Thomas Piketty is one of the world’s leading economists, a socialist who has been studying the corrosive effects of inequality for decades. Last May, he sat down with Harvard’s Michael Sandel, one of the world’s most prominent political philosophers, for a talk at the Paris School of Economics about the moral limits of markets and the future of the left. They tussled over what liberals would have to do to counter a rising tide of nativism from Donald Trump and the other conservative politicians gaining traction around the globe.
In the months that followed, Mr. Piketty and Mr. Sandel kept talking over email, sparring over questions about identity and belonging: When do borders matter? How do you find a balance between nationalism and internationalism? What are our responsibilities to migrants, and how can we convince Americans that the system is fair?
Today, with Democrats struggling over how much of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda to support as well as the future of their party, Times Opinion has adapted Mr. Piketty and Mr. Sandel’s conversations. Both men have long been critics of mainstream liberalism from the distinct perspectives of their respective fields — Mr. Piketty as an economist, Mr. Sandel as a philosopher. Their back-and-forth, edited for length and clarity, builds to a surprising conclusion: that the left must reclaim a form of identity politics.
Michael Sandel: Let me test your international socialist principles with a question about borders. Is there any good principled reason not to have open borders?
Thomas Piketty: I think the free circulation of people always comes with some specific public goods that need to be financed, whether it’s education, transportation or the environment. To take an example, European Union member states have decided that you are free as a student to go to any E.U. country where you want to study. I think it’s a fantastic principle, one of the great achievements of the European Union. The only problem is that we didn’t plan anything to pay for this.
Students from Norway or Germany who go to French universities pay close to zero. But students from Mali or Bangladesh have to pay 5,000 euros or 10,000 euros each to come. Is this the best we can do? I’m not sure. I would like us to have more free circulation, greater possibilities for students to come. But this would have to come with some international tax regime that will pay for it.
That’s a specific example but it illustrates the general point I want to make. If we plan sufficiently well the funding of public services — universities, hospitals, housing, transportation, infrastructure — I don’t see any reason to have strong restrictions on free circulation. Of course, that’s a big if. But the point is we should be very close to free circulation and open borders.
Sandel: So at the moment, do rich countries have a right to keep out migrants from poor countries?
Piketty: What do you mean by a right? I think we all have a right to think of a better system. We all have a duty to think of a better set of institutions. And so, if you’re asking me, “Is Europe right now sufficiently open to the rest of the world in migrant flows?” my answer is no.
Our current strategy is to say we need to have 10,000 more or 50,000 more people die in the Mediterranean to ensure that nobody else wants to cross. Is this the best we can do? Are we saying, “We’ve thought a lot about it, and after 2,000 years of civilization around the Mediterranean Basin, this is the best solution we have found to regulate human flows”? If you’re asking me if this the best solution, then, no, this is not the best solution.
We’ve never been as rich as we are today. But because we’ve given up on some ambitious continuation of the egalitarian agenda of making the most powerful economic actors accountable to democratic control, making them contribute to the public goods we need to fund, you have this nativist discourse of blaming migrants or supposedly excessively open frontiers for our problems.
In fact, the magnitude of the flow as compared to the European Union population of 450 million is relatively small.
Sandel: The reason I’m pressing you on this, Thomas, is that it bears on the future of the left. It seems to me that one of the greatest political vulnerabilities of social democratic parties is that they have allowed the right to monopolize some of the most potent political sentiments, namely patriotism, community and belonging.
Immigration is an issue that forces us to ask questions about the moral significance of national borders and, by implication, about the moral significance of nations as communities of mutual dependence and responsibility.
My sense is that the future of a left politics will depend on developing fuller answers to these kinds of questions.
I think it’s a mistake to cede patriotism to parties of the right. It seems to me that social democratic and progressive parties should articulate their own conception of what patriotism and belonging mean. For example, when companies seek tax havens rather than pay taxes in the countries where they sell their goods and make their profits, couldn’t this be described as a failure of economic patriotism? Don’t companies have a patriotic duty to pay taxes and contribute to the common good in the country that makes their success possible?
Do you agree that parties of the left have had a hard time, especially in recent decades, articulating an ethic of membership, belonging, community and shared identity?
Piketty: I think that what explains the vote for Trump or the vote for Marine Le Pen in France is primarily job losses in manufacturing due to trade competition, rather than an inflow of migrants.
Sandel: But the salience of the immigration issue is high in some places with very few immigrants. Why is that?
Piketty: Because the left has not addressed the issues of trade and jobs. They will not win by competing with the nationalist right on identity discourse or about migrants because the nationalist right will always be more convincing on this front. What’s important, I think, is to address what’s really the core issue for the voters.
In the counties where Trump has been getting the most votes, the big predictor is the destruction of manufacturing jobs. It is not the inflow of migrants from Muslim countries or wherever. This is just wrong.
We see the same in France. There were, historically, among Jean-Marie Le Pen voters, people who were clearly angry at North African migrants. But today, the party of his daughter Marine le Pen, the National Rally, draws its voters mainly from small cities with no migrant population, where the real issue is opposition to European trade policy and the offshoring of jobs. These voters are saying “Our main problem is trade competition. Whether it’s from Turkey, from China, from Algeria, from Mexico is not the issue. The issue is that we are losing jobs.”
Nicolas Sarkozy, when he was in power in France, was the voice of the liberal right and the free market. He tried to appeal to these people by being very strong on identity, using inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants.
But he was not able to attract Le Pen voters because what they were really asking for was change in how economic globalization and the economic system are organized.
Another issue, and I think it’s very important for the U.S. too, is that people in small cities feel they are always being stigmatized — criticized, for instance, for having their own car, for living in single-family houses. We saw this in France, with the Yellow Vest protests against Emmanuel Macron’s gas tax. People who had to commute to work resented being told by Paris elites that they are responsible for climate change, for carbon emissions — even as these elites thought nothing of flying to Rome for a weekend, heedless of their own emissions. That’s led to this feeling of being abandoned by both the center-right and the center-left.
I think the problem of the left is that not only has it not questioned the way the economy has been organized, but it has also been the champion of its evolution, as you yourself have very well shown.
If you tell the public over several decades that unfettered global trade and capital flows are facts of nature beyond political control, if you pretend that the only thing you can control is the flow of migrants across borders, you should not be surprised when the entire political discussion is about migration and identity. I think that’s a trap, something that should be avoided at all costs, because in the end this will lead to victory for the nativist, nationalist side.
Sandel: I think I would distinguish less sharply, Thomas, than you do between identity issues and economic issues. Of course, I agree that the job losses due to the trade policies of the age of globalization have been an enormous driver of support for figures like Trump and Marine Le Pen, as have the dislocating effects of unfettered capital flows and the financialization of the economy.
But there are two kinds of effects here. One is the direct economic effect: job loss, wage stagnation. The other is connected to a politics of identity construed more broadly than border policies or immigration — identity in the sense of speaking to the expressive dimensions of politics. Your point about people feeling stigmatized is a good example.
We talked about dignity and recognition. People who lived in hollowed-out industrial towns suffered not only wage stagnation or job loss, but also the sense that the rest of the society, or those who governed it, didn’t care about them as fellow citizens, didn’t recognize them or respect them or care about their dignity.
It seems to me that we can’t ignore the politics of recognition. That is a kind of politics of identity — and we need to articulate it and, in articulating it, we have to recognize and name grievances.
Piketty: The identity politics you describe is very different than the one stressing ethnic origins and religion or the color of skin.
Sandel: Fair enough.
Piketty: But yes, the left does have to speak to that kind of identity, and to respond to it.
Back in the 1980s or 1970s or 1960s, the American socioeconomic elite, the educational elite, mostly voted Republican. The Democratic Party did less well with elites. But today, if you look at many of the fanciest areas, the most affluent places, they actually vote Democratic, and this has enabled Trump Republicans to appeal to working-class voters.
I want the Democrats to lose their vote in the wealthiest areas. As long as they predominate in these areas, it means they are unlikely to offer serious measures to combat inequality. It also means they can easily be portrayed by the other side as being elitist. But the way to appeal to non-elites is not to have a race with the Republicans on identity in the sense of concern about migrants.
Sandel: Not in that sense, no.
What you say reminds me of an experience I had this winter. My family and I were vacationing in Florida, and I got into an elevator in the place where we were staying. An older woman who was in the elevator asked me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “Boston.” That’s all I said. She replied, “I’m from Iowa.” And then she added, “And we know how to read in Iowa.” I didn’t know what to reply. I hadn’t said I was from Harvard. All I said was Boston. Then, as she got out of the elevator, she said, “We don’t much like people on the coasts.”
This, in a way, is a politics of identity. It’s not about immigration, but it’s about feeling looked down upon. It’s about recognition. It’s about dignity.
My hunch is that any hope we may have of reducing economic inequality will depend on creating the conditions for greater equality of recognition, honor, dignity and respect. What do you think?
Piketty: This seems very reasonable to me.
By continuing in the direction of the democratic socialist agenda promoted by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and hopefully by younger candidates in the future, I think the Democratic Party will be able to restore hope and a feeling of recognition to a larger part of the country than just Boston and San Francisco. Similar conclusions also apply in Europe and elsewhere.
Sandel: A progressive economic agenda is an important step in the right direction. But as Donald Trump returns to the White House, Democrats need a broader project of civic renewal. They need to affirm the dignity of work, especially for those without college degrees; rein in the power of Big Tech and give citizens a voice in shaping technologies, so that A.I. enhances work rather than replaces it. Citizens should also have a hand in shaping the transition to a green economy, rather than being forced to accept whatever top-down solutions technocratic elites impose.
Mistrust of experts now runs deep. It feeds the resentment and sense of disempowerment that Donald Trump exploits. Democrats (and, it seems to me, social democrats in Europe) need a new governing project — one that strengthens the bonds of community and gives people a say in directing the forces that govern their lives.
Piketty: Time will tell whether a new turnaround is possible. What is certain is that it will require a major change of course for the Democrats. Having downplayed redistributive ambitions in recent decades, Democrats have become the party of the most highly educated, and of the highest earners. The Republicans retain a strong base among the business world, but they have also succeeded, at little cost, in attracting the popular vote by breaking with the Democrats on free trade and on liberal, urban, elitist globalization.
Sandel: Thomas, we have both emphasized the need for Democrats to break more explicitly with the neoliberal version of globalization that brought widening inequality and also to move beyond the faith that the solution to inequality is individual mobility through higher education.
How many times, in the 1990s and 2000s, did we hear Democrats (and mainstream Republicans) proclaim this rhetoric of rising: “If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to college. What you earn will depend on what you learn”? But most Americans (and most Europeans) don’t have a university degree. So it’s folly to create an economy that makes dignified work and social esteem depend on a credential that most people don’t have.
It’s also political folly: Telling the losers of globalization that their struggles are due to their failure to get a college degree implies that their failure is their fault. That fuels anger against elites, and also the backlash against higher education.
To his credit, Joe Biden departed not only from the trade policies of his predecessors but also, to some extent, from their credentialist rhetoric of aspiration. He spoke more about the dignity of work and less about arming people for meritocratic competition. Though some argue that his focus on forgiving college debt tilted in the old direction. What do you think?
Piketty: If the Democrats want to become the party of social justice once again, and also if they want to stop being portrayed as the party of the elite, they must accept the loss of the vote of the privileged by proposing vigorous redistribution measures, which will have to respond not only to the aspirations of the urban working class but also to that of small towns and rural areas. You can’t bet everything on canceling student debt; you also need to reach out to those who have taken on debt to buy a home or a small business. Aspiration can take many different forms, and all ought to be respected and valued.
Sandel: Talk of aspiration brings us back to the blurry boundary between economics and the politics of identity.
Piketty: Socioeconomic issues and identity conflicts are deeply connected. If your socioeconomic aspirations are neglected too long and too obviously, then at the end this can give rise to entrenched identity conflict.
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