survey-finds.

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Por otro lado, conservative politicians and lay people often are strong meritocrats.
En 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney described to donors the “forty-seven percent”
of voters

who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that
they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.
. . . [METRO]y job is
not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal
responsibility and care for their lives.8

En 2020, President Trump issued an executive order proclaiming “the fundamental
premises underpinning our Republic: that all individuals . . . should be allowed an
equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual
merit.”9

Public opinion surveys, En realidad, show conservatives to be more likely than liberals to
hold individuals responsible for their mobility, poverty, or situation in life. As Sandel
points out, conservative voters are furious about “line-cutters” who push themselves for-
ward without earning their status, and they resent pampered city dwellers who would fail
in a rougher rural environment.10 In short, meritocracy is the province of neither left nor
bien. Bastante, Americans dispute what counts as merit, what conditions are necessary for
merit to be able to rise above constraints, who should create those conditions and how,
and when other values should supersede meritocracy. Those are intense and politicized
debates, perhaps now more than ever—but they are not primarily debates between leftist
meritocrats and right-wing communitarians.

Segundo, meritocracy is not new. Sandel recognizes that, por supuesto, but I think he over-
states the argument that merit has recently become much more tyrannous. I have room
here only to point to a few earlier exemplars—but consider (1) Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography with its elaborate checklist of virtues to be cultivated in order to attain
wealth and prominence;11 (2) Ralph Waldo Emerson’s uncharacteristically succinct obser-
vation that “there is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune, y entonces, en

8

9

10

11

David Corn, SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters,
MOTHER JONES (Sept. 17, 2012), https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/secret-video-romney-private
-fundraiser/.
Exec. Order No. 13, 950, 85 Fed. Reg. 60683 (Sept. 22, 2020), https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions
/executive-order-combating-race-sex-stereotyping/.
ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD, STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: ANGER AND MOURNING ON THE AMERICAN RIGHT (2016);
KATHERINE CRAMER, THE POLITICS OF RESENTMENT: RURAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN WISCONSIN AND THE RISE OF SCOTT WALKER
(2016).
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (2012).

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LEFT, RIGHT, AND MERITOCRACY

making money”;12 (3) Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” sermon, preached over
5,000 times at the turn of the twentieth century, which exhorted its hearers that

you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich.
be the most honest men you find in the community.
are to be sympathized with is very small.
United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings;13

. . . The men who get rich may
. . . [t]he number of poor who
. . . [t]here is not a poor person in the

and finally, (4) Pa’s song in the best-selling Little House in the Big Woods series:

It’s cowards alone that are crying,
And foolishly saying: “I can’t!"
It’s only by plodding and striving,
And labouring up the steep hill
Of life, that you’ll ever be thriving,
Which you’ll do, if you’ve only the will.14

None of these, por supuesto, are richly developed philosophical arguments—but all point
to a celebration of success and its attendant righteousness, coupled with scorn for failure
and its attendant disgrace. There is, tal vez, nothing new under the sun, and meritocracy
is certainly not new.

Third and most broadly, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
has induced me to ponder the historical migrations of “conservative” and “progressive” phi-
losophies. Meritocracy rose as what we might now call a left-wing challenge to traditional
methods of and justifications for inequality—ancestry, carrera, género, priestly anointing.
Thomas Jefferson’s call for governance by a “natural aristocracy” of “virtue and talents”
was an attack on the “artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either vir-
tue or talents.” It was, in its time, a boldly egalitarian claim. So, in its time, was Lincoln’s
claim that, although Black Americans never could or should be socially equal to whites, ellos
should be free, and have the full right to the fruits of their labor and to strive to improve their
social condition. So, in its time, were women’s demands to have their accomplishments
judged by the same criteria as men’s. En breve, meritocracy was a moral and philosophical
weapon against unfair hierarchy. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common
Bien? forces us to ponder whether merit has now become the foundation of a new unfair
hierarchy, to be challenged in its turn by populism or some other ideal.

12
13

14

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wealth (1860), https://emersoncentral.com/texts/the-conduct-of-life/wealth/.
Russell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (1882), https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/rconwellacresofdiamonds
.htm.
LAURA INGALLS WILDER, THE LONG WINTER 334 (1940).

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REVISTA AMERICANA DE DERECHO E IGUALDAD |

ISSUE 1 | 2021

This line of thinking about The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common
Bien? leads me to a final observation. At roughly the same time that meritocracy was
arguably switching sides from radical to status-quo-preserving, the politics of identity
was moving in the opposite direction. Liberals used to celebrate Americans’ ability to
choose how much of their heritage to retain and how much to turn themselves into a dif-
ferent kind of person that they preferred to be. I will never forget an elderly relative’s pride
as she described her successful struggle to move away from her ethnic family enclave and
culture in order to become an independent, secular scholar; she brought to mind the many
authors of the “from . . . to” genre of immigration memoirs.15 Reverend Martin Luther
King Jr. expressed the same then-radical impulse in his call to evaluate people by “the
content of their character” rather than “the color of their skin.”

The right has moved in the opposite direction with regard to the importance of the
identity into which one is born. At least before the twentieth century, conservatives
understood people’s life trajectories, and perhaps their characters, to be largely fixed by
the circumstances of their birth. In Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh is out-
raged that “the shades of Pemberley are to be thus polluted” by the marriage of Elizabeth
Bennett to her nephew, Señor. Darcy. Elizabeth does not dispute the view that rank at birth
should determine one’s life trajectory; she retorts that “In marrying your nephew, I should
not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s
daughter; so far we are equal.” History is full of examples of men proclaiming that women
must not be permitted to become politicians or medical doctors, or that descendants of
enslaved Africans were incapable of higher education, or that it was natural for Jews to be
money lenders and then bankers.

By now, to put it too crudely, identity politics has become the province of the left
rather than the right. To explore that shift is to move too far beyond The Tyranny of Merit:
What’s Become of the Common Good?—but the fact that Sandel has led me to ponder his-
torical changes in the intersection of political stances and philosophical arguments might
suggest to readers just how thought-provoking this book is.

15

A few examples: MARY ANTIN, FROM PLOTZK TO BOSTON (1899); EDWARD STEINER, FROM ALIEN TO CITIZEN (1914);
RICHARD BARTHOLDT, FROM STEERAGE TO CONGRESS (1930).

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