 Ddon't use up all of your applause on me because we have a guest as well, so now Michael it's quite rare actually to get a vision when you walk into the room so that is a reflection of your esteem. Good evening everyone, I'm Matthew Taylor. I'm chief executive of the RSA I'm delighted to welcome you here this evening for this very special event. Can you turn your mobile phone to silent but you don't need to turn off because you can join in the conversation that we're having, we're filming today's event where live streaming is always so big welcome to those of you joining us online. y hashtag for anyone who wants to be part of that conversation is RSA Politics. So, please do join the conversation on Twitter. Now, we are truly delighted to have such a special guest with us today. This is the last event of a whole month's really of events in which we have been celebrating the opening of our new coffee house, Rawls Mills, which is downstairs. For those of you who don't know the RSA, it has a rich history of ideas and action. It was founded in 1754 in a coffee house, Rawls Mills, near Covent Garden. Its founding ambition was the creation of a principled and prosperous society. And this great room auditorium, where we are here today, has been the setting for many of the great social, political and cultural debates of the day since then. Today, the RSA's mission is 21st century enlightenment, enriching society through ideas and action. And we continue to be a home for all those who want to improve society, to exchange ideas and to work together for the common good. And at the end of that process, and we had some fantastic speakers over that month, we are delighted and we could not have a more fitting guest to help us celebrate this tradition than Professor Michael Sandell. Professor Sandell teaches political philosophy at Harvard University as one of the most celebrated and in-demand public intellectuals in the world. His writings on justice, ethics, democracy and markets have been translated into 27 languages and his legendary course, Justice, was the first Harvard course to be made freely available online and on television. His bestselling books relate to the big issues of political philosophy to the most intractable challenges of our time and he joins us today to give his perspective on how to revive our jaded political discourse. What can we do to create a politics fit for the 21st century? You may have noticed Michael, things aren't going all that well for us right now, so you've chosen a particularly poignant day to arrive. I'm not sure who the Prime Minister is as I speak, but how can we have a vibrant politics, a politics that engages people without stooping to xenophobia or populism? So as I say, we are deeply honoured that you've joined us tonight, so please join me in welcoming Professor Michael Sandell. Thank you. Thank you, Matthew, for those kind words. It's great to be back at the RSA. It's a place that I've long admired, it's long history, it's a place for public discourse and public discourse oriented to action to make the world a better place. And so it's a special privilege to be part of this series, Matthew. Thank you. We gather at a time of political turmoil and also bewilderment from the struggles in Parliament over Brexit, to the protests in the streets of Paris, to the angry chaos of the Trump presidency. We are witnessing the undoing of a project, a project that has defined the contours of politics for the past four decades, and it won't, I think, be put back together. So the question is, what sense can we make of our current political moment, and is it possible to imagine a politics that could respond to the anxieties and to the frustrations that are roiling democratic politics around the world? These are dangerous times for democracy. The danger surely can be seen in the rising xenophobia, growing public support for autocratic figures who test the limits of democratic norms, but equally alarming is the fact that mainstream parties and politicians display little understanding of the discontent. Some denounce the upsurge of populism is little more than a racist, xenophobic reaction against immigrants in multiculturalism. Others see it mainly in economic terms as a protest against job losses brought about by global trade and new technologies. But it's a mistake to see only the bigotry in populist protest or to view it only as an economic complaint. The hard reality is that Donald Trump and other figures like him had succeeded by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties have no control. Before they can hope to win back public support, these parties must rethink their mission and purpose. And to do so, they need to learn from the populist protest that has displaced them, not by replicating its xenophobia and strident nationalism, but by taking seriously the legitimate grievances with which these ugly sentiments are entangled. Such thinking should begin with the recognition that these grievances are not only economic, but also moral and cultural. They're not only about wages and jobs, but also about social esteem. Now the mainstream parties in governing elites who find themselves the target of populist protest struggle to make sense of it. And one of the reasons they struggle and find themselves bewildered is that they fail to acknowledge their role in prompting the resentment that led to the populist backlash. They fail to see that the upheavals we are witnessing are a political response to a political failure of historic proportions. At the heart of this failure is the way mainstream parties have conceived and carried out the project of globalization over the past four decades. Two aspects of this project gave rise to the grievances that fuel populist protest. One is the neoliberal technocratic turn of contemporary politics. By neoliberal turn, I mean the embrace of a market driven version of globalization and the faith that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. The technocratic turn is closely connected. It refers to the tendency of governing elites to drain public discourse of substantive moral argument, to treat ideologically contestable questions as if they were matters of economic efficiency, the province of experts. It's not difficult to see how the neoliberal technocratic turn set the stage for populist discontent. The market driven version of globalization brought growing inequality. It also devalued national identities and allegiances as goods and capital and people flowed freely across national borders. Those who stood astride the global economy valorized cosmopolitan identities as a progressive enlightened alternative to the narrow parochial ways of protectionism and tribalism. The real political divide they argued was no longer left versus right, but open versus closed. This implied that critics of outsourcing and free trade agreements and unrestricted capital flows were closed minded rather than open minded, tribal rather than global. Meanwhile, the technocratic turn treated many public questions as matters of technical expertise beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. This mode of governance narrowed the scope of democratic argument, hollowed out the terms of public discourse and produced a growing sense of disempowerment. The neoliberal technocratic turn was joined by mainstream parties of the left and the right. But it was the embrace of market thinking and market values by center left parties that proved most consequential for the globalization project itself and for the populist protest that followed. The populist uprising in the US, Britain and Europe is a backlash directed generally against elites, but its most conspicuous casualties have been liberal and center left political parties. The Democratic Party in the US, the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democratic Party in Germany who shared the vote reached a historic low in the last federal election. Italy's Democratic Party whose vote shared dropped to less than 20%, the Socialist Party in France whose presidential nominee won only 6% of the vote in the first round of the last election. Before these parties can hope to win back public support, they need to reconsider the neoliberal technocratic approach to governing. But they also need to rethink something else, something subtler but no less consequential. And this has to do with the attitudes towards success and failure that have accompanied the growing inequality of recent decades. They need to ask why those who have not flourished in the new economy feel that the winners look down with disdain. So what exactly does this mean? What has incited the resentment that has led large numbers of people to give political expression to this sense of being looked down upon? The answer begins with the rising inequality of recent decades, but it doesn't end there. It has ultimately to do, not just with economics, but with the changing terms of social recognition and esteem. We know about the rising inequality. The age of globalization has restored its rewards unevenly to say the least. Most of the income gains since the 1970s in the US and in Britain have gone to those at the top while the bottom half have received very little. In real terms, the median income for working age men in the US is less than it was four decades ago. Now mainstream parties and politicians have responded to this growing inequality by calling for greater equality of opportunity, retraining workers whose jobs have disappeared due to globalization and technology, improving access to higher education, removing barriers of race, ethnicity and gender. This rhetoric of opportunity is summed up in the slogan that those who work hard should be able to rise as far as their talents will take them. This has become almost a trope of political rhetoric across the political spectrum. Politicians centre left and centre right have reiterated this slogan to the point of incantation. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Theresa May among Conservatives, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton among Liberals have all invoked it. Barack Obama was fond of a variation of this theme drawn from a pop song. You can make it if you try. In fact I did a search and found that during his presidency he used this line in his speeches 135 times. But the rhetoric of rising now rings hollow for two reasons. First, it doesn't fit the facts on the ground. In today's economy it's not easy to rise. And second, because the ideal itself is flawed and I'd like to explain why. It's often been thought that mobility is the answer to inequality. But the explosion of inequality in recent decades has not quickened upward mobility. To the contrary, it's enabled those on top to consolidate their advantages and pass them on to their children. Over the past half century elite colleges and universities dismantled barriers of race, religion, gender and ethnicity that once restricted admission to the sons and it was the sons of the privileged. But today's meritocracy has hardened into a hereditary aristocracy. To take one example from my country, from my own university, two thirds of the students at Harvard and at Stanford come from the top fifth of the income scale. And despite generous financial aid policies, fewer than four percent of Ivy League students come from the bottom fifth at Harvard and other Ivy League colleges in the US. There are more students from families in the top one percent. That's an income of over $600,000 a year. More students from the top one percent than there are students from the bottom half of the population combined. But the problem with meritocracy is not only that the practice falls short of the ideal. If that were the only problem, the solution would consist in perfecting equality of opportunity. In seeking a society in which people could, whatever their starting point in life, truly rise as far as their efforts and talents would take them. But it's doubtful that even a perfect meritocracy would be satisfying either morally or politically. Morally, it's unclear why the talented deserve the outsize rewards that market driven societies lavish on the successful. The whole case for the meritocratic ethic rests on the idea that we don't deserve to be rewarded or held back based on factors beyond our control. But is having or lacking certain talents really our own doing? And if not, it's hard to see why those who rise thanks to their talents deserve greater rewards than those who may be equally hard working but less endowed with the gifts a market society happens to prize. Those who celebrate the meritocratic ideal and put it at the center of their political project overlook this moral question. They also ignore the morally unattractive attitudes that the meritocratic ethic generates among the winners and also among the losers. Among the winners, it generates hubris. Among the losers, humiliation and resentment. These moral sentiments are at the heart of the populist uprising against elites that we are witnessing today, more than a protest against immigrants and outsourcing and stagnant wages. The populist complaint is about the tyranny of merit and the complaint is justified. The relentless emphasis on creating a fair meritocracy in which income and wealth and social esteem reflect effort and talent. This relentless emphasis has a corrosive effect on the way we interpret our success or the lack of it. The notion that the system rewards talent and hard work encourages the winners to consider their success their own doing, a measure of their virtue and to look down upon those less fortunate than themselves. Meritocratic hubris. This is the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It's the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate and by implication that those on the bottom deserve theirs too. A lively sense of the contingency of our lot conduces to a certain humility, the idea that there but for the grace of God or the accident of fortune go why. But a perfect meritocracy, even a perfect meritocracy, especially a perfect meritocracy, banishes all sense of gift or grace or luck. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate and so it leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny or unjust rule. Now seen from below the hubris of elites is galling, no one likes to be looked down upon. But the meritocratic faith adds insult to injury. The notion that your fate is in your hands, that you can make it if you try, is a double-edged sword inspiring in one way but invidious in another. It congratulates the winners but denigrates the losers even in their own eyes. For those who can't find work or make ends meet, it's hard to escape the demoralizing thought that their failure is their own doing. That they simply lack the talent and drive to succeed. This gives rise to a politics of humiliation. The politics of humiliation differs from a politics of injustice. Protest against injustice looks outward. It complains that the system is rigged, that the winners have cheated or manipulated their way to the top. Protest against humiliation is psychologically more freighted. It combines resentment of the winners with nagging self-doubt. Perhaps the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. Maybe the losers are complicit in their misfortune after all. This is the thought. This feature of the politics of humiliation makes it more combustible than other political sentiments. It's a potent ingredient in the volatile brew of anger and resentment that fuels populist protest. Though himself a billionaire, Donald Trump understands and exploits this resentment. Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who spoke constantly of opportunity, Trump scarcely mentions the word. Instead, he offers blunt talk of winners and losers. It's interesting in the American context that Bernie Sanders, who was challenging the mainstream from the left, he too rarely spoke of opportunity and mobility, focusing instead on inequalities of power and wealth. Elites have so valorized a college degree, both as an avenue for advancement and as a basis for social esteem, that they had difficulty understanding the hubris a meritocracy can generate and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who have not gone to college. These attitudes, I think, are at the heart of the populist backlash. It's unsurprising that one of the deepest divides in politics today is between those with and those without a college degree. Electoral studies of the 2016 American election found that education, not income, best predicted support for Trump. Among those with similar incomes, those with more education voted for Hillary Clinton, those with less voted for Trump. So it's no wonder that Trump proclaimed, celebrating one of his early primary victories, quote, I love the poorly educated. A similar divide appeared in Britain's Brexit referendum. Low-income voters were more likely than high-income voters to favor leaving the EU, but educational differences were more pronounced. Over 70% of voters with no college education voted for Brexit, while over 70% of those with a postgraduate degree voted to remain. And so the politics of humiliation, Donald Trump is keenly alive to it, notwithstanding his penchant for perverocation, he comes by his sense of humiliation honestly, so to speak. It is the one authentic thing about him. In fact, you can see this in his frequent protestations that he is intelligent. In fact, as he assured us, a very stable genius. In these otherwise stray and puzzling remarks, Trump displays and illustrates the insecurity a meritocratic society inflicts, reviling elites while craving their respect. At a campaign-style rally last year, he lashed out against elites, then claimed to be one himself. Here's how he put it. Now you know, I was a good student, this is Trump. I always hear about the elite. Their elite? I went to better schools than they did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more beautiful apartment. And I live in the White House too, which is really great. I think, you know what, I think we're the elites, they're not the elites. Throughout his campaign and his presidency, Trump has felt the need to offer repeated assurances of his intellect. He often cites his uncle, a professor at MIT, as evidence that he, Trump, has, quote, good genes, very good genes, very smart. When his Secretary of State reportedly called him a moron, Trump replied, if he did that, I guess we'll have to compare IQ tests and I can tell you who's going to win. In a bizarre speech to employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, on the day after his inauguration, Trump told them, quote, trust me, I'm like a smart person. The term meritocracy was coined relatively recently, in 1958. It's not an ancient term as we use it today. It's coined by the British sociologist Michael Young. For him, the term described a dystopia, not an ideal. His book was The Rise of Meritocracy, some of you may remember it. It was written at a time when the British class system was breaking down, giving way to a system of educational and professional advancement based on merit. This was a good thing because it enabled gifted children of the working class to develop their talents and to escape a life consigned to manual labour. But Young also glimpsed the dark side of meritocracy. Here's what he wrote. Now that people are classified by ability, he's imagining the realization of the meritocracy some years in the future, now that people are classified by ability, the gap between the classes has inevitably become wider. Today, the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class. In fact, some members of the meritocracy have become so impressed with their own importance as to lose sympathy with the people whom they govern. Michael Young, 1958. Young concluded his dystopian scenario by predicting that in 2034 the less educated classes would rise up in a populist revolt against the meritocratic elites. That revolt arrived 18 years ahead of schedule for those who feel aggrieved by the tyranny of merit. The problem is not only economic disadvantage but the loss of social esteem. The grievance is not only about unfairness. It is also about humiliation. Mainstream parties and elites miss this dimension of politics. They think the problem with globalization is simply a matter of distributive justice. Those who have gained from global trade and new technologies and the financialization of the economy have simply not adequately compensated those who have lost out. But this misunderstands the populist complaint. It also reflects a defect in the neoliberal technocratic approach to governing. Conducting our public discourse is if it were possible to outsource moral and political judgment to markets or to experts and technocrats, this approach to public discourse has created an empty, impoverished public discourse, a vacuum of public meaning. Such empty public spaces are invariably shielded by narrow, intolerant authoritarian alternatives, whether in the form of religious fundamentalism or strident nationalism. This is what we are witnessing today. Three decades of market-driven globalization have hollowed out democratic public discourse, disempowered ordinary citizens and prompted a populist backlash that seeks to clothe the naked public square with an intolerant, ventral nationalism. To reinvigorate democratic politics, we need to find our way to a morally more robust public discourse, one that takes seriously the corrosive effect of meritocratic striving on the social bonds that constitute our common life. Disentangling the intolerant aspects of populist protest from its legitimate grievances is no easy matter, but it is important to try. Understanding these grievances and creating a politics that can respond to them is the most pressing political challenge of our time. Thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. That was incredibly rich. Where to start? I think the first question I want to ask is who are we talking about when we talk about the privileged. I think that it's easy to talk about the top 1%, or it's even easier to talk about the top 10% of the top 1%. I recall a book by Richard Reeves from the Brookings Institute published last Jacob and spoke here. He said the problem isn't the top 1%, it's the top 35%, and the way they are hoarding educational advantage. I'm currently reading a book by Christophe Guillet which was written, I think, two years ago or 18 months ago in which he predicts he actually says in this book there will be an alliance between the politically disenchanted and those who live in the periphery. He predicted what's happening on the streets of Paris which is precisely this combination. He attacks, not the top 1%, he attacks what he calls Boboes, the Bohemian bourgeoisie. If the divide here is between those who gain from globalization and are comfortable with globalization and those who've lost from globalization, this is, we are the problem, we are the ones who have to give something up. I agree. Yes, well, I agree that the beneficiaries of globalization are roughly the top 20%, 30%, something like that. And the governing elite is drawn in large part from that group as well. Now, giving something up, yes, if that means, well, two things. Well, giving something up if that means paying more tax. Giving up if that means not replicating your own privilege for our children in the way that has come to be the case in recent decades. But I think it's important also to show how a more generous politics of the common good that changed the attitudes towards success that I've suggested are corrosive would be a good thing not only for those who've lost out, but also for those who have landed on top. Tyranny, the tyranny of merit, has two faces, I think. The more obvious one is the tyranny that's exerted by the successful and those who've been left behind and excluded economically and culturally. But as the classical philosophers taught us, tyranny also oppresses the tyrant, the winner, the beneficiaries of an unjust arrangement. And I think we can see elements of this if we look at certain aspects of the competitive rat race in which those who succeed in the global economy find themselves entangled and especially inflict on their children. I notice this in the students who make their way to my classes. They are the winners in the sense that they've prevailed in a hyper-competitive race for admission to top colleges and universities. But they bear injuries and scars from the gauntlet, the high-pressurized gauntlet that they've endured as teenagers and high school students, subjected to a kind of intense set of driven pressures on exams to take innumerable advanced placement courses to go off and do internships in Nicaragua to fill in the public service part of the resume. And they emerge injured to the point where it's not so easy to turn off this competitive pressurized drive and that obstructs learning and thinking and taking the world in. And so I think if we know that there are also mental health consequences of the generation that's been brought up with this, the hyper-pressurized adolescence that is the way in which, one of the ways in which, the privilege makes sure their children prevail in this race for admission to top colleges and universities. So giving up, this goes back to your point, and it's a good point about those on top having to give up something. Yes, in terms of tax, in terms of a kind of self-righteous sense that their success is to serve. But I think building a politics of the common good also depends on showing that this would make for a better kind of life, a less driven life for the children of the privilege, our children. And I think that related to that, the conversation about social mobility, the conversation that Liberal politicians are comfortable with is all about how we help people up. In fact, the real challenge for social mobility is people coming down. Is the resistance of the middle class to coming down. In the fear of that, and the anxiety about that. So one of the reasons why a fully meritocratic society would be unhappy is that psychologists will tell us that loss aversion is more painful than the acquisition of advantage. So if 50% of us were going up and 50% going down, the 50% going up would be relaxed about it and think they deserved it and reasonably happy. The 50% going down would be very miserable and very angry. So that leads to the argument that says that in order the true meritocrats are egalitarians in the sense that a more equal society is not so much one where it's easier to go up but one where it is more tolerable to go down because the cost of going down is not so catastrophic for you because there is a basic provision, there is a basic decency available to all. There's that, yes. The rungs on the ladder are less far apart, so falling as well as right less is at stake in falling and in rising, less is at stake. In the society we've created and the economy we've created, everything is at stake in staying or seeing to it that one's children stay. It's partly because the rungs on the ladder have pulled further and further apart so falling from the top fifth to the middle is falling a greater distance than would be the case in a more equal society if the rungs were closer together. But more than that, the social esteem and recognition now is so tied to where one sits that falling is unthinkable because it doesn't only represent a loss in purchasing power, it represents a loss of identity and social recognition and that's the other part of it that we need to rethink. You have spoken and written brilliantly through a lot of your career about justice and the idea of justice. But do you think that in a sense one of the things that comes out of your argument is that we should be focusing possibly less on justice and more on well-being. If the question we asked ourselves was not so much how do we have a society that is just, but how do we have a society that maximises well-being which by the way would be just, but the justice is a means to the end and the end is greater well-being. Is that an implication of your argument? With one qualification that if by justice we mean distributive justice narrowly conceived as how we allocate income and wealth as instruments of consumption, then yes, we should focus less on that. If we talk about reorganising the terms on which we accord social recognition and esteem to people who make various contributions to social and economic life, that I think, we might describe that as being a way toward well-being, a way toward a society more oriented to a common good, but I also think that society where social recognition were more tied to genuine contributions to the common good, not just to GDP, would also be a more just society. So one more question for me before I open up because I'm sure there are many questions in the room. We were chatting at the end of last week because so many of the things in your lecture chime was some thinking I've been doing. So one of the ways in which I characterise this moment, which absolutely aligns with your argument, is that we are suffering from a generalised solidarity deficit, the neo-liberism, technocratic neo-liberism as you put it, is in a sense a kind of deal and it's a deal between the state and the market. It's a deal between the hierarchy and some notion of individualism. We're used to electoral politics. I've grown up with an electoral politics that was about either efficiency or self-interest. So who will run the country better, the efficiency argument, and who will put most money in your pocketbook, the individualistic argument. And that politics, as you eloquently described, has led to this solidarity deficit. So we have, in a sense, a kind of left account of that deficit, which is to do with inequality and the injuries to the disadvantaged. And then we have a right account or a populist account, which is the insult, a deficit which is around nationhood and belonging and cohesion and tradition and also the vivid points you make about the damage meritocracy is done. Now we agree about this, but my worry is that that politics, the politics that emerges from that solidarity deficit is one which is very intractable. It's about groups. And I've spoken to other people about this recently, Francis for Kiama, Jonathan Hyatt, various people, and there's a sense where the group has got to be the nation. We've got to have an inclusive idea of group rather than this identity versus that identity, but that's hard. It's also politics about morality. And it's not just politics that says, politics efficiency was easier. We could argue about who could run things better. That wasn't a kind of insulting argument, but a politics of morality says, you're bad and I'm good, and that's a bad starting place for any kind of conversation. And finally, it's a visceral politics. It's a politics of emotion as much as it is of reason, more than possibly of reason. How do we step out of this space that we've got into? Well, one way would be to say that all conceptions of solidarity that you've identified need to be enlarged through public debate, a more explicit public debate about what kind of solidarity we should aspire to, which is ultimately a debate about the common good. And national identity and patriotism, I think, should not be the sole province of the right. I think that that progressives and centre-left parties and politicians have done themselves and their cause a great disservice by allowing questions of national identity and belonging and patriotism to be an issue that belongs solely to the right. I think that the content of patriotism and national community and belonging and solidarity is contestable, rightly so, and should be open to argument. But what do we owe one another as citizens engaged in a common project? These are questions that progressives as well as conservatives should address and should debate where there are disagreements. I also think that the sources of solidarity and belonging and membership and identity should not be understood only in relation to the nation state. It's one important basis of community, but it's not the only one. Smaller forms of community and identity, the association life of civil society traditionally has cultivated notions of civic identity and participation and the ability to share in self-government that in many ways I think we are losing. So I think a broader debate about solidarity or the common good if that seems more expansive and debatable should include for the left as well as for the right a conception of community of belonging of what we owe one another as citizens and should allow for the possibility that we inhabit a multiplicity of communities in a pluralist society cultivates and nurtures forms of identity and belonging in the smaller as well as in the more expansive ways that we live and enact a common life together. Would you like to see the kind of deliberative processes that are bringing people together? Do you think that we ought to be bringing that more into our democracy as well? This is a particular RSA obsession right now that we should be using those deliberative methods not just in the kind of academy or in civil society, but we should be using those to help us resolve our policy issues and politicians should be more willing to ask the public to advise them as they work. Yes, so I'm off for the initiative the deliberative initiative that you've undertaken. Great, thank you very much. Okay, so let's take some as a hand there. Thank you. Could you tell us who you are, that would be great. My name is Sarah Gordon, I'm American 30 years. I'm just curious having listened to your lectures and tonight also why do you think politicians continue to get away over many, many years with sort of suckering the American public whether it's how they're going to fix gang crime in Chicago, homelessness in Oakland, bad public schools in Trenton, whatever. Why do you think politicians continue to get elected and then are allowed to do next to nothing in these places that are just a morass of neglect? To link to that I know why the rich are successful like the myth of meritocracy but poor people like the idea that the president anyone can become president of the United States so it's a powerful myth not just for well-off people but for the poor as well. Yes, and the idea that anyone can rise the rags to riches story it's at the heart of the American dream and it's inspiring but it also has a dark side especially against the background of the inequality that we've experienced. As for politicians getting away with the failure to address real and persisting problems especially in cities they get reelected even when they fail I think it's partly due in this various country to country it's partly to do with electoral systems that don't enforce accountability and I think it also has to do and this is a special besetting ailment of the American political system to do with the outsize role of money in politics which obstruct accountability to ordinary citizens and voters. Thank you Jennifer Ball I'm a fellow but I've been a teacher all my life and I'm a European teacher I'm waiting for the word hope and I think that it lies in the next generation and something which I want to see if you what you think in the terms of positive constructive discourse is that I think that young people have an innate altruism and idealism which we fail to recognize in this patriarchal and it is patriarchal even for young people I don't think young people are allowed to engage on their own terms sufficiently often European youth parliament is a phenomenal forum for young people to come up with creative political ideas when the children go to the house of commons and run their own debates they have an incredibly high quality what do you think about engaging young people as a constructive deliberative advisory process? I think it's a very important source of hope and I'm glad you've brought us to the question of hope I see two sources of hope in this otherwise dark diagnosis one of them is that the winners as well as those who've been left behind all have a stake in creating a society that is more oriented to the common good the affluent have seceded from public spaces and public institutions increasingly but I think part of a project of the politics of the common good would be to rebuild the civic infrastructure of a shared common life to create public services, public institutions and public places that create occasions for class mixing to draw people out of gated communities and I think the hope is my hope is that this could be attractive for the successful as well as for those who struggle and who are left behind but a second source of hope is exactly the one you suggest a younger generation not yet jaded by the stale reflexes of contemporary political alternatives everywhere I go I find that students and young people are hungry to engage in recent public debate about big questions that matter including questions of values and ethics as they relate to politics and this is I think one reason for this hunger is that there is very little in public discourse or in what the media offers that provides occasions for this kind of reason, debate and argument about big questions that matter to do with values and justice and what we owe on another citizens so in that hunger I think there is hope and it's for us to tap it let's take one final round of questions before we wind up so there's a over there at the end of that row and then at the back over there Michael thank you so much for outlining the disparities in our society and in our politics so clearly but I wonder whether you can point to recent events in history where such divisions have come to the fore when they were resolved I was thinking of one in particular I was reading about recently concerning the period in the senate before the civil war when politicians actually attacked each other quite violently in order to make clear that their divisions were real and meaningful is there any options I talked to thank you for that when I talked to Jonathan Hyatt the other day I asked him about this because I've been watching the Ken Burns documentary about Vietnam and of course it's 50 years since 1968 now if we think our problems 1968 terrible assassinations the disaster of the Vietnam war bombing lots of bombs being sent around America by revolutionaries of various kinds terrible state of affairs Jonathan Hyatt's argument was he said yes the centrifugal forces in 1968 were very strong but we still then had the centripetal we had the things that held us together the difference now is the forces driving as a partner might not be not so strong but the forces holding us together have become much weaker so I'm interested relating to that question let me address both periods the period leading up to the civil war it is true there was intense pitched conflict over partisanship and ideology in the American case over slavery and the fate of slavery and there was a guy was beaten nearly to death in the Senate by a guy who had come over from the House of Representatives with a cane so it was pretty vicious I wouldn't identify that period though Lincoln produced Lincoln I wouldn't identify that period and the resolution of that conflict is a solution for ours because ultimately what resolved the question of slavery was a civil war so I prefer I prefer I would say the late 50s and 60s up through the mid 60s as an illustrative example of a time when there were deep divisions and disagreements and great ferment in politics Matthew, you mentioned the assassinations of 1968 and the key figures who were assassinated that year were Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and what they represented was a kind of hope that flowed from social movements on the civil rights movement in the 50s through the 60s and then later merging with the protest against the Vietnam War and what these two movements had in common apart from unleashing tremendous civic activism and debate is that they both made explicit appeal to moral arguments and what we're missing today is why I fault the kind of technocratic politics we have today as we have precious little moral and civic argument and idealism in public discourse and this looking back 50 years and listening if you listen not only read but you should listen to some of the audio recordings of the speeches including a speech that Robert F. Kennedy gave in Indianapolis informing the crowd this was the days before news spread so quickly informing the crowd that Martin Luther King had been assassinated and this was a crowd for the most part of African Americans in Indianapolis who had come to see Kennedy and he gave and you can listen to it online the audio a very short but magnificent appeal to the country to recede from the violence and he spoke about his own experience with his brother having been killed and he ended by quoting Escalas in tragedy it's worth listening to it's from a different world because it's a kind of public discourse that is at the same time a kind of moral discourse which is difficult and it's difficult and it's contentious but I think it's enriching the difference it seems to me now is that it was an inclusive morality whereas the moral arguments of today are I'm better they're kind of identity the identity politics is to do with my groups better than your group and that's a different kind of subtly different it's marode and impenetrable in that way then there's no space for genuine deliberation but if we keep morality out of politics for fear of these impenetrable moments then I think we drain too much energy and idealism from the kind of deliberation that we need yes I think it's all to do with the relationship between identity and morality if only we had five more hours back at the room thanks Michael, Ben Glover from the Demos think tank if you get rid of meritocracy what story of hope should progressives tell the left behind the want to leave that behind them well the story we should tell has to be a story that begins by talking about the dignity of work which is a theme that has been lost to progressive politicians and mainstream politicians and we need to begin to tell stories and frame a politics around appreciation genuine appreciation and social recognition for contributions to the common life and to collective well-being that go beyond what the market how the market rewards you and how the market defines the value of your contribution so while opportunity should be open to everyone I'm not against that I'm against making equality of opportunity the primary substance of collective aspiration and the way of defining who's contributed what and how people's work especially against the background of a market society that gives a very sharp clear answer to those questions so I've not given a fully adequate answer to your question but I would begin by trying to have a public debate that redefines what counts as contributing to the common good that isn't wholly the captive of of the market one comforting point Michael for us sitting up here in our advanced years which is we talked about young people I think also older people as you get older you start to be less obsessed by status and by money and by those kinds of ambition you start to care more about friends and about family and about whether or not you've done the right thing in your life so maybe an aging society also brings certain wisdom to this as well as the young people another source of hope the aging of society who would have thought it was a source of hope so I'm so sorry we haven't been able to take more questions I'd like to have carried on talking for hours and hours Michael is very kindly available to sign books outside don't keep him too long cos he's then, she's really kind of him gonna do a little interview with me for the RSA podcast where we spoke to Jonathan Hight and I spoke to Francis Fukuyama the other day so do subscribe to Polarized on your iPod channel we're talking about all these kinds of issues do go and see Rothmell downstairs this is the end of the celebration of our new space if you haven't been to our space on minus one and minus two it is designed for the kinds of discourse that Michael has been talking about and every time I go down there I hear the most fantastic conversations going on and if you're not a fellow of the RSA then what are you doing join the fellowship of the RSA and be part of making the world a better place than having these kinds of conversations it just remains for me to ask you to join me in thanking Michael Sandel