The afternoon I am writing this is Labor Day, 2020, which was established as a Federal Holiday in 1894 to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the contributions of laborers to the development and achievements of the United States.
The concept of a national holiday honoring labor was initiated by two labor unions, the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. In the United States the percentage of the labor force that belonged to unions peaked at 35 percent in 1954 and peaked in the total number of of union members at 21 million in 1979.
In 2019 (the most recent numbers I could find) union membership had declined precipitously to 10.3 percent and 14.6 million. Union membership in the private sector was 6.2 percent and in the public sector was 33.6 percent.
Not only has union membership plummeted in the last 40 years but also the embrace of blue-collar workers by the Democrats has also declined. Michael Sandel, Harvard professor and political philosopher, brilliantly identifies this deterioration in an op-ed piece in The New York Times on September 2, titled “Disdain for the Less Educated Is the Last Acceptable Prejudice.” Sandel writes that “By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had 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.”
Sandel writes that in 2016 “two-thirds of whites without a college degree voted for Trump, while Hillary Clinton won more than 70 percent of voters with advanced degrees.” As you might expect, the people who Hillary Clinton’s referred to as “deplorables” didn’t vote for her and led to Trump’s win. The “technocratic liberalism” that infected the Democratic Party led, in part, to this disastrous outcome.
Sandel points out that Joe Biden is the first Democratic presidential candidate in 36 years without a degree in an Ivy League university, which might enable Biden to “connect more readily with the blue-collar workers the Democratic Party has struggles to attract in recent years. More important, this aspect of his candidacy should prompt us to reconsider the meritocratic political project that has come to define contemporary liberalism, Sandel suggests.
At the heart of this project are two ideas: First, in a global, technological age, higher education is the key to upward mobility, material success and social esteem. Second, if everyone has an equal chance to rise, those who land on top deserve the rewards their talents bring.
This way of thinking is so familiar that it seems to define the American dream. But it has come to dominate our politics only in recent decades. And despite its inspiring promise of success based on merit, it has a dark side.
Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a precondition for dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from elective government and provokes political backlash.
Sandel writes that the rhetoric of getting ahead because of getting a college degree has been echoed across the political spectrum — “from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton — and what they are really saying is “If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault.”
It is important to remember that most Americans — nearly two-thirds — do not have a four-year college degree. By telling workers that their inadequate education is the reason for their troubles, meritocrats moralize success and failure and unwittingly promote credentialism — an insidious prejudice against those who do not have college degrees.
Sandel further writes that what he calls “credentialism” is “the last acceptable prejudice.” And he also indicates that “elites are unembarrassed by this prejudice.”
Even Congress is packed with credentialism. Over the last five years , Congress has become more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender, but less diverse with regard to educational credentials and class. But, you might ask, “Isn’t government by well-educated university graduates is a good thing?” Sandel asks, “Aren’t highly credentialed leaders best equipped to give us sound public policies and reasoned political discourse?”
Then Sandel answers his question with, “Not necessarily.”
Governing well requires not only technocratic expertise but also civic virtue — an ability to deliberate about the common good and to identify with citizens from all walks of life. But history suggests little correlation between the capacity for political judgment and the ability to win admission to elite universities. The notion that “the best and the brightest” are better at governing than their less-credentialed fellow citizens is a myth born of meritocratic hubris.
Google, which has the reputation for being among, if not, the best at hiring people of any company in the world, found that success at Google, contrary to what it initially thought, has no correlation to where someone went to college, or, surprisingly, even if they went to college at all. How well an engineer wrote code or how well a salesperson sold or how well a manager managed wasn’t based on a college diploma.
Nevertheless, credentialism is still a common prejudice among both wealthy liberals and conservatives. And even though you’d never guess it from his typically incoherent rambling, President Trump is an Ivy Leaguer (the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania).
If the rhetoric of rising and the reign of technocratic merit have led us astray, how might we recast the terms of moral and political aspiration? We should focus less on arming people for a meritocratic race and more on making life better for those who lack a diploma but who make important contributions to our society — through the work they do, the families they raise and the communities they serve. This requires renewing the dignity of work and putting it at the center of our politics.
On this Labor Day, 2020, as a country, we need to think about how we can renew the dignity of work and honor and reward fairly those who do the labor that keeps us safe, clean and fed.
