AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |
ISSUE 1 | 2021
AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY
HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT
Comment on M. Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit
Daria Roithmayr*
Capitalism has always had winners and losers, and losers have been unevenly distributed
among particular groups. From the beginning, people of color have been among capitalism’s
biggest victims and have made up a disproportionate number of the poor. Even before the
Reagan–Thatcher era, conservative cheerleaders for capitalism justified the uneven distribu-
tions of markets by blaming the victims. In the United States, Par exemple, according to the
famous Moynihan Report, Blacks were at the bottom of the pecking order because of a
“culture of the underclass” that included fatherless families and teen pregnancy.
The last several decades have witnessed two important developments in this landscape.
D'abord, beginning in the late 1980s, New Democrats went all in for a neoliberal version of
capitalism that encouraged free trade and deregulation. Instead of blaming the victims for
their losses under neoliberalism, the New Democrats encouraged the losers to try harder,
to get a college education in order to avoid the worst effects of economic restructuring.
Education featured centrally as the star of their “equal opportunity” show—the great
equalizer that would ensure that everyone had a fair chance at being a winner. Affirmative
action helped get Black and brown students into higher education to jump-start their
success (although Democratic elites never fully defended it, seeing it as anti-meritocratic).
Deuxième, capitalism acquired some new losers along the way. In the wake of global
restructuring, long-term wage stagnation, and the Great Crash of 2008, capitalism’s losers
came to include the white working and middle class (especially white working- et
middle-class men). Democratic elites doubled down on their meritocratic rhetoric and
Author: *Daria Roithmayr is a critical race theorist who teaches and writes about structural racial inequality at USC
Gould School of Law. Her book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage, was reissued in
paperback, with a new preface, dans 2021. She is at work on a new book, Racism Pays, which argues that many of the
country’s most celebrated innovations in the digital platform economy have relied on racial exploitation to get them off
the ground cheaply and to scale.
© 2021 Daria Roithmayr. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00013
100
Téléchargé depuis http://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00013/1961829/ajle_a_00013.pdf by guest on 07 Septembre 2023
HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT
on their push for displaced workers and their children to get job retraining or a college
degree. There was some cultural bashing as well. Certain politicians, including Bill and
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, dissed various members of the working class, calling
them trailer trash, deplorables, and simpleminded people who were clinging to their guns
and religion.
Bien sûr, we all know what happened next. Dans 2016, Donald Trump rode the wave of
a populist backlash, capitalizing on white working-class resentment, to find a pathway to
the White House. According to many commentators, Trump’s electoral success depended
heavily on the millions of non-college-educated white men who were infuriated by what
they perceived as their relegation to second-class status.
In The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?,1 Sandel calls out those
Democratic elites for their abandonment of white working-class men to the cruelty of the
marché. Sandel’s argument is actually narrower than that: Sandel does not take issue with
capitalism, job displacement, or wage stagnation, but instead he takes issue with the mer-
itocratic rhetoric that Democratic elites have used to justify the restructured economy’s
wins and losses. Sandel takes particular aim at the hubris that meritocracy-talk generates
among the winners and indicts as overly harsh the moral judgment that meritocracy
imposes on capitalism’s losers. In Sandel’s view, such judgments erode solidarity,
demean and demoralize those left behind, and disempower ordinary non-college-educated
citizens.
In the way of affirmative prescription, Sandel argues for a rethinking of meritocracy
and its attitudes toward success and failure. Beyond arguments for a wage subsidy and a
fancy-school admissions lottery, he argues chiefly that elites should be more humble, être
more attentive to the role that luck has played in their success, and be more affirming of
the dignity and respect of all work—not just the work of the college-educated professionals
that people their ranks.
There is much to recommend Sandel’s book as an argument targeting Democratic
elites for their snobbish assumption that the elite deserve their riches and the lumpen pro-
letariat do not because they have not worked hard enough. Others have written glowing
reviews of the book, with which I mostly agree. Sandel deserves effusive praise, both for
being willing to critique the Democrats and for making his critique of the elites so acces-
sible. Cependant, I write to make two critical points.
D'abord, Sandel fails to recognize that people of color are also victims of capitalism and
the rhetoric of meritocracy that Democratic elites use to justify capitalism’s uneven distri-
bution. Because Sandel’s critique is focusing on the white working class as capitalism’s
newest victims, and the effect of meritocratic rhetoric on them, he only briefly mentions
1
MICHAEL J. SANDEL, THE TYRANNY OF MERIT: WHAT’S BECOME OF THE COMMON GOOD? (2020).
101
Téléchargé depuis http://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00013/1961829/ajle_a_00013.pdf by guest on 07 Septembre 2023
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |
ISSUE 1 | 2021
people of color. More specifically, aside from a section on the difficulties that affluent
children face in getting into selective colleges, Sandel’s book focuses almost exclusively
on white working-class men, which makes it seem as though they are the only ones
affected.
Although Sandel is welcome to focus on whatever group of capitalism’s victims he
chooses, the book’s title and framing suggest a more general study of meritocracy. In that
framework, Sandel’s exclusive focus suggests that capitalism and meritocracy have harmed
primarily, and maybe only, the white working class and then mostly men. There’s certainly
a distinctive story to tell about the white working class, and others have begun to tell it.2
But as a book about the tyranny of meritocracy in general, the book’s argument suffers
from its overly narrow focus on this group of people.
We can see this best in the sections of the book where Sandel should be talking about
African Americans and Latinos, but he does not. Par exemple, when pointing out that
globalization and automation have hurt American workers, he cites to statistics only about
white men.3 But it turns out that African American workers are disproportionately con-
centrated in the kinds of support roles most likely to have been affected by automation.4
En effet, William Julius Wilson wrote a whole book about the effect of globalization and
economic restructuring on African American workers. In his book When Work Disap-
pears, Wilson tied the disappearance of African American jobs and the emergence of
the ghetto to industrial restructuring, globalization, and foreign competition.5 Indeed, le-
orists have argued that Black workers might well have been the miners’ canaries, warning
of the future effects of restructuring on white workers.6
De la même manière, when Sandel compares Americans to Danes and Canadians on economic
mobility, he neglects to mention that, even as the number of African Americans going
to college has increased, Black children born to parents in the bottom household-income
2
3
4
5
6
Voir, par exemple., JUSTIN GEST, THE NEW MINORITY: WHITE WORKING CLASS POLITICS IN AN AGE OF IMMIGRATION AND INEQUALITY
(2016) (describing white working-class alienation in the United States and United Kingdom); JOAN C. WILLIAMS,
WHITE WORKING CLASS: OVERCOMING CLASS CLUELESSNESS IN AMERICA (2017) (analyzing fears of the white working-
class people about their economic future).
“The median income of American males has been stagnant, in real terms, for half a century. Although per capita
income has increased 85 percent since 1979, white men without a four-year college degree make less now, in real
termes, than they did then.” SANDEL, supra note 1, à 197.
Black workers are concentrated in automation-vulnerable occupations, such as office administration and support,
transportation, and food preparation. David Baboolall et al., Automation and the Future of the African American
Workforce, MCKINSEY REPORT (Nov. 14, 2018), https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-work
/automation-and-the-future-of-the-african-american-workforce.
WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, WHEN WORK DISAPPEARS: THE WORLD OF THE NEW URBAN POOR (1997).
LANI GUINIER & GERALD TORRES, THE MINER’S CANARY: ENLISTING RACE, RESISTING POWER, TRANSFORMING DEMOCRACY
(2002).
102
Téléchargé depuis http://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00013/1961829/ajle_a_00013.pdf by guest on 07 Septembre 2023
HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT
quintile still have only a 2.5% chance of rising to the top quintile of household income,
compared with 10.6% for whites, a gap that rivals that between Americans and Canadians.7
Sandel also wholly ignores the effect of the rhetoric of meritocracy on people of color. Il
might have noted, Par exemple, the research finding that, for Latino students, believing in
meritocracy erodes student self-esteem over time when they don’t measure up.8 More
surprisingly, when Sandel discusses conversations about merit that begin in the 1980s, il
leaves out any sustained discussion about the stigmatizing effect of meritocracy on race-
conscious affirmative action in college admissions. This struck me as a pointed omission, par-
haps a deliberate choice to close the door on any conversation about meritocracy and race.
Most tellingly, when Sandel first describes the emergence of a populist backlash during the
2016 election,9 he describes it as working class, rather than white working class.10 But, bien sûr,
it wasn’t the working class who triggered the populist backlash associated with Trump’s
election. It was the white working class without a college degree. As scholars of the election have
shown, this group’s resentment of elites was coupled with a deep anti-immigrant, anti-Black
sentiment. Sandel is right to note that this resentment is not just naked racism, but he is wrong
to imply that it has relatively less to do with race and more to do with meritocracy.
Encore, I am not arguing here that people of color should be Sandel’s focus, or that
there is no distinctive story to tell about the white working class. Plutôt, I am arguing that
the impact of restructuring and the use of meritocratic rhetoric to justify restructuring’s
wins and losses together have affected more than just white working-class men—all mem-
bers of the working class have been affected in very historically specific ways. In a general
book about globalization and meritocracy, Sandel’s argument suffers from its deliberately
narrowed focus on the smaller group.
7
Raj Chetty et al., Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective, 135 Q.J.
ECON. 711, 733 (2020). En effet, in Sandel’s own citation of Chetty for the United States–Canadian gap, Chetty
acknowledges this variation.
Relative mobility is lowest for children who grew up in the Southeast and highest in the Mountain West
and the rural Midwest. Some [commuting zones] in the United States have relative mobility comparable to
the highest mobility countries in the world, such as Canada and Denmark, while others have lower levels of
mobility than any developed country for which data are available.
is that intergenerational mobility is lower in areas with larger African American
Raj Chetty et al., Where Is the Land of Opportunity?, 129 Q.J. ECON. 1553, 1556 (2014). “Perhaps the most obvious
pattern from the maps . . .
populations, such as the Southeast.” Id. à 1605.
See Erin Godfrey et al., For Better or for Worse: System-Justifying Beliefs in Sixth Grade Predict Trajectories of Self-
Esteem and Behavior Across Early Adolescence, 90 CHILD DEV. 180 (2019).
SANDEL, supra note 1, à 71.
Sandel does mention that “some members of the working class” trafficked in racism when voting for Trump. Id. à
72. Although Sandel does use the phrase “white working class” elsewhere, he frequently uses “white working class”
interchangeably with “working class,” as though these terms were equivalent, throughout the book.
8
9
10
Téléchargé depuis http://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00013/1961829/ajle_a_00013.pdf by guest on 07 Septembre 2023
103
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LAW AND EQUALITY |
ISSUE 1 | 2021
Deuxième, Sandel misdiagnoses the problem as meritocracy rather than neoliberal capi-
talism. This misdiagnosis means that he doesn’t take the problems of white working-class
men seriously enough to offer them a real solution. In several chapters, Sandel goes so far
as to suggest that for the white male worker, the problem is less that he has lost his
manufacturing job and more that he has been humiliated over the loss. En effet, in one
chapter, Sandel cites to the Case and Deaton study of “deaths of despair” to suggest that
these deaths are attributable to worker humiliation as opposed to the material loss they suf-
fered.11 But the study authors themselves attribute these deaths to the flaws in capitalism—to
the weakened position of labor, the consolidation of power among corporations, and to the
long-term wage stagnation, job loss, and accompanying loss of social capital that have all
accompanied restructuring.12 They say little about meritocratic rhetoric or even humiliation
at the hands of elites as an underlying cause.13
Because he has misdiagnosed the problem, Sandel offers little in the way of real solu-
tions for the displaced white worker. He devotes much of one chapter on education to a
proposed lottery for college admissions at fancy schools, a lottery among those who are
“qualified” to do the work at those schools. He spends several pages anticipating objections
from elites, as though structural inequality wouldn’t doom the majority of the white and
non-white working class to fall into the group of unqualified applicants, or as though the
majority of these groups still wouldn’t apply to fancy schools for reasons other than their
GPA. Sandel does mention important non-elite forms of education, like community college
or job training, but only in a drive-by sentence after discussing the fancy-school lottery.
That Sandel has misdiagnosed the problem becomes clear in the other solutions-
focused chapter on the dignity of work. Ici, Sandel endorses a wage subsidy program that
looks something like a universal basic income program. This solution, which looks far more
promising than an attitude shift, seems to concede that the problem is, in fact, more material
than rhetorical. Even then, those programs offer only a supplement to wages for displaced
workers forced into precarious jobs in the informal economy. Wage subsidies don’t solve the
underlying job displacement problem, and they don’t solve the meritocracy problem either.
Sandel does suggest that policy-making choices should prioritize job creation, a recommen-
dation that Joe Biden appears to be taking to heart with his early labor-focused cabinet picks.
But Sandel spoils the soup by arguing that job creation should perhaps be more important
than environmental clean-up goals.
11
12
13
Id. à 199.
ANNE CASE & ANGUS DEATON, DEATHS OF DESPAIR AND THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM (2020).
Roge Karma, Deaths of Despair: The Deadly Epidemic that Predated Coronavirus, VOX (Apr. 15, 2020, 8:50 AM),
https://www.vox.com/2020/4/15/21214734/deaths-of-despair-coronavirus-covid-19-angus-deaton-anne-case
-americans-deaths (interview with Case and Deaton).
104
Téléchargé depuis http://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00013/1961829/ajle_a_00013.pdf by guest on 07 Septembre 2023
HUMBLE PIE IS COLD COMFORT
Beyond the wage subsidy, the book offers white working-class men little concrete re-
lief, other than the exhortation to progressive elites to be humble and to respect the dignity
of non-college-degree work. But shifting rhetoric won’t provide high-wage, stable jobs with
opportunities for advancement. That’s a big part of why Trump won—because he prom-
ised he would bring back the manufacturing jobs that had disappeared or been automated
away—although he never really made good on that promise. And that’s why Trump might
have won again, had the pandemic not intervened: in part because of an inherited hot
economy, Trump was on track to outpace both Bush and Obama in job creation before
the pandemic disrupted everything.14
Sandel is right to focus on the losses suffered by white working-class men, and should
have expanded his focus to include the legions of others that neoliberal capitalism and
meritocracy have victimized. But the core problem for all writ large is capitalism and writ
small is job loss. Meritocracy is just the sideshow. A fancy-school lottery and a suggestion
to elites to eat humble pie is cold comfort for those who suffer the pain of a restructured
economy. And although it might be unfair of me to expect a philosopher to fix the
material problems of global capitalism, I am reminded of advice I got from a mentor in
law school (whose brother was a famous philosopher). My mentor told me that philoso-
phy raises the most important questions for society to resolve but has relatively less to
offer than other disciplines in the way of answers. As a book about raising questions,
Sandel’s book succeeds in spotlighting important issues. As a book about answers, Sandel’s
book has much less merit.
14
Brian O’Keefe & Nicolas Rapp, How President Trump Measures Up on Job Creation in 6 Charts, FORTUNE (Oct. 19, 2020,
7:00 AM), https://fortune.com/longform/comparing-trump-on-jobs-us-economy-past-presidents-obama-bush
-clinton/ (using U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data).
105
Téléchargé depuis http://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00013/1961829/ajle_a_00013.pdf by guest on 07 Septembre 2023
Télécharger le PDF