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Daniel Chandler is the author of a new book called Free and Equal. The subtitle is “A Manifesto for a Just Society.” Daniel teaches philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics where he’s also the research director of a new program on Cohesive Capitalism, which I take to mean a kind of post-neoliberalism. These are ideas for carrying out all the things that were left undone in previous center-left eras. I had a conversation with Daniel about his new book, which has new resonance now that we are heading into a second, very likely more autocratic Trump presidency. What follows is an edited transcript. You can watch the full interview here.
Robert Kuttner: Daniel, in addition to Democrats in the U.S. and social democrats in Europe needing a more compelling program, we also need defense of basic democratic institutions. How does the new context of a second Trump term affect your thinking?
Daniel Chandler: It just makes the project all the more urgent. The motivation for my book was a feeling that mainstream center-left parties have really lacked vision, that they’ve struggled to articulate a coherent and optimistic forward-looking account of the kinds of societies that they want to create. That is not just a problem for intellectuals like us, who like to think about ideas, but a serious political obstacle to their success.
My premise is that part of the reason why they have struggled to articulate that kind of vision is a real absence of intellectual and philosophical reference points, whereas Thatcher and Reagan could look to thinkers like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in the 1980s and draw a sense of intellectual direction and confidence from those kinds of thinkers.
It’s not as clear where contemporary progressives should look for similar inspiration. Mainstream center-left parties have largely adapted to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s. And they’ve responded to the rise of authoritarian populism with a kind of technocratic managerialism more than an alternate vision of their own. The more radical parts of the left, where you might hope to find inspiration, have gone down a route where they have reacted to some of the failures of liberal democracy, as we know it, not by trying to revive a more ambitious emancipatory liberalism, but by tending to reject liberalism and to disparage kind of the Enlightenment tradition. I think that that’s a bit of a dead end, too.
The ideas that we need are kind of hiding in plain sight. We should look to the liberal tradition associated with John Rawls in particular. His ideas revolutionized liberal political philosophy. But that thinking hasn’t broken out of academia and into our public and political discourse. One project of the book is to try to drag his ideas out of academia, put them into the public sphere, where I think they have a lot to offer, and then connect them with the sorts of questions that political parties, and not just academics, are asking.
In my experience, any serious person who’s not an ultra-libertarian has to agree with Rawls. To oversimplify drastically for the benefit of those who are not familiar with Rawls, the idea is that if you did not know where you would end up in life’s lottery, you would want a society far more egalitarian than the one we have.
That’s it, exactly. That’s his most famous idea—this thought experiment. I also think part of the reason why it has such incredibly wide resonance, why people find it just so compelling, is that in a sense it’s a secular interpretation of the Golden Rule; the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you is an idea that’s found, in some form, in almost every religious and cultural tradition.
The other thing I just love about Rawls is that he doesn’t just pose that question. He tries to give you a constructive answer to it. He uses this thought experiment to identify two fundamental principles, a freedom principle and an equality principle. And it’s that kind of useful and constructive aspect of his thinking that makes him such a helpful thinker for us right now.
Let’s relate Rawls to the failure of the liberal/social democratic project. Do you think that liberals hit a wall after Reagan and Thatcher because they didn’t have a sufficient appreciation of first principles? Or did they hit a wall because they found it expedient to move halfway towards Thatcherism and neoliberalism in general, beginning with Carter and Clinton? President Harry Truman once famously said, if you give people a choice between a Republican and a Republican, they’ll pick the Republican every time. In other words, you don’t succeed by being a half-baked imitation of the other side.
There was a moment in the 1980s when, both in America and in the U.K., it was a serious project of trying to rethink what the left stood for. That gave rise to the so-called Third Way, an attempt to achieve a synthesis of the liberal and the socialist traditions which, at a philosophical level, is ultimately Rawls’s great achievement.
I think there was a moment when some of these ideas were being taken seriously, and could have really shaped a new and ambitious progressive project. But political expediency got in the way. Instead, Third Way became more of a project of electoral triangulation.
That worked electorally for a time. But it was not a sustainable strategy. These parties did increase their votes in the 1990s and early 2000s. But it came at a real long-term cost because that strategy ultimately alienated working-class voters. Heading for the middle ground on the basis that that’s where all the votes lie is a serious misunderstanding of how politics really works, what motivates people to vote, and how it is that you build lasting political identities.
Just to underscore your point—it worked tactically and electorally in the short run. But over the long run, because working-class people and even many middle-class people found that they were getting further and further behind, they lost faith, not only in center-left parties, but as Trump shows, they lost faith in democracy itself. And they were willing to vote for an autocrat who gave them the psychic satisfaction of spitting in the eye of liberals.
If democracy is not making my life any better, my prospects and my life chances, and the life chances of my children are getting worse and worse, well then, the hell with democracy! Certainly the hell with a center-left more interested in being woke than they’re interested in me.
Interestingly, though Rawls is often criticized for being very abstract, on this question he really did have something to say. He predicted that a society that didn’t give opportunities to the least well-off, didn’t take questions seriously—about not just the distribution of money, but of power, control, dignity, self-respect—would give rise to a politics of resentment that would ultimately threaten the survival of liberal democracy.
I mentioned before that there are two principles, a freedom principle and an equality principle. The basic freedom or liberties principle is that everyone should be entitled to a set of fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of bodily autonomy, but also crucially political freedoms. He thought that everyone should have a genuinely equal chance to take part in and influence our political system.
And his equality principle includes not just the absence of discrimination, but making sure that everyone has a genuinely equal chance to develop their talents and abilities in life irrespective of class, race, gender—and then he combines this commitment to equality of opportunity with an idea of fair outcomes or shared prosperity. The idea is that we should tolerate inequalities, but only where they ultimately serve to increase the life chances of the least well-off. It’s a radically egalitarian view that’s consistent with the fundamental principles of liberalism.
It seems to me that during the postwar boom, we had a not bad first rough draft of a kind of Rawlsian society. There was both equality of opportunity and equality of result. Democracy was getting more and more robust. The society was actually becoming more equal. The state was the instrument of a political democracy that had credibility. This was happening both in Europe and in the United States, when you had leftish government in power like the British Labour Government of 1945, or the Roosevelt-Truman era. And the conservative government that immediately followed did not try to undo this.
But then, with Reagan and Thatcher, the neoliberal era, and it all sort of fell apart. So you’ve done a restatement of the case for a just society with a manifesto providing a lot of details both on first principles, of freedom, civility, democracy, and also on implementing principles like equality of opportunity and shared prosperity and greater democracy. And it’s a very plausible and attractive manifesto.
The question is: How does it get a hearing? And what will it take for center-left parties to regain any kind of plausibility with the sort of working-class and economically beleaguered middle-class voters, small-businesspeople who felt that these parties and the idea of an activist state have delivered absolutely nothing for me and for my children. Meanwhile, the first challenge is preventing Trump from destroying democracy altogether.
The comparison between the U.K. and the U.S. is very interesting because you have a Labour government in power for the moment, anyway, because voters everywhere were voting against incumbent governments. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer doesn’t seem to be doing a great job of regaining the affections of a frustrated working class, at least in his first several months. So how does the center-left regain any kind of credibility with the sort of voters who’ve deserted center-left parties almost everywhere?
You would probably agree that center-left parties have deserted them. So, in order for your manifesto to be taken seriously, as voters are skeptical of the whole idea of activist government and center-left parties making their lives better, what has to happen before this kind of manifesto gets taken seriously politically?
It’s a great question, and I wish I had all of the answers to it. In America, the fundamental problem for the Democrats was that they positioned themselves as defenders of the status quo. The aim was to build the broadest possible anti-Trump coalition and to rely on a message that really emphasized the very real threat that he poses to democracy. But that left the Democrats unable to connect with the deep desire for change, particularly amongst working-class people who want change and are open to a variety of arguments about what direction that might take.
I think that center-left parties need to take more seriously the importance of vision and ideas. What motivates people to vote? Most people are not spending their time analyzing the details of different policies and how they’re going to affect them. People vote on the basis of stories and narratives that parties tell about where a country is, where it should be going, what their values are.
That was part of the strength of Reagan and Thatcher’s politics. There was an ideological core to it that ultimately they, as skilled politicians, were able to convey to voters. So I think another part of getting a hearing is talking not just about policies, but trying to connect with people at the level of values and emotions.
I think a lot of the criticism of Harris was that she was too narrow, too technical, too incremental, that she really lacked a vision, and she counted on the fact that people would recoil from the anti-democratic nature of Trump. That proved not sufficient. You had to have a powerful affirmative vision.
I want to push you on one other theme. Your book calls for a society that is both democratic and market-based. But for a lot of people in my part of the woods, we’ve had far too much market. So the question becomes, what constraints on markets are appropriate?
Deregulated markets have led to reconcentration and abuse. In principle, what gives the market its legitimacy is competition, since competition disciplines price and promotes innovation. But when you deregulate it too much, you get what we’ve seen with the tech industry and with banking, and with medicine in the United States where we don’t have a national health system—you get concentration, market power, and the harming of ordinary people.
And, secondly, the social sector which necessarily complements the market sector and provides the whole range of public goods has been weakened by the excessive power of the market sector, as the capitalist system has become more and more deregulated. And then there are the political feedback loops where the very, very rich people who benefit from the deregulation of capitalism gain more and more political power to change the rules so that they can have even more deregulated capitalism and more power and more money influencing politics.
So talk to me a little bit about your view of a liberal society, a free and equal society. What sort of constraints on markets, both at the level of philosophical first principles and at the level of practical policies, do you think are part of this narrative?
Yes, thank you. I agree with most of your analysis there, and in defending a broadly market-based economy, I don’t think that’s the same to me as arguing for a laissez-faire approach to how markets operate. The way I think about this philosophically is that markets have two important benefits. They are important for enabling people to achieve certain important freedoms. The freedom of occupational choice is a very important economic freedom, and the right to own personal property. According to the Rawls equality principle, we should think about what arrangements of a market economy would most benefit the least well-off.
Making the most of markets requires not a laissez-faire approach to regulation, but, as you suggested, maintaining a competitive market structure, making sure that we have counterweights to the tendencies within markets towards monopoly and oligopoly. And then also recognizing that although there are some things that markets do very well, like producing most kinds of consumer goods, there are lots of things that they don’t do well, like delivering important public goods like health and education.
They also are, as we’ve seen, unable to respond to the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for a very rapid transition to a sustainable economy. But there are good, principled, liberal reasons for not wanting to do away with a broadly market-based economy, but to harness the benefits of a market economy in a way that’s genuinely just and fair. We would need to completely rethink the way that they currently operate.
