The Death of the “Politics of Moral Engagement”

At the end of his book Justice, after arguing (correctly) that morally neutral government was an impossibility, Harvard philosophy professor Michael Sandel urged liberal America to take up a “politics of moral engagement” and asked if, in a pluralistic society, it was possible to conduct our politics on “the basis of mutual respect”?

In recent decades, we’ve come to assume that respecting our fellow citizens’ moral and religious convictions means ignoring them…But this stance of avoidance can make for a spurious respect. Often, it means suppressing moral disagreement rather than actually avoiding it…A more robust public engagement with our moral disagreements could provide a stronger, not a weaker, basis for mutual respect.

They were nice sounding sentiments, but even Sandel had the self-awareness to acknowledge that it might not work out as optimistically as he hoped.

There is no guarantee that public deliberation about hard moral questions will lead in any given situation to agreement–or even to appreciation for the moral and religious views of others. It’s always possible that learning more about a moral or religious doctrine will lead us to like it less. But we cannot know until we try.

Well, Mike…we tried.

Roughly fifteen years after Justice’s publication, Sandel’s plan looks about as prescient as Steve Ballmer, then CEO of Microsoft, saying in 2007, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

To be fair, it’s not clear that when Sandel advocated for a “politics of moral engagement” he meant ten plus years of hysterical, shrieking busy-bodies hectoring normal people for everything from the words they used to the way they wore their hair, but still…that was what we got.

But when JD Vance sat down with CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan for an episode of Face the Nation to discuss immigration, the vibe shift became as visible as it ever has been. When Brennan attempted the same type of pedantic, bad-faith concern trolling that has been standard fare for more than ten years, Vance smoothly brushed her complaints aside with words that people are now calling “iconic.”

“I don’t really care, Margaret.”

If these words were powerful, it was because they signaled the end of Sandel’s experiment.

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My young adult years were spent watching the escalation and increased polarization wrought by the culture wars of the 2010s. Something often overlooked about that period is how close it was to the adoption of social media itself and how this influenced the ways that Sandel’s “politics of moral engagement” actually played out. People forget, there was a time when we all used social media in basically the same way that octogenarians use it today: naively, innocently, honestly. We hadn’t yet realized how these displays of our authentic thoughts were going to intersect with the other areas of life–like our jobs. And, just as naively, prior to the 2010s many of us had large friend groups that included people with widely varying political opinions.

So when the culture wars truly kicked off, we were all treated to the spectacle of watching innumerable friendships and relationships fall out publicly and in real time. And throughout that period, I noticed a particular dynamic play out between conservatives and progressives more times than I can count.

When two people with a prior relationship clashed over some political issue, it was like watching a fight between someone who is trying to save a marriage and someone who is willing to use that desire for their own advantage. The person who was trying to preserve the relationship was typically the more conservative of the two and their attitudes were typically conciliatory and gracious, whereas the progressive party was almost always snide, condescending and astonishingly eager to throw away a friendship of years over this issue that they became aware of two days ago. Of course there were exceptions to this rule, but anyone who claims that both sides were equally at fault in this regard is deluded or lying.

But of course it makes sense, doesn’t it? Conservatives conserve things, or at least that’s what we’re told. And inside of those conversations, it was usually the conservative trying to conserve the relationship. This was reflected in the tired (even if true) bromide that conservatives think that liberals are mistaken or foolish, where liberals think that conservatives are evil. And throughout the years since Sandel published his book, conservatives have often tried to conserve a moral unity (or as much of one as possible) with liberal progressive America. Maybe what made Vance’s statement so meaningful was that it signaled the end of that effort.

For years, conservatives would point out progressive hypocrisies and then seem flabbergasted at the absolute indifference of their opponents. And most of them failed to realize that the reason that this happened is that their opponents no longer included them as members of the progressive moral community, and only members get to make legitimate criticisms. Imagine a slumped, middle-aged man in a faded suit standing in front of a packed auditorium of college kids saying, “But what about the double-standard” as every face in the room contorts in howling laughter at him. Witness the dumbfounding impotence of the boomercon trying to convince cackling twenty-somethings that Democrats are the “real racists.” This was conservatives for over a decade.

There have been times in my life when I’ve worked odd-jobs that required me to watch over kids. Once, during one of these occasions, I was watching a group of children playing a simple game. They were enjoying themselves and the game went smoothly. But after a while, another child joined them and immediately began making pronouncements, demanding that this or that aspect of the game be changed—always to his benefit. What I found surprising was that the other children continued to accommodate this new arrival even when the things he was saying were absurd. After only a short time, the game became all but unplayable, but still, the kids glumly persisted, seemingly baffled by the change. This was conservatives for over a decade.

And for that time, the reason why the moral language of progressives gained purchase on conservatives was because conservatives still wanted to believe that they were part of the same moral community as their left-leaning compatriots.

Well, that’s done with now. And I think that now that this period in American life is coming to a close, it’s important to remember how it started and who started it.