DIAGNOSING DEMOCRACY’S DISCONTENT

AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY

DIAGNOSING DEMOCRACY’S DISCONTENT
Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit

Sarah Song*

These are troubling times for democracy: mounting inequality, growing xenophobia, Und
persistent public support for autocratic politicians who have little regard for democratic
institutions. In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?,1 Michael
Sandel contends that mainstream parties and politicians have failed to understand the
source of the discontent fueling the populist backlash in the United States and Europe.
The problem is not only an economic one generated by global trade and technological
ändern, nor is it primarily about xenophobia and racism against immigrants and racial
minorities. It is fundamentally a moral and cultural problem driven by the meritocratic
ideal.

Sandel acknowledges that the populist backlash is partly a response to the way main-
stream parties have carried out the project of globalization over the past four decades.
Politicians, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, adopted a techno-
cratic approach to politics, in which market mechanisms are the primary tools for pursu-
ing the public good. Neither Republicans nor Democrats did much to address the
deepening inequality. Despite this, Sandel suggests, the technocratic approach to govern-
ing is not the main source of the populist backlash. Eher, it is the meritocratic ethic
embraced by elites, which Sandel calls the rhetoric of rising—anyone who works hard

Author: *Sarah Song is a professor in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) Program at Berkeley Law School and in
the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Immigration and
Democracy (2018) und Gerechtigkeit, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2007). In 1999, Professor Song served as
a teaching fellow for Michael Sandel’s justice course at Harvard and currently teaches an undergraduate course on justice
at Berkeley.

MICHAEL J. SANDEL, THE TYRANNY OF MERIT: WHAT’S BECOME OF THE COMMON GOOD? (2020).

© 2021 Sarah Song. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00003

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and plays by the rules should be able to rise as far as their talents will take them2—that is
causing the backlash.

Is the meritocratic ideal really to blame? Perhaps the real problem is our failure to live
up to the ideal. Sandel begins the book by discussing the 2019 Varsity Blues admissions
scandal, in which wealthy parents paid a college consultant to fake test scores and bribe
college oﬃcials to get their children into elite universities. This scandal exempliﬁes dis-
torted, not true, meritocracy. As Sandel notes, the rhetoric of rising rings hollow because
it is hard to rise. In the United States, only about one in twenty of those born in the bottom
ﬁfth of the income scale will make it to the top ﬁfth; most will not even rise to the middle
Klasse. Higher education is the gateway to social mobility, but our current system is failing
to reward high-achieving students from low-income families. Sandel cites a study of the
ninety-one most competitive American colleges and universities, which found that seventy-
two percent of the students come from the top quarter of the income scale, und nur
three percent come from the bottom quarter.3 Faced with such facts, why not renew our
commitment to the meritocratic ideal and work harder to ensure more qualiﬁed students
from low-income families can go to college?

Sandel contends the problem is not just our failure to realize the ideal; the ideal itself is
ﬂawed. Even if it could be achieved, a perfect meritocracy would be undesirable. Warum?
“Morally, it is unclear why the talented deserve the outsize rewards that market-driven
societies lavish on the successful.”4 Our having certain talents is the result of factors be-
yond our control. The high incomes that top athletes, investment bankers, and lawyers
enjoy are due to natural and social contingencies, such as being born into a wealthy family
or having certain abilities that happen to translate into high market value. Even the willing-
ness to work hard is the result of contingencies. It is thus misguided to say that high-
income earners morally deserve the rewards that ﬂow from their talents. A second more
politically potent reason for rejecting the meritocratic ideal is the morally unattractive
attitudes it promotes: hubris among the winners and humiliation and resentment among
the losers. In Sandel’s judgment, “These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist
uprising against elites. More than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing, the pop-
ulist complaint is about the tyranny of merit. And the complaint is justiﬁed.”5

I think Sandel puts too much blame on the ideal of merit. If we are failing to live up to
the ideal, how can we be certain that any backlash is against the ideal rather than its dis-
tortion? Sandel concedes as much when he says the rhetoric of merit tends to slide from

2
3

4
5

Id. bei 23.
Jennifer Giancola & Richard D. Kahlenberg, True Merit: Ensuring Our Brightest Students Have Access to Our Best
Colleges and Universities, JACK KENT COOKE FOUND. (Jan. 2016), https://www.jkcf.org/research/true-merit-ensuring
-our-brightest-students-have-access-to-our-best-colleges-and-universities/.
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 24.
Id. bei 25.

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DIAGNOSING DEMOCRACY’S DISCONTENT

the aspirational into the congratulatory, asserting the hope as if it were a fact.6 We should
not give up on the hope.

At the heart of the meritocratic ethic is the idea of equality of opportunity. Consider
one prominent example that Sandel criticizes, Rawls’s principle of fair equality of oppor-
tunity, which says that “those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the
same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their
initial place in the social system, das ist, irrespective of the income class into which they
are born.”7 Rawls’s principle is more demanding than Sandel acknowledges. For Rawls, fair
equality of opportunity requires political and legal institutions to regulate the free market
in ways that prevent excessive accumulation of property and wealth and to provide an
educational system designed “to even out class barriers.” Sandel accuses Rawls of feeding
the hubris of meritocracy’s winners, but Rawls’s theory is premised on a rejection of moral
desert. Rawls does suggest that, if we can distribute opportunities fairly, we can say those
who compete for and receive the opportunities are entitled to them. Such entitlements,
unlike claims of moral desert, are situated in a broader egalitarian approach aimed at ad-
dressing inequalities arising from social and natural contingencies. Fair equality of oppor-
tunity is not the right way to distribute all important things in life, including income and
romantic partners, but it is a desirable way to distribute the opportunity to attend medical
school or law school and the opportunity to hold political oﬃce. We want our doctors,
lawyers, and elected oﬃcials to have the relevant qualiﬁcations. We should debate what
the relevant qualiﬁcations for higher education or political oﬃce are, but we should not
give up on the task of distributing such positions on the basis of fair standards.

Noch, Sandel calls for replacing the meritocratic ideal with “a broad equality of condition
that enables those who do not achieve great wealth or prestigious positions to live lives of
decency and dignity.”8 A democratic society should aim at ensuring equality of dignity and
respect for all members, regardless of their occupation, Einkommen, and wealth. But equality of
opportunity is also important. Equality of opportunity seeks to meet the needs of a com-
plex modern society for certain skills and forms of expertise. Sandel is right to argue equal-
ity of opportunity is insuﬃcient and its excesses should be qualiﬁed; that is why we need
equality of condition. Equality of condition aims to ensure that every member of the po-
litical community is treated with equal dignity. But equality of condition should supple-
ment, not replace, equality of opportunity. Rawls supplements fair equality of opportunity
with another principle governing the distribution of wealth and income, what he calls
democratic equality: because the natural lottery of talents is just as morally arbitrary as the
social contingency of being born into a rich or poor family, not only should opportunities

6
7
8

Id. bei 79.
JOHN RAWLS, A THEORY OF JUSTICE 72–73 (1971).
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 224.

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be fairly distributed, wealth and income should be distributed to maximize the position of
the least advantaged.9 We can disagree with how Rawls conceives of democratic equality,
but his approach shows that it is possible to combine a principle of merit with a commit-
ment to fostering a broad equality of social condition.

Sandel does not actually advocate throwing out the meritocratic ideal. He revises it by
proposing a lottery of the qualiﬁed in university admissions. Of the more than 40,000 stu-
dents who compete for the roughly 2,000 admission oﬀers at Harvard or Stanford, admis-
sions committees should “winnow out those who are unlikely to ﬂourish at Harvard or
Stanford, those who are not qualiﬁed to perform well and to contribute to the education
of their fellow students.”10 This would still leave tens of thousands of qualiﬁed applicants.
Rather than trying to predict who among them are the most meritorious, the entering class
should be chosen by lottery. As someone who has interviewed many highly qualiﬁed
applicants for Harvard College, I would welcome such a change. A lottery would main-
tain a commitment to equality of opportunity. But by explicitly introducing an element
of chance, it would challenge the myth that getting into an elite college is entirely the
individual’s own doing.

If we look beyond Harvard and the Ivy League to the community colleges and public
universities that educate vastly greater numbers of students, we can see what is good about
the meritocratic ideal. The University of California, Berkeley, where I have taught for the
past fourteen years, strives to combine academic excellence with greater access to higher
Ausbildung. The students from low-income families that graduate from Berkeley exemplify
true meritocracy in action. Through hard work and eﬀort, they are indeed rising and im-
proving their prospects in life. Instead of jettisoning equality of opportunity, we need to
renew our commitment to it, reinvesting in public education so more students from dis-
advantaged backgrounds can rise.

The stronger part of Sandel’s critique of meritocracy centers on its moral psychology.
Social esteem ﬂows to those who enjoy educational and economic advantages, but are the
attitudes of hubris and humiliation inevitable? I am not as certain as Sandel about this. Let
me illustrate with a personal perspective. I grew up in a low-income immigrant family. ICH
applied to and was admitted to Harvard College in the early 1990s. I remember my mother
crying when I shared the news; she had not gone to college. I had certainly worked hard in
high school, but I did not feel I morally deserved my place at Harvard. Mostly I felt in-
credibly lucky, in the same way that I felt lucky that my parents had been born in the
southern (d.h., not northern) part of the Korean peninsula in the 1940s, and that their ad-
venturous spirit led them to immigrate to the United States in the 1980s. When I got to
Harvard, I met students on the other end of the social ladder, including a son of a media

9
10

RAWLS, supra note 6, at 75–83.
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 185.

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DIAGNOSING DEMOCRACY’S DISCONTENT

mogul and a granddaughter of the politician who sponsored the federal student aid leg-
islation that helped me pay for college. I do not think that these privileged classmates of
mine believed their admission to Harvard was entirely their own doing. Sandel says that
the Harvard students he has encountered think that they deserve their admission to
Harvard, but I have found the reverse to be true, and not just in my own case; viele
of my Harvard classmates readily acknowledged the role of luck in their success. This is an
empirical question that can be studied. My point here is that the psychology of the
“winners” may be more varied than Sandel suggests. And, if the sentiment of hubris
among “winners” is indeed as prevalent as Sandel says, I certainly agree that such senti-
ments should be counteracted with an ethos of humility.

With respect to the psychology of those on the losing end of meritocracy, my hunch is
that their feelings of humiliation and resentment are the result of having lost a game they
see as unfair and rigged against them. Recent social science research lends support to
Sandel’s focus on the loss of social status in explaining the populist backlash. In discuss-
ing the erosion of the dignity of work, Sandel emphasizes, “Working-class men without
a college degree voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.”11 Social scientists have
found that the discontent fueling the rise of radical parties stems from “feelings of social
marginalization—namely, in the sense some people have that they have been pushed to
the fringes of their national community and deprived of the roles and respect normally
accorded full members of it.”12 In Arlie Hochschild’s words, they feel like “strangers in
their own land.”13 Yet, those drawn to right-wing populist politicians like Trump actually
sit several rungs up the socioeconomic ladder in terms of their income or occupation. Der
political scientist Diana Mutz ﬁnds that Trump’s victory in 2016 was not due to working-
class voters rising up in opposition to being left behind economically in terms of lost jobs
and stagnant wages.14 Instead, the key motivation underlying support for Trump was per-
ceived status threat among “traditionally high-status Americans (whites, Christians, Und
men).” In 2016, Trump won majorities of white Americans at all education and income
levels. As Mutz puts it, “The 2016 election was a result of anxiety about dominant groups’
future status rather than a result of being overlooked in the past.
. . . Given current
demographic trends within the United States, minority inﬂuence will only increase with
Zeit, thus heightening this sense of perceived status threat.”15

11
12

13
14

Id. bei 199.
Noam Gidron & Peter A. Hall, Populism as a Problem of Social Integration, 53 COMPAR. POL. STUD. 1027, 1027–59
(2020).
ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD, STRANGERS IN THEIR OWN LAND: ANGER AND MOURNING ON THE AMERICAN RIGHT (2016).
Diana C. Mutz, Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote, 115 PROC. NAT’L ACAD.
SCI. E4330–39 (2018).
Id.; see also Jon Green & Sean McElwee, The Diﬀerential Eﬀects of Economic Conditions and Racial Attitudes in the
Election of Donald Trump, 17 PERSPS. ON POL. 358 (2019).

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It is thus critical to recognize the roles of race, religion, and immigration in explaining
status anxiety and the populist backlash. Racism and xenophobia are a key part of the
populist narrative about who is to blame for the erosion of digniﬁed work. Trump rose
to power not only by railing against credentialed elites, but also by expressing hostility
toward immigrants and racial and religious minorities, including calling for a ban on
Muslims entering the country and promising to “build a great wall.”16 This suggests that,
in order to move beyond our polarized politics, we need to do much more than reckon
with distorted meritocracy and economic inequality. We also need to reckon with racism
and xenophobia.

Although I disagree with Sandel’s diagnosis of democracy’s discontent, I endorse his
call for renewing public debate about the common good, not only in terms of what dem-
ocratic citizens are owed but also what they can contribute. Rather than assuming one’s
market value is the proper measure of one’s contribution to society, we should deliberate
about what counts as a contribution to the common good. The COVID-19 pandemic has
made vivid the value of the work performed not only by doctors and nurses but also
agricultural workers, grocery store clerks, delivery workers, and others who perform
essential but modestly paid work. Sandel proposes policies to recognize the dignity of such
traditionally undervalued work, for example enacting a wage subsidy, lowering or elimi-
nating payroll taxes, and raising revenue by taxing consumption, Reichtum, and ﬁnancial
transactions.17

Such proposals express a commitment to the broad equality of condition that Sandel
advocates. They may go some way toward addressing inequality of income and wealth, Aber
they may not boost the esteem of blue-collar workers. Improving a person’s material cir-
cumstances is more straightforward than raising their sense of self-respect and the respect
of others. Education can play a critical role in restoring the dignity of work, retraining
those who have been left behind by globalization, and providing high-quality K–12 edu-
cation for all children. If recent social science research is right that the feelings of social
marginalization among white Americans stem not only from economic disadvantage but
racial resentment, we will need more than progressive tax policies and worker retraining.
We must renew our commitment to civic education and public dialogue to foster toler-
ation and respect across lines of race and religion as well as class. In our time of extreme
polarization, it is hard to imagine how to start such a dialogue, let alone come to any kind
of agreement, but as Sandel emphasizes, we need this kind of public debate now more
than ever.

German Lopez, Donald Trump’s Long History of Racism, from the 1970s to 2020, VOX (updated Aug. 13, 2020),
https://www.vox.com/2016/7/25/12270880/donald-trump-racist-racism-history.
SANDEL, supra note 1, bei 218.

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