Michael Sandel, an author and a professor of political philosophy at Harvard University, is the 2025 laureate of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture. He recently sat down with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels to discuss the fate of liberalism and the vulnerability of the neutral state.
Nathan Gardels: It is remarkable in today’s context to remember that 40 years ago, you and I sat here in Cambridge at the dining room table of the famous sociologist Daniel Bell to discuss what we called “the American Cultural Civil War.” The discussion was about the loss of authority of the liberal establishment with the rise of Ronald Reagan, both politically and culturally. Much of what was said then can be said now.
You said then that Reagan appealed to the “symbols and resonances” of traditional order and that Democrats had become the party of the national welfare state that had lost touch with the “local intermediating institutions” like bowling leagues and churches, which they “looked down on as parochial and prejudiced.”
Then you presciently pointed out the “vulnerability of a neutral state as a framework of rights equally impartial among competing conceptions of the good life.” It was vulnerable, you said, because “the problem of tolerance is that it is not self-interpreting or self-implementing as an ideal. Tolerance is not a substitute for a vision of the common good. It presupposes one.” The way to address this vulnerability, you said at the time, is to “infuse politics with moral and spiritual meaning.”
So, one has to ask, in 2026, isn’t that just what MAGA has done? They’ve assigned a moral substance to the state, not in terms of liberal values, but in terms of what they call the “strong gods” of family, faith and nation.
Michael Sandel: Yes. MAGA has been very effective at speaking to the sense that the moral fabric of community was unraveling around us, invoking a kind of hyper-nationalism that asserts sovereignty and belonging with a vengeance. Part of what worried me back when we met during the Reagan years was that even then, the liberalism of the day had largely ceded the language of community, identity, belonging and patriotism to the right.
Ronald Reagan was very effective. Though he was a free-market libertarian with one voice, he spoke a strong language of community and patriotism with another part of his political rhetoric. And this, I think, was the key to his political success, more so than even the pro-market libertarian side of Reagan.
He evoked a sense of national community and belonging and pride. Then and since, liberals, instead of offering an alternative conception of what patriotism means, grew suspicious of patriotism and ceded this potent language of community and belonging to the right. So, I think you’re right to draw the connection from there to here; that’s what Trump and MAGA have done.
And even now, though it’s true that Democrats and progressives will give speeches with a phalanx of American flags behind them, that’s not enough. The language of belonging and community has to be given content and substance by progressives if they are to speak in a compelling way to what it is that holds us together, what it means to be a citizen and what it is we share.
What’s happened, as you point out, is that by insisting that public discourse be neutral with respect to competing moral convictions, the liberalism of neutrality has made itself vulnerable by creating a kind of moral void in public discourse. That vacuum, sooner or later, as I worried then, would be filled by narrow, intolerant moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hyper-nationalism. And that, sadly, is what’s unfolded in recent decades.
From The Rhetoric Of Rising To The Politics Of Grievance
Gardels: When we think back to the time between Reagan and MAGA, it was largely liberals who ran the show. There was a period in the United States, the period of the Bushes. But across the West, the main players were the “third way Democrats” and “New Labour,” the market-friendly center-left of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama.
They promoted globalization and the social hyper-competitiveness that you speak about in your book, “The Tyranny of Merit.” The way to make it in such a world, they preached, is for the aspiring individual to work really hard and excel to get to the top. The implication was that those who didn’t make it were slackers and losers. And so this created a resentment toward a political class that celebrated achievement but left behind those they considered less ambitious, who drove trucks and worked with their hands.
“Liberals, instead of offering an alternative vision of what patriotism means, grew suspicious of patriotism and ceded this potent language of community and belonging to the right.”
I wonder how much you think that that resentment, combined not with the idea of community but with that of individual striving in the market, laid the groundwork for the MAGA sense of elite resentment?
Sandel: Yes. I think that is very much the case. And if I could just go back even a little bit later to the Reagan period. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher argued explicitly that government is the problem, markets are the solution. And Thatcher famously said: There is no alternative to the free market domestically and then globally. What happened to this market faith even after Reagan and Thatcher were succeeded by center-left politicians, Bill Clinton in the United States, Tony Blair in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany?
They softened the harsh edges of the pure laissez-faire market faith, but they didn’t challenge its fundamental premise that markets and market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good. And so, they embraced the market faith in a more humane way, shoring up the safety net.
And they embraced a version of market-driven, finance-driven globalization that led to widening inequalities. This happened on the watch of Democratic as well as Republican presidents over the past 50 years. The result was growing anger at the grassroots about widening inequalities.
The response to those inequalities by the center-left parties in the U.S., Britain and Europe was essentially to offer some bracing advice. If you want to compete and win in the global economy, go to college. What you earn will depend on what you learn. You can make it if you try. This was the political rhetoric. I call it the “rhetoric of rising.”
And compounding this was the insult implicit in the advice, about “go improve yourself and get a degree.” The insult was this: If you struggle in the new economy, and if you didn’t go get a university degree, your failure is your fault. You didn’t improve yourself the way we advised you to. And so, it’s no wonder that many working people, those without four-year degrees, came to feel patronized, looked down upon by the credentialed professional elites who, after all, were the winners of globalization.
It is important to recognize that most of our fellow American citizens do not have a four-year college degree. About 62% do not. So it was folly to create an economy that set as a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life a four-year degree. This is what gave rise to the divide between winners and so-called losers. By 2016, with the vote for Brexit in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the United States, we saw the populist backlash, a politics of grievance by those who felt looked down upon by credentialed elites.
The Bad Faith Of The Tolerance Of Avoidance
Gardels: That politics resonated strongly with those who felt unrecognized. Let me go back to the neutral state. People who joined the MAGA movement or sympathized with its sensibility don’t think of the liberal state as neutral. For them, “the neutral state” legalized same-sex marriage and abortion. It allowed for transgender therapy for pre-adolescents and embraced the “woke” diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) mandates on all institutions.
Yet if the liberal state had content, it obviously is not content that gave a sense of belonging and community in any traditional sense that we’ve been talking about. Is liberalism capable of doing that if it is primarily about tolerance of people’s choices to pursue their own liberated self-realization?
Sandel: Here we should talk about competing conceptions of tolerance. There is a version of tolerance that goes with a version of liberalism that insists on neutrality toward the good life or toward virtue. That’s what we might call a “tolerance of avoidance.” It tries to be neutral in the sense that it seeks not to pass judgment, not to be judgmental on what way of life is worthy and higher, but simply lets people pursue their own paths, whatever they may be, consistent with a similar liberty for others. On the face of it, this seems like an attractive way of contending with a pluralist society.
People disagree about the meaning of the good life. They disagree about questions of sexual morality. They disagree about the meaning of virtue. They disagree about how to raise their children. Rather than tangle with our fellow citizens in messy, contentious debates about virtue and the good life, isn’t it safer to seek a kind of toleration that doesn’t enter into those moral disputes? That’s the moral impulse and plausibility of liberalism as neutral.
“The insult was this: If you struggle in the new economy, and if you didn’t go get a university degree, your failure is your fault.”
Such a conception means avoiding those substantive moral disagreements. But sooner or later, the toleration of avoidance, like the liberalism of neutrality, gives rise to a sense of bad faith because public questions are being decided in a way that seems to privilege some people’s moral convictions over others.
For example, take the case of the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade about abortion. The court began by announcing that it’s going to be neutral on the deeply contested moral and theological question of the moral status of the developing fetus. But it goes on to announce a certain policy based on the three trimesters of when the state may regulate abortion and when it should be the choice of the mother and the parents. Now, that may be a sensible solution for a divided country on abortion. Yet, it proved highly contestable. And it seemed, under the cover of neutrality, to invoke and establish a certain moral determination.
What I think is the better way to contend with pluralism and disagreement is not the toleration of avoidance, but a “pluralism of engagement,” engaging in public discourse and argument about these morally contentious questions. Which is what we did, if we think about it, on the issue of same-sex marriage. What vindicated same-sex marriage in this country was not the toleration of avoidance. It was a changing of the public mind on the moral status of same-sex love and unions and the meaning of the family.
This issue trespasses directly on the terrain of what is the good life. Marriage has a private dimension, but it’s also a public institution. So this question can’t be decided without bringing into public discourse arguments and attempts to persuade each other about what counts as the good life and what counts as a morally legitimate form of union. So this is an example of what I would call the pluralism of engagement.
There was [engagement] through persuasion, not just political persuasion, but especially through conversations that were held in families within religious communities, when people came to know members of the LGBTQ community and realized that they were friends and neighbors and sons and daughters. And in a surprisingly short period of time, there was a changing of the public mind on the substantive moral question. And that’s what led to the legalization of same-sex marriage.
Now, there will still be disagreement. And there is not unanimity. But there is a sense that there has been a public debate on the underlying moral question that has gone beyond the fiction of liberal neutrality.
Who Gets To Decide What The Good Life Is?
Gardels: Let’s go a little deeper than politics in terms of liberalism as a modern philosophy.
Liberal modernity is about “deculturation.” That is, it is about the liberation of the individual from any holistic way of life bequeathed from historical precedent and tradition.
One conception of the good life says that’s great. We’ve never had the possibility of transgender fluidity before. We do now. Others say, no! It is a sin against natural law and everything our Christian culture and family norms stand for. That leads to two strands within society: the liberal-modernity idea of liberation from the archaic chains of tradition on the one hand, and then the idea of cultural continuity of norms and values derived from that chain of tradition.
So what you have in America today is “norms without normality.” You have a lot of people who believe in transgender rights, LGBTQ and DEI norms, and others who don’t, who believe something else completely. There’s kind of a cultural standoff between these two. Culture is so politicized because there’s no common agreement on what the good life is. Who gets to decide what norms should be normalized?
So, first, would you agree with that characterization of where we are? Given what you just said about “the pluralism of engagement,” there’s a way to have that discussion. But when it’s not had, this standoff is what we get.
Second, it’s hard for me to imagine a platform for which this kind of common deliberation, a public conversation of non-avoidance, can take place. This is especially so in today’s fragmented world of silos.
Sandel: Let’s come to the platform in a moment. But on the question of liberal modernity as a conception of freedom independent of inherited tradition, belonging, community and identity, I think that is one powerful strand of liberalism. That strand conceives of freedom as detaching from or transcending our embedded communities and selves. And going back to my first book, “Liberalism and the Limits of Justice,” I’ve been arguing against this picture of the self. I call it the “unencumbered” self — a self whose freedom consists in being independent of moral encumbrances antecedent to choice.
“62% of Americans do not have a four-year degree. How many of them are in Congress or in the Senate? Almost none.”
I’ve argued that the unencumbered self, though it offers an alluring picture of freedom, actually leads not to freedom but to a kind of disempowerment. That requires thinking through what freedom consists in. I argue in my book “Democracy’s Discontent” that freedom is not simply the ability to choose, unencumbered by prior moral ties. To be free is to have a meaningful say in shaping the collective destiny. To have a voice in self-government. To be a participant, to be a citizen.
I contrast a consumerist idea of freedom, which is launching out on my own, unbound by prior moral ties, choosing what best matches my wants, preferences, interests and desires. I see that as an impoverished conception of freedom because it misses the part of freedom connected to sharing and self-rule and participation in self-government.
And so, I would call the second, more demanding idea of freedom the “civic,” as against the “consumerist” idea. Now, this is all at the level of philosophy.
Gardels: I was going to say, because the impoverished conception is driven by consumer society, which dominates our cultural ethos.
Sandel: Yes. And so, it’s hard to resist. It’s hard to resist not only because we like to consume and we live in a consumerist society, that’s certainly part of it.
But also because there is something appealing and alluring and tempting about the idea that my freedom consists in choosing for myself what I want. And yet, that cuts us off from the civic project and the empowerment that can come from deliberating with fellow citizens about common purposes and ends. And it’s easy to see how the disempowerment is not only political; in recent decades, as markets have increasingly governed our collective life and choices, political decision-making has been increasingly ceded to technocrats.
Citizens have less and less voice. But this is also connected to the part we were discussing earlier on community. Because if my freedom depends on reasoning together with fellow citizens about common purposes and ends, then we need to attend to character formation, to a sense of belonging, to community, because that’s what provides the possibility of public deliberation.
Gardels: Basically, what you’re saying is the central political issue today is who gets to decide and how we decide what the good life is?
Sandel: Yes. And my answer to that question is we have to reason together as citizens about that. And it’s not as if we could come up with a just society independent of a debate about the common good. I argue that they are connected.
Reimagining Forums For Public Deliberation
Sandel: So what are the platforms? Well, these days, there are precious few. They’re impoverished. They’re hollowed out. If we look at public discourse, it consists either of narrow managerial technocratic talk, which inspires no one, or when passion enters, of partisan shouting matches, ideological food fights, the angry, outrage-driven fare of social media, talk radio, podcasts and the like.
And so we need to create new platforms for public deliberation. We need to rein in the toxic ones, especially social media, which, by its business model, wants to keep us glued to our screens for as long as possible, the better to gather our personal data, the better to sell us stuff through targeted ads. As we all know, that business model leads to a steady stream of outrage and anger-provoking news feeds.
That coarsens and corrupts public discourse. So one question is how to rein that in. I like what Australia has done, which has been to ban social media for young people under 16. I’d be tempted to extend that age maybe to about 74, 75, maybe 80. But beyond that, there are other things that could be done, which would be to go after that business model by banning targeted digital online advertising and requiring the social media companies to fund their business in other ways, for example, subscription, that don’t depend on holding you and enraging you all the time. We should debate ways of changing that business model, because it corrupts the possibility of civil discourse.
We then need to creatively reimagine forums for public deliberation that could be compelling and accessible, that would not rule out anger and frustration, but would also not be driven by outrage. To that end, I think we need to explore not-for-profit media companies that could provide platforms for genuine public deliberation, and also various civic forums and citizen assemblies, for example, to provide public venues that rebuild the public sphere in ways more amenable to deliberation about the common good.
“Why not consider bicameral legislatures in states or at the national level, where one house is elected and the other house chosen by lottery?”
Gardels: The way republics have been designed constitutionally is to place checks and balances to curb the concentration of too much power in one place. In this social media age, we have the opposite problem: private communication through silos and social media tribes does not create the public sphere but disempowers it.
So just as we need checks and balances on too much power, we need checks and balances to prevent the disempowerment of the public sphere. That could include the things you mentioned, such as citizens’ assemblies, where citizens are brought together outside the electoral arena, in islands of goodwill, so to speak, to deliberate issues in a non-passionate way that has some influence on the actual implementation of policy. And that’s happening in localities and subnational jurisdictions across Europe and America.
Sandel: I want to pick up on one thing you just said about how social media seems, rather than to concentrate power, to atomize public communication and discourse, and to radically privatize and individuate it. I think that is true.
It’s atomized, privatized, individuated. And yet, we’ve got the worst of both worlds because while the discourse and the communication is privatized, atomized and individuated, the social media companies of Big Tech have accumulated and exercise concentrated power.
So we have both concentrated power of the kind that republican government has always worried about, and the atomized mode of public communication.
Gardels: You need to deal with both aspects that are threats to a republic.
Sandel: On possible alternatives in the public sphere, I think that the virtue of the experiments with citizen assemblies is that they may be a way to break the impasse of representative government, which has lost a great deal of its legitimacy.
In the American case, that has a lot to do with the power of money in politics as well as the electoral system. So part of the appeal of extramural citizen assemblies, outside of the electoral process, is to see what citizens reasoning together and arguing together on a given issue can come up with, and then maybe hold the elected officials to account, prompt them to have to explain why they may disagree or why they failed to attend to the question at hand.
But this experiment could go even further. I would like to add one element that exists in some of these experiments, which is choosing the citizens to gather based on lottery, what is called “sortition,” which is an ancient democratic mechanism. One advantage is it breaks the hold of the kind of credentialist prejudice that is reflected in Congress and in parliaments.
If we go back to the figure of 62% of Americans do not have a four-year degree, how many of them are in Congress or in the Senate? Almost none. There’s one member of the Senate and about 5% of the House who do not have a four-year degree. And most have advanced degrees or professional degrees in the Senate. A very high proportion have law degrees. Now, if there were the same lack of parity, with a large swath of the citizenry who go virtually unrepresented, and if it were on some other demographic basis, we would worry about that. We would consider it undemocratic and in need of reform.
So the element of sortition would be a way of contending with the credentialist prejudice that essentially excludes working people from representative government. And we could begin with citizen assemblies to draw the participants by lot.
But here’s a radical extension one could imagine. If it works well in these local examples and experiments, why not consider bicameral legislatures in states or at the national level, where one house is elected and the other house chosen by lottery? A Senate, let’s say, and a people’s house, where the people’s house would be those chosen by lot, with term limits long enough to become acquainted with the issues, but with turnover. It might be a way of breaking down the hold that money and power have, along with the credentialist prejudice on representative government.
Gardels: In effect, not replacing electoral democracy or representative democracy but complementing it with a kind of check and a balance for the very reasons that you say.
If you go back to the history of the constitutional design in the U.S., in 1776, John Adams conceived of a constitution for North Carolina where one house would serve to mimic the public at large as perfectly as possible, while the other house would be more experienced and deliberative. The two would check each other.
“If we look at the U.S. Congress or European parliaments these days, it’s not hard to imagine that a people’s body chosen by lottery under the right circumstances could deliberate in a much more effective way.”
Sandel: It could be that body chosen by lottery, the people’s house, may not be any less good at deliberating than the credentialed upper house.If we look at the quality of deliberation in the U.S. Congress or European parliaments these days, it’s not hard to imagine that a people’s body chosen by lottery under the right circumstances could deliberate in a much more effective way.
Gardels: The citizens’ assemblies that have been convened, for example, the famous one in Ireland, which recommended relaxing the no-abortion strictures in the constitution, were successful because there was structured deliberation. It’s deliberation that brings in information and knowledge, so you have a knowledgeable democracy — not just people talking, not solely opinion.
Sandel: John Adams may have worried that just rabble tossed together would act out of pure self-interest and not for the well-being of the entire community. Well, look at what we’ve got now with corrupted representative government. We could do better.
The Democratic Art Of Listening
Gardels: At the end of our conversation 40 years ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell said: “No society can exist if we take non-negotiable moral and cultural issues and politicize them.”
You’ve taken the view that we need a public deliberation of contentious issues. Others like John Gray, the British philosopher, an heir in some ways to the great pluralist thinker Isaiah Berlin, argue that that is not going to work. There just is no one common conception of the good life.
There are many conceptions of the good life. What we need then are plural jurisdictions, like in the Middle Ages in Europe. Some things are OK here, some things aren’t OK there. Why make everyone conform to the same norms everywhere? What do you say to that path?
Sandel: Well, the idea of plural jurisdictions and the idea of subsidiarity recall the aspiration behind the idea of American federalism and the idea that states could be laboratories for democracy, coming up with different answers to important questions of policy. I’m very sympathetic to the idea of a plurality of jurisdictions, though some questions need to be debated and decided at the national level and even beyond.
[French political thinker, politician and historian] Alexis De Tocqueville’s idea was that citizens learn the art of government in the small sphere within their reach. And as this sphere expands, then citizens need a kind of political education that equips them to engage in a larger sphere, not only to contend with pluralism, but also to cultivate civic virtue and civic character.
Further, it’s important to have a plurality of venues, whether localities, cities, towns, states, but also other arenas within civil society, such as trade unions or church congregations, that can bring people together, ideally across classes, to reason in the small sphere within their reach. That means empowering some of those decentralized units.
But I disagree with our old friend Dan Bell on the idea that moral and cultural disagreements are non-negotiable. It’s that idea that fuels the impulse to liberal neutrality with which we began. It fuels the idea that we should ask citizens to leave their moral and spiritual convictions outside when they enter the public sphere, because that will make for a less contentious, less contested, less messy and potentially less tolerant kind of public life.
That impulse, and Dan Bell articulated it so well, is understandable. But I think it’s mistaken. It’s mistaken not because public deliberation will lead to unanimous agreement on any contentious moral question, but because we can’t know in advance what moral question is non-negotiable until we try, until we enter into conversation and deliberation and attempt to persuade and sometimes find ourselves being persuaded in turn.
And the challenge for us, the only way to contend with the shadows and the peril that hang over our democratic life, is to seek a more engaged, vigorous kind of public discourse than the kind to which we have become accustomed. We need to recover the art of listening, and by listening, I don’t just mean hearing the words spoken by our political opponent but listening for the moral convictions lying behind our political disagreements.
Listening is a democratic art. It’s a civic virtue. And we need to do what we can to create the conditions to listen to one another, to reason together across our differences, even without a guarantee that we will resolve them at any given moment.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
