Online NewsHour: Gergen Dialogue with Michael Sandel, May 10, 1996

REDISCOVERING CIVILITY

MAY 10, 1996
TRANSCRIPT

David Gergen, editor at large of "U.S. News & World Report," engages Michael Sandel, professor of government at Harvard University and author of Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Sandel argues that America must return to the civic traditions Alexis de Tocqueville described when he visited the United States in the Nineteenth Century.
DAVID GERGEN: Professor Sandel, in your new book, you argue that our current discontents in our democracy are rooted very much in the changed public philosophy. For most of our history from Jefferson and Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, we had a public philosophy that believed that we should cultivate good citizenship, those habits of the heart that De Tocqueville found when he was here 130 years ago or so I guess, in the 1830's that said, in effect, people through their local associations, their churches, their township meetings, and the other things, became good citizens, they acquired good moral character,and that's what made our democracy vibrant and workable, but now we've abandoned that.
MICHAEL SANDEL, Author, Democracy's Discontent: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: Say in the 20th century. Tell me where we've come, in your judgment.
MICHAEL SANDEL: Well, I think we've come to a public philosophy that says government should be neutral with respect to controversial moral and religious conceptions; government shouldn't try to cultivate civic virtue or form the character of its citizens. That would be legislating morality. That would risk coercion; government should simply provide a framework of rights and entitlements within which people can choose for themselves. And while that's very attractive in some respects, it also has certain defects, and the defects are showing up in our public life now.
DAVID GERGEN: What are those defects, in your judgment?
MICHAEL SANDEL: Well, I think that the defects are reflected in discontent that is swirling about us and has afflicted American politics for the last few decades. One aspect is a sense that despite the expansion of rights and entitlements, we're less and less in control of the forces that govern our lives, a sense of disempowerment. The other has to do with the erosion of community, the sense that from families to neighborhoods, to the nation, the moral fabric of community is unraveling.
DAVID GERGEN: So that--help me understand the connection between good citizenship and a feeling that we've lost control, the loss of mastery.
MICHAEL SANDEL: Well, throughout the American tradition, one important strand of public philosophy that you referred to, the civic strand, or the small “r” republican strand, says that to be a citizen is more than just voting every four years, it's more than just registering your self interest in politics. It's deliberating about the common good. It's participating in shaping the forces that govern the collective destiny, and the civic voice of American politics, the one that attends to that aspiration, has dropped out and given way to a kind of procedural republic, as I call it in the book, that tries to keep moral and civic questions at a certain distance from politics.
DAVID GERGEN: So the people feel they have a sense, they have rights, but they no longer have anchors in their lives. They feel that they're drifting?
MICHAEL SANDEL: Yes, yes, and the civic tradition always emphasized the importance not only of having a say and having a control collectively but having a sense of belonging, a sense of identity with the particular political community because only in that way do people have a sense of responsibility for a whole that's larger than themselves.
DAVID GERGEN: All right. Why do you think we walked away from--was it growth of big business and the growth of big government that followed in which during that time people lost their moorings?
MICHAEL SANDEL: I think that was a big part of it, because the first expression of the discontents that we find so powerful today showed up really in the early 20th century when suddenly big business and the national economy and monopolies and trusts organized economic power and social life on a vast scale and people felt disoriented, displaced, because political community was still oriented toward small cities and towns and local centers, and for much of the century, our politics has struggled to, to ease that gap, to enable bigger government, national government and also a national sense of citizenship to catch up to the scale on which economic powers is exercised.
DAVID GERGEN: Now, it's interesting to me that you believe that even though we have this reign--this new reigning public philosophy, the emphasis upon individual rights and this rampant individualism in our society, and a government that is morally neutral, that there are voices up there both on the left and the right that you wrote about sympathetically, favorably. It's not often one hears from deep within the academy words of praise for cultural conservatives like Bill Bennett and George Will, but your book very much speaks to them and says that they very much are on the right track in your judgment.
MICHAEL SANDEL: I think they are on the right track, and they speak about the culture, the popular culture, the educational system, the erosion of values. They want to restore virtue to public life, and I think they're on the right track, but I disagree with them. I think they're only half right, because it isn't just big government, and isn't just the consumer culture, though that's a big part of it, that have contributed to the erosion of communities, values, and civic virtue, it's also, in my view, the effects of economic power organized on a vast scale, the dislocating effects of the global economy and of capital mobility, these forces, economic forces, market forces have also powerfully undermined the forms of community and civic life that civic conservatives rightly worry about. So what I would like to argue for and I try to in the book it's a politics that is a progressive politics, small "d" democratic politics, that attends to questions of virtue, civic virtue, character formation, but that looks both at the market and at the culture.
DAVID GERGEN: Well, some argue with regard to the economic arrangements we have today, especially the economic--the inequality of wealth--you point out for example that between the early 70's and the early 90's, about 98 percent of the new wealth generated in this country went to the top 20 percent. Some argue that the problem with that is that the people in the bottom half don't have an equal chance at the starting line, that what we ought to do is give them and train them in a way, give them an equal chance at the starting line. Your argument goes further.
MICHAEL SANDEL: Yes.
DAVID GERGEN: Your argument is that there is really something corrupting about that much inequality in and of itself.
MICHAEL SANDEL: Yes. It corrupts the civic character of our public life. Liberals, for the most part, have emphasized, as you point out, the issue of fairness to individuals that is, is violated by a growing gulf between rich and poor, but those philosophers in the civic tradition, the small "r" republican tradition, have also said that in order to have a civic life where people can be oriented to a common good, rather than merely private pursuits, there has to be a certain rough equality, a condition economically. And if a society is too deeply riven with rich and poor leading really separate lives, then it's very difficulty to have the sense of community and identity and belonging and the mixing in ordinary life across classes and various groups to be able to have a common life and a kind of politics oriented to a common good.
DAVID GERGEN: What is the responsibility of us, those of us who have privilege who've had education, within this social order? What--how do we encourage the civic virtues among us?
MICHAEL SANDEL: Well, I think maybe the biggest responsibility is, is to focus not so much on the redistribution of income, though in my view that would be desirable, it's very difficult to sustain politically, and to worry more about building public institutions from the public schools to other forms of public institutions, libraries, museums, public transportation, city centers that are vibrant, places where men and women from different walks of life, different economic classes, different religious and ethnic groups can mix or thrust together in the normal course of life, bump up against one another in the hope not that they'll agree--because we'll never agree and democratic politics depends on disagreement--but we'll share a sufficiently common life so that we can deliberate together about the purposes of political community.
DAVID GERGEN: All right. We can talk about creating a stronger morality within the country and the higher level of civic virtue. For many who have been on the fringes of our society, gays, for example, blacks, working women, that could be threatening. There are many--there are many Americans, for example, who believe that the moral codes of a Jerry Falwell are proper for this country and we need to restore them. For others, they would be very, very uncomfortable. How do we--how do we build civic virtue without imposing or coercing people who feel those are not their values?
MICHAEL SANDEL: Yeah. That's a good question. There's one impulse which has to do with the procedural liberalism I criticize that says Jerry Falwell and the like prove we have to banish religious argument and moral argument from public life. I think that's a mistaken impulse. The answer isn't to flee moral and religious discourse in politics, it seems to me, but to engage it, deepen it, to contest it, because otherwise there will be a kind of moral void and emptiness in our political discourse that will open the way to the most intolerant, narrow moralisms, and I think democratic politics can't be sustained in a way that's value neutral, for without allowing contending moral and religious conceptions to inform politics, the question is how to do it in a way that's pluralistic and cultivates an appreciation of differences rather than narrow intolerance.
DAVID GERGEN: I wish we could go on, but thank you very much.
MICHAEL SANDEL: Thank you, David.


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