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January 29 - July 19, 2025
Only a regime that disperses sovereignty both upward and downward can combine the power required to rival global market forces with the differentiation required of a public life that hopes to inspire the reflective allegiance of its citizens.
The nationalizing of American political life occurred largely in response to industrial capitalism. The consolidation of economic power called forth the consolidation of political power. Present-day conservatives who rail against big government often ignore this fact. They wrongly assume that rolling back the power of the national government would liberate individuals to pursue their own ends instead of leaving them at the mercy of economic forces beyond their control.
The American welfare state is politically vulnerable because it does not rest on a sense of national community adequate to its purpose. The nationalizing project that unfolded from the Progressive era to the New Deal to the Great Society succeeded only in part. It managed to create a strong national government but failed to cultivate a shared national identity.
As the welfare state developed, it drew less on an ethic of social solidarity and mutual obligation and more on an ethic of fair procedures and individual rights. But the liberalism of the procedural republic proved an inadequate substitute for the strong sense of citizenship the welfare state requires.
In the age of NAFTA, the politics of neighborhood matters more, not less. People will not pledge allegiance to vast and distant entities, whatever their importance, unless those institutions are somehow connected to political arrangements that reflect the identity of the participants.
federalism is more than a theory of intergovernmental relations. It also stands for a political vision that offers an alternative to the sovereign state and the univocal political identities such states require. It suggests that self-government works best when sovereignty is dispersed and citizenship formed across multiple sites of civic engagement. This aspect of federalism informs the pluralist version of republican politics.
The laws that desegregated public facilities and secured voting rights for African Americans served freedom in the voluntarist sense—the freedom to choose and pursue one’s purposes and ends. But the struggle to win these rights displayed a higher, republican freedom—the freedom that consists in acting collectively to shape the public world.
The formative aspect of republican politics requires public spaces that gather citizens together, enable them to interpret their condition, and cultivate solidarity and civic engagement.
The global media and markets that shape our lives beckon us to a world beyond boundaries and belonging. But the civic resources we need to master these forces, or at least to contend with them, are still to be found in the places and stories, memories and meanings, incidents and identities, that situate us in the world and give our lives their moral particularity.
The civic virtue distinctive to our time is the capacity to negotiate our way among the sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting obligations that claim us, and to live with the tension to which multiple loyalties give rise. This capacity is difficult to sustain, for it is easier to live with the plurality between persons than within them.
to every virtue there corresponds a characteristic form of corruption or decay.
Where civic virtue consists in holding together the complex identities of modern selves, it is vulnerable to corruption of two kinds. The first is the tendency to fundamentalism, the response of those who cannot abide the ambiguity associated with divided sovereignty and multiply encumbered selves. To the extent that contemporary politics puts sovereign states and sovereign selves in question, it is likely to provoke reactions from those who would banish ambiguity, shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to “take back our culture and take
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The second corruption to which multiply encumbered citizens are prone is the drift to formless, protean, storyless selves, unable to weave the various strands of their identity into a coherent whole.
There is a growing danger that, individually and collectively, we will find ourselves slipping into a fragmented, storyless condition. The loss of the capacity for narrative would amount to the ultimate disempowering of the human subject, for without narrative there is no continuity between present and past, and therefore no responsibility, and therefore no possibility of acting together to govern ourselves.
The consumerist conception of freedom made for an impoverished understanding of what it is to be a citizen. It promoted the idea that democracy is economics by other means, a way of aggregating individuals’ preferences rather than deliberating about justice and the common good. The discontent that beset American democracy in the last decades of the twentieth century reflected this diminished aspiration; the consumerist notion of freedom fed a growing sense of disempowerment and failed to inspire the sense of belonging and civic engagement self-government requires.
In the end, the trade deals of the globalization era contributed only modestly to American economic growth; by one estimate, they added less than a tenth of a percent to GDP.11 But they did reconfigure the economy, mainly to the benefit of corporations and the professional classes. Middle- and working-class Americans benefited as consumers but not as producers.
Within the domestic economy, deregulating finance had a further appeal: it seemed to spare politicians the hard choices they would otherwise face about how to allocate investment among competing social purposes.
Although finance is essential to a flourishing economy, it is not productive in itself. Its role is to facilitate economic activity by allocating capital to socially useful purposes—new businesses, factories, roads, airports, schools, hospitals, homes. But as finance came to dominate the U.S. economy in the 1990s and 2000s, less and less of it involved investing in the real economy. More and more involved complex financial engineering that yielded big profits for those engaged in it but did little to make the economy more productive.
In the capitalism of the post–World War II decades, companies made money by making things, selling them at a profit, and investing the profits in new productive capacity. This brought jobs and economic growth that was broadly shared across income groups. In the finance-dominated capitalism of the post-Reagan era, companies made money not by investing but by speculating on the future value of existing assets.
Even as wages stagnated and inequality deepened, American consumers leveraged the value of their homes to keep consuming.
By standing between the bankers and “the pitchforks,” Obama sought to mollify the public outrage, rather than give it voice. Despite his eloquence—during the campaign and at times during his presidency—about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, Obama treated the financial crisis as a technical problem for experts to solve, not a civic question about the role of finance in democratic life. This stance fueled discontent with the mainstream parties and set the stage for populist backlash. Public anger over the bailout would find other political expression—on the left, in the
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The success of right-wing, nativist populism is generally a symptom of the failure of progressive politics. When liberals fail to defend the people against the powerful by holding economic power to democratic account, the people look elsewhere. This is what happened in 2016. As Americans went to the polls after eight years of the Obama administration, 75 percent said they were looking for a leader who would “take the country back from the rich and powerful.”
The study confirms what most Americans sense—that their voice does not matter, that the average citizen has no meaningful say in how we are governed. This sense of disempowerment, which has deepened in recent decades, is at the heart of democracy’s discontent. It is one of the corrosive civic consequences of the vast inequalities of income and wealth that decades of finance-driven globalization have produced.
In recent decades, those who have 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 rewards the market bestows on them. And, by implication, that those left behind deserve their fate as well.103 This way of thinking about success arises from a seemingly attractive principle, the ideal of meritocracy: if chances are equal, the winners deserve their winnings.
It is tempting to think that the solution to inequality is simply to push for a more perfect meritocracy, to level the playing field so that everyone has an equal chance to become a winner. This is the response to inequality that the mainstream parties offered, to varying degrees, during the age of globalization. But seeking a more perfect meritocracy failed to address the inequalities that finance-driven globalization produced,
Giving people a more equal chance to clamber up the ladder of success does little to alleviate inequality if the rungs on the ladder are growing farther and farther apart.
seeking a more perfect meritocracy does not heal the inequalities of esteem that meritocracies produce. If anything, it makes them worse. Encouraging people to believe that their success (or failure) is their own doing generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among those left behind. It reenforces the image of social life as a competitive race, in which the winners ...
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meritocratic attitudes toward success make it hard to redress inequalities of income and wealth through redistribution. For the more confident we are that market outcomes reflect what people deserve, the more powerful the pr...
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Meritocracy as a political project found expression in the familiar slogan that everyone should be able to rise “as far as their efforts and talent will take them.” In recent years, politicians of both parties reiterated this slogan to the point of incantation.
despite its seemingly egalitarian bent, the rhetoric of rising entrenched rather than challenged inequalities of income and wealth. It did not propose to alleviate these inequalities by reconsidering the economic policies that produced them. Instead, it offered a workaround: individual upward mobility through higher education.
It is no wonder many working people turned against meritocratic elites, who seemed to forget a simple fact: most people do not have a four-year college degree. Nearly two-thirds of Americans do not.109 So it was folly to create an economy that makes a university diploma a necessary condition of dignified work and a decent life.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, parties of the left attracted with those with less education, while parties of the right attracted those with more. In the age of meritocracy, this pattern has been reversed. Today, people with more education vote for left of center parties, and those with less support parties of the right.
Seeing meritocratic ways of thinking about success as the moral companion to finance-driven globalization helps us understand the political backlash against credentialed elites. For four decades, the market faith and the meritocratic faith, taken together, formed the defining project of mainstream American politics. Neoliberal capitalism made some people rich and others poor, but meritocracy created the divide between winners and losers. And it is this divide, not income inequality alone, that gave rise to the humiliation that Trump and other authoritarian populists were able to exploit.
the pandemic also brought a deeper, subtler change. It cast doubt on the claim at the heart of the neoliberal project: that market mechanisms can define and achieve the public good.
Keynes’s insight is both liberating and sobering. It is liberating because it asserts the primacy of the political. What we can afford depends on what we ultimately care about.
Agreeing on what we want to do, on what we ultimately care about, will not be easy. Our politics is rancorous and polarized. We are not accustomed to deliberating about questions as consequential as how to rethink our way of living with nature.
In the age of the Anthropocene, the challenge for self-government is not only fiscal but philosophical. Governing the economy requires more than figuring out how to maximize GDP and how to distribute the fruits of economic growth. It requires that we reconsider the way we live with one another, and with the natural world that we inhabit.
In pluralist societies, people disagree about the good life. We should therefore set aside our moral and spiritual convictions when we enter the public square. We should govern according to principles that are neutral toward competing conceptions of the good. This penchant for neutrality bends liberalism in the direction of the market faith. The deepest appeal of markets is not that they deliver efficiency and prosperity, but that they seem to spare us the need for messy, contentious debates about how to value goods. This is, in the end, a false promise. Banishing morally contested questions
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