 So we're going to get started. I am Pete Davis. I'm a 2L here at the law school. I'm the chair of the Harvard Law Forum. It's the longest-running American Law School speaker series. It's so long-running that I'm proud to say we are the only Harvard Law School organization that has hosted JFK, Jimmy Carter, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Nader, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ebert Ann Roper, Jerry Falwell, Cesar Chavez, Timothy Leary, Sally Ride, Whoopi Goldberg, Fidel Castro, and wrestling magnate, Vincent McMahon. Take that Harvard Law review. We try to bring in people who have insights on the most important issues of the day, so as to enlighten and inspire our community. If you want to contact the Harvard Law Forum, that's our email address. If you want to follow up with us, go to hlrecord.org, click Forum. This year, we are focusing the Harvard Law Forum on our law school's mission statement, which Harvard Law School's under-discuss mission statement is to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society. We want speakers who inspire us to not just monetize our law degrees, but rather deploy them to address the important crises of our day. There is a crisis in the law today. Four-fifths of civil legal needs go unmet. Mass incarceration has ballooned eightfold over the past decades. And public interest lobbyists are outgunned by corporate interest lobbyists in DC by a rate of 34 to 1. And with the events of 11-9, that crisis has only gotten worse with the threat of an executive branch that has shown disrespect for civic norms and the rule of law. The question for us as a law school is what are we going to do about it? Responsibility is the ability to respond. We have the ability to respond to these crises, and therefore, we have a responsibility. But we need insight into what the heck is going on to live out our responsibility. One man full of that insight is Professor Michael Sandel. 20 years before this year, before last year, he wrote this book, Democracy's Discontent. It's a book that changed my life and countless other lives, too. In it, he warned that absent a stronger civic Republican spirit, a care for our country, a care for our neighbors, a care for participation in our shared public life, liberalism would collapse giving way to, and I'm quoting right from the book here, quote, those who would shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to, quote, take back our culture and take back our country. That was a warning in 1996 from Professor Michael Sandel. 20 years later, he's here to help shed light on why Trump and what now, here today, to help us live out our responsibility to advance justice and societal well-being in this dark and confusing age, is Professor Michael Sandel. Let's hear it for him. Thank you, Pete Davis, for that rousing introduction, and thanks to all of you for coming. One month into the Trump presidency, many people around the world worry that the American Republic is tilting toward tyranny. Many Americans also worry. Last week, John McCain, voiced alarm, had, quote, the hardening resentment we see toward immigrants and refugees and minority groups, especially Muslims, that the growing inability and even unwillingness to separate truth from lies. And he worried that, quote, more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism. The worry is understandable. The autocratic tendencies are difficult to deny. During his campaign, Mr. Trump encouraged violence against protesters at his rallies, threatened to jail his political opponent, promised mass deportations of immigrants living here illegally, refused to say whether he would accept the legitimacy of the election unless he won. And even when he won, he insisted that his loss of the popular vote was due to massive fraud. He proposed tightening libel laws to make it easier to sue journalists. Although he has not acted on this proposal, he recently called the news media enemies of the American people. This chilling phrase, enemies of the people, has a long and dark provenance. It was used by Lenin and Stalin, Goebbels, Hitler, Mao, big league tyrants, as Mr. Trump might call them. Richard Nixon also talked this way, though mostly in private. Never forget, he once told Henry Kissinger, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Lest Kissinger, a former Harvard professor, missed the point, Nixon repeated it, quote, professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it. In thinking about the present political moment, Nixon's presidency is instructive. Of all the presidents in my lifetime, it was Richard Nixon who presented the American constitutional order with its most demanding stress test until now. Then the system held, thanks mainly to three institutions, the media, the courts, and Congress, which ultimately voted articles of impeachment. I remember this vividly. I was 21 years old at the time and an aspiring journalist. Due to a stroke of good luck, I landed a summer job with a newspaper in Washington and covered the Nixon impeachment. Things are different now. Although the media and the judiciary are still independent and robust, Congress is more polarized and partisan and controlled by the president's own party. But the biggest difference is this. What makes this moment dangerous and uncertain is not a constitutional matter, but a political one. Donald Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations, and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties have no compelling answer. What this means is that for those who are worried about Trump, it is not enough to mobilize a politics of protest and resistance. It is also necessary to engage in a politics of persuasion. And such a politics must begin by understanding the discontent that is roiling American society and politics. The election of Trump, like the triumph of Brexit in the UK, was an angry verdict on decades of rising inequality in a version of globalization that benefits those at the top but leaves ordinary people disempowered. It was also a rebuke for a technocratic approach to politics that is tone deaf to the resentments of people who feel the economy and the culture have left them behind. Some denounce the upsurge of populism. It's little more than a racist xenophobic reaction against immigrants and multiculturalism. Others see it mainly in economic terms. It's a protest against the job losses brought about by global trade and new technologies. But it's a mistake, I think, to see only the bigotry in populist protest or to view it only as an economic complaint. To do so misses the fact that the upheavals of 2016 were a political response to a political failure of historic proportions. Right wing populism is usually an indicator of the failure of progressive politics. And this is true today. The Democratic Party has become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional classes than to the blue collar and middle class voters who once constituted its base. A similar predicament of Flick's Britain's labor party. How did this happen? In the 1990s, the Clinton administration joined with Republicans in promoting global trade agreements and deregulating the financial industry. The benefits of these policies clode mostly to those at the top. But Democrats did little to address the deepening inequality and the growing power of money in politics. Having strayed from its traditional mission of taming capitalism and holding economic power to democratic account, liberalism lost its capacity to inspire. All that seemed to change when Barack Obama appeared on the political scene in his 2008 presidential campaign. He offered a stirring alternative to the managerial technocratic language that had come to characterize liberal public discourse. He showed that progressive politics could speak a language of moral and spiritual purpose. The moral energy and civic idealism he inspired as a candidate did not carry over into his presidency. Here's why. Assuming office in the midst of the financial crisis, he appointed economic advisors who had promoted financial deregulation during the Clinton years. With their encouragement, he bailed out the banks on terms that did not hold them to account and offered little help for ordinary citizens who had lost their homes. His moral voice muted. Obama placated rather than articulated the seething public anger toward Wall Street. Lingering anger over the bailout cast a shadow over the Obama presidency and would fuel a mood of populist protest across the political spectrum. On the left, it prompted the Occupy Movement and then the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. On the right, it fueled the Tea Party Movement and ultimately the election of Trump. The populist uprising in the US, Britain, and Europe is a backlash against elites of the mainstream parties. But its most conspicuous casualties have been liberal and center-left political parties, the Democratic Party in the US, the Labor Party in Britain, the Socialist Party in France. Before they can hope to win back public support, progressive parties need to rethink their mission and purpose. To do so, they should 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 rethinking should begin with the recognition that these grievances are not only economic, but also moral and cultural. They aren't only about wages and jobs, but about social esteem. Here are four themes that progressive parties need to grapple with if they hope to address the anger and resentments that royal politics today. Income inequality, meritocratic hubris, the dignity of work, and patriotism in national community. Let me say something about each of these four themes. First, income inequality. The standard response to inequality is to call for greater equality of opportunity, retraining workers, improving access to higher education, removing barriers of race, ethnicity, and gender. This approach is summed up in the slogan that those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their talents will take them. But this slogan now rings hollow. In today's economy, it is not easy to rise. Americans have traditionally worried less than Europeans about inequality, believing that whatever one's starting point in life, it's possible with hard work to rise from rags to riches. But today, this belief is in doubt. Americans born to poor parents tend to stay poor as adults. In fact, it's easier today to rise from poverty in Canada or Germany or Sweden and in many other European countries than it is in the US. Progressives should therefore reconsider the assumption that mobility can compensate for inequality. They should reckon directly with inequalities of power and wealth rather than rest content with the project of helping people scramble up a ladder whose rungs grow further and further apart. But the problem runs deeper, which brings me to meritocratic hubris, the second theme. The relentless emphasis on creating a fair meritocracy in which social positions reflect effort and talent 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 winners to consider their success, their own doing, a measure of their virtue, and to look down upon those less fortunate than themselves. As for those who lose out, well, they may complain that the system is rigged, that the winners have cheated and manipulated their way to the top. Or they may harbor the demoralizing thought that their failure is their own doing, that they simply lack the talent and drive to succeed. Now, when these sentiments commingle, as invariably they do, they make for a volatile brew of anger and resentment against elites that fuels the populist protest. Though himself a billionaire, Trump understands and exploits this resentment. Unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who speak constantly of opportunity, Trump, if you notice, scarcely mentions the word. Instead, he offers blunt talk of winners and losers. It's also worth noting that Bernie Sanders rarely mentions the word. Liberals and progressives have so valorized a college degree, both as an avenue for advancement and as a basis for social esteem, that they have difficulty understanding the hubris ameritocracy can generate and the harsh judgment it imposes on those who haven't gone to college. Such attitudes are at the heart of the populist backlash in Trump's victory. One of the deepest political divides in American politics today is between those with and those without a college degree. To heal this divide, Democrats need to understand the attitudes toward merit and work, the divide reflects. The third theme is the dignity of work. The loss of jobs to technology and outsourcing has coincided with the sense that society accords less respect to the kind of work the working class does. As economic activity has shifted from making things to managing money, as society has lavished outsized rewards on hedge fund managers and Wall Street bankers, the esteem accorded work in the traditional sense has become fragile and uncertain. New technology may further erode the dignity of work. Some Silicon Valley visionaries now speak of a time when robots and artificial intelligence will render many of today's jobs obsolete to ease the way for such a future. They propose paying everyone a basic income. And so what was once justified and proposed is a safety net for all citizens. Is now offered as a way to soften the transition to a world without work. Whether such a world is a prospect to welcome or to resist is an important question. One that needs to be central to politics in the coming years. And to think it through, political parties will have to grapple with the meaning of work and its place in a good life. Finally, the theme of patriotism in national community. Free trade agreements and immigration are the most potent flashpoints of populist fury. On one level, these are economic issues. Opponents of free trade agreements and immigration argue that they threaten local jobs and wages. Whereas proponents reply, they help the economy in the long run. But the passion these issues evoke suggests that something more than economic, something more than wages and jobs is at stake. Workers who believe their country cares more for cheap goods and cheap labor than for the job prospects of its own people feel betrayed. This sense of betrayal often finds ugly and intolerant expression, a hatred of immigrants, a strident nationalism that vilifies Muslims and other outsiders, a rhetoric of taking back our country. Liberals reply by condemning the hateful rhetoric, by insisting on the virtues of mutual respect and multicultural understanding. This principled response, valid though it is, fails to address an important set of questions implicit in the populist complaint. What is the moral significance, if any, of national borders? Do we owe more to our fellow citizens than we owe citizens of other countries? Is patriotism a virtue or is it a vice, a kind of prejudice for our own kind? In a global age, should we cultivate national identities or should we aspire to a cosmopolitan ethic of universal human concern? These questions may seem daunting, a far cry from the small things we discuss in politics these days. But the Trumpian moment highlights the need to rejuvenate the democratic public discourse, to address the big questions people care about, including moral and cultural questions. Disentangling the intolerant aspects of populist protest from the legitimate grievances it conveys 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. Okay, now we'll enter into conversation after that wonderful lecture. I'll ask a few questions and we'll leave some room at the end for y'all to ask questions too. We have about, we've got a lot of time for questions, so this'll be great. I'll start with this. In your book, Public Philosophy, so getting down to like practical precedence. In your book, Public Philosophy, my favorite chapter, it might be because I'm part Irish Catholic, but my favorite chapter was a ode to the 1968 Bobby Kennedy campaign. You said he had the moral energy and bold public purpose that could have shaken up the complacency of post-war American liberalism. He balanced being more radical and more conservative than the mainstream party, and he brought together black and white blue-collar communities. Do you still believe that after, you know, Obama kind of, you said he might have channeled the Bobby Kennedy spirit, but he stopped it. Do we need just Obama again, but he continues it after the presidency? Speak to that a bit. Well, I do think we need to, I think we need something like the kind of politics that Robert Kennedy was offering in 1968. What we forget is that he was offering an alternative to the kind of procedural technocratic liberalism that has predominated, well, since, at least predominated in democratic politics. And he departed from it precisely along the lines that I think we need to encourage, which is to introduce directly into public discourse explicit debate about moral and spiritual questions, not to insist on bracketing or setting aside controversial conceptions of the good life or of civic virtue in politics. And the political resonance that he found, I think, and that Barack Obama as a candidate in 2008 found speaks to the resonance and importance of that kind of public discourse, but we've not recovered it, sadly, since. What did you mean by he was more radical and more conservative than the mainstream democratic party? Well, he was more radical in the sense that, well, certainly by comparison to the mainstream democratic party of 1968, he was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War on moral as well as pragmatic grounds. He argued openly about the injustice of the war. He also talked about poverty. You rarely hear, it's striking, you rarely hear democratic politicians in the years, oh, say in the last two to three decades. Talking about poverty, they talk a lot about the middle class and aim at suburban swing voters. So in these two respects, he was more radical than mainstream Democrats. He was more conservative partly because he had, he used a moral and spiritual language, which we've come to associate, I think, wrongly with conservative politics. But he also, he was another conservative impulse. He talked about work, which was one of the four themes that I suggested we need to recover. And he did not see, I don't think he would have been keen on a universal basic income. He criticized welfare. On the grounds, not on the grounds that it was too expensive, not on the grounds that it was wrong to tax the rich to help the poor, but instead on the grounds that it was corrosive of the civic virtue of those who didn't work and contribute to the common good. So that was in some ways a conservative position, although the rationale for it, which is to do with civic virtue and contributing to the common good, might not be only conservative. So those are some examples. Speaking of work and production, one very interesting part of democracy's discontent, recommend the book to everyone, especially for the age of Trump. You linger on this lost debate in the 1800s, free labor versus wage labor. This Jacksonian notion of the producing classes against the, for HLS students, lawyers, bankers and speculators, and the Knights of Labor's unions ideal of a virtuous citizen producers. And as soon as I saw Make America great again, everyone lingered on America, nationalism, great, this like lost autocracy again, this nostalgia, but no one lingered on Make that Trump had this sort of faux simple producerist ethic he was speaking to. Could you speak to that a bit? It is very interesting. In a way, Trump has appropriated the old producerist ethic, because when he says we're losing to China and various other countries, what he means is, they're producing and exporting more to us than we are to them. That's what he means by losing. From a consumerist point of view, that describes winning. They make stuff, we get to consume it. They hold our debt. That sounds like winning from a consumerist point of view. And what this suggests, and you're right to say this goes all the way back. And I did discuss it in the book. The way we think and talk and argue about economic policy underwent a fateful change in the 20th century, around the middle of the 20th century. And one of the important changes is that previously, from Jefferson to Jackson to the Knights of Labor to Lewis Brandeis and TR in the progressive era, economic policy was debated from the standpoint, not primarily from the standpoint of GDP and economic growth, but also from the standpoint of citizenship, what economic arrangements and structures and forms of work will cultivate citizens capable of the independence and the orientation to the common good that democracy requires, that a self-governing republic requires. The Knights of Labor is a good example. Here was an early moment in the labor movement. Now today we think of the labor movement as concerned primarily about hours of work and wages and conditions of work. One of the demands of the Knights of Labor was that there be reading rooms in factories stocked with newspapers. Because otherwise workers couldn't really be citizens. They wouldn't have the time or the occasion to learn about public affairs so that they could actually contribute and have a voice as meaningful citizens. And the early anti-trust anti-monopoly movement was also not about, as it is today, preventing monopolies that would drive up consumer prices. That's the consumerist ethic. The anti-trust movement when it began was about preventing concentrations of economic power that would suffocate or overwhelm democratic power and self-government. It was a civic rationale, not a consumerist rationale. So in many ways, we've lost touch with what I call a political economy of citizenship and instead have embraced this over the last 60, 70 years, a political economy of growth and distributive justice. One question some have asked when they heard that this was coming was, since you're an ethicist and a moralist, good person to ask about, there are figures like the alt-right, like Milo or whatever his name is. And Trump has unleashed some people that are so far outside of the bounds of what we feel is decent, that engaging them in conversation and in persuasion is giving them a platform. What are our ethics about this? Should we start, some people might not even talk to us unless we admit that Trump is legitimate and then we can talk to them. But we don't believe Trump might be legitimate. We might wanna just say, draw a hard line and say, this is crazy, we don't even wanna talk about this. Where do we draw the line of what conversations we should be having that are persuasion and what conversations are, let's not give a platform to these wild ideas? Well, it's never easy to know in advance who is a persuadable and who isn't. It's something that's hard to know unless we try. At the same time, we can make informed judgments at the extremes. And in a way, Pete, I think this touches on two different questions. One is the question of whom to invite and offer a platform to at the Harvard Law Forum. And the other question is, how is a matter of political argument and deliberation can we identify a possible or plausible interlocutors? Those are two somewhat different questions. And I think in deciding whom to give a platform to, whom to invite, you should, we should exercise judgment on who has something valuable to contribute to public discourse, whether or not we agree. And the answer may not include everybody. But when it comes to identifying partners for a public debate persuasion, there we have to, I think we should have a broader, rather than a narrower scope, but understanding all the while that we can't anticipate who's persuadable until we give it a try. This is a question from George Shalaba. He's a member of the Harvard community and reviewed Democracy's Discontent 20 years ago, one of the great book reviewers of our community, a question of practical policies. So there are these abstract ideas that you laid out. But on a practical front, he asks, are you in favor of some of these concrete policies that could lead to higher civic life? So automated voter registration, platforms funded that allow for more vigorous debates run by the League of Women Voters, a national popular vote compact outside of the Electoral College, a rollback of Citizens United. Are there any civic policies that are in the air that you wanna call our attention to what you think of them? I think all of the ones that he mentioned and that you read out just now are good ideas. Yes, they're all good ideas. We have, among the lowest percentage of eligible citizens voting in American elections than most democracies. And so partly this is to do with registration laws, but also there's the problem of Citizens United and the corrupting and now really outsize roll of money in politics. So yes, I would endorse all of those, but I think it's important to recognize that even if we fixed all of those problems with voting and money in politics, we would still have before us the harder, more controversial task of recasting the terms of public discourse. So I don't think we should consider those procedural solutions, important though they are, and I'm all in favor of, it's an alternative to recasting the terms of public discourse. I'm gonna open it up. Let's see how much time we have to open it up. We have about 20 minutes. Let's please keep your questions to a question and short. I'm gonna pull the mic away, so. Yes, Professor, you just mentioned about the eligibility to vote. It was my impression that in this last election that there were 43% of the electorate that stayed home. And you also mentioned that the Democratic Party had a large number of brilliant people surrounding Hillary Clinton. And I was depending on them to find a strategy to make a successful campaign and go to those states, the Rust Belt states, where people were crying and talk to them and none of this happened and 43% of the people sat on their hands. What do you have to say? They didn't run a great campaign. And it wasn't just poor mechanics or an overreliance on the so-called analytics which may have been part of the problem. I think it was to do beyond the mechanics of the campaign being in the grip of a certain picture of politics and the scope of public discourse and the range of alternatives that led the Clinton campaign and Secretary Clinton herself not fully to grasp the mood of protest nor to imagine a kind of politics that could begin to address it. Other questions, way back there. You, in the way. Speak up, please. You mentioned earlier about the barge response with the intention of just to get that question on the mic. A question on the future of work and the rise of AI, artificial intelligence and automation. Right. I don't have a quick answer to that. It partly depends on what form the artificial intelligence takes, how it interacts with the world of work, what jobs it will displace, what jobs it may enrich and strengthen. There's now a growing debate about this very question. But for me, the big moral and political question is whether we should welcome technological developments that would have the effect of rendering work obsolete for a great many people. Citizens. Now some would say much work that machines might take over is hard and difficult work that we would be better off not having to ask humans to perform. But this raises large questions about the role of work in a good life. I'm a little bit suspicious of those Silicon Valley enthusiasts I mentioned who think it's as simple a matter as paying people off so to speak to do without work and not to complain. I'm wary of that argument. But how exactly, what role artificial intelligence should play, what technologies we should encourage and discourage in the realm of work. That's a bigger, broader question that I think we need to begin to think about as a society. Other questions. We're back there. In the back. I'm asking where do you see us going and keep your eyes set on the promise right? Trump. But this kind of conflict appears in which direction it's going towards. Like all of the backlash that's happening about immigration. Right. Where it goes depends on what you, we collectively do. It depends on how civil society reacts. It depends on how those who are worried about the litany of Trump threats, promises, commitments that you mentioned depends on the response. Now here are two things I think that will make it more likely that the response will be more effective rather than less. First, while it's important to mobilize for those who disagree with Trump, his threats, his promises, his policies. Mobilization simply to protest this or that executive order or policy or statement carries two risks that need to be borne in mind. First, that it will contribute to the chaos and the tumult and the appearance of chaos that actually strengthens rather than weakens his agenda. And we saw this even, we saw a glimpse of this even with the travel ban and then the protests at the airport which I think were laudable and admirable. But whereas for previous presidents, having a policy rollout set by chaos was a political liability. Remember the chaos of the website with Obamacare at first. That was a liability that weakened the policy and weakened the president politically. For President Trump, it doesn't work that way. It's something closer to the opposite. The chaos and the tumult and the fevered frenzy and the confusion actually creates an atmosphere, a political atmosphere that helps his politics. Because part of his political offer is to stand up against confusion and chaos even if he himself and his policies may have contributed to that chaos and confusion. So it's important not to allow mobilizations and protests to evolve into a kind of chaotic or violent display that reinforces the support in the public for the idea of a strong man who will stand up to that. So that's one cautionary note. But there's another which I think matters even more. If you watch cable news, put aside Fox, if you watch cable news that's covering every tweet of the president and every seeming political misstep and reporting on the chaos of the administration, there is a kind of fevered frenzied fascination with Trump that this feeds and abets and encourages. And this is damaging to those who would mount a serious critical alternative to Trump's policies because it creates a welter of outrage and of passion and of confusion and of distraction that makes it very hard to discriminate between what's really important and what's peripheral. To listen to cable news, you would think that the travel ban, let's say, or the question of Russian involvement in the election are on a par with a Trump high staff member flogging the goods of Ivanka Trump on television. They're treated with the same kind of fevered intensity and fascination and that leads to a dulling of political judgment and focus. And so what I'm suggesting is that in the age of Trump a critical political alternative has to exercise a certain kind of restraint, a kind of restraint you might describe as an economy of outrage because absent an economy of outrage, it will be impossible to discriminate the essential from the trivial, the threats that really matter from the eye catching distractions that about. As our final question, we ask every final speaker here, what role does Harvard play in this? What role specifically Harvard law? What can students do? Well, the main role that Harvard and Harvard law school can play is to create a forum, such as the one Pete that you've created here and everyone who's attended has contributed to, of deliberating together, trying to make sense of the politics of our time and cultivating the ability to reason together and learn together about these questions in the spirit of democratic citizens. That's what Harvard should do. Let's be citizens. Michael Sandow everyone, let's hear it for him. Michael Sandow, let's keep it going. Thank you so much.