That's the theory of our next guest, Harvard professor and political philosopher Michael Sandel.

He joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how polarization fueled Trump's campaign.

Thank you, Beanna and Michael Sandel.

Welcome back to the show.

Good to be with you, Walter.

You know, when the election results came in, I was rereading your book, Democracy's Discontents, the new version of it.

And I said, this is the best explanation of what just happened.

Explain to me how democracy's discontents that you write about will manifest in the election.

In two ways, Walter.

First, people feel that they don't have a meaningful say in how they are governed.

It's really a crisis of self-government.

People feel overwhelmingly that their voice doesn't matter.

That's one.

And secondly, people have felt for some time that the moral fabric of community has been unraveling from family, to community, to the nation.

People hunger for a sense of belonging, a sense of pride, a sense of solidarity.

And people feel unmoored.

And so I think these are two deep sources of the discontent that this election was about, that Donald Trump managed to tap into, connected also with the grievances of working people, those without university degrees, who felt that elites looked down on them.

You talk about those grievances, and you actually call them legitimate grievances.

Explain why.

Yes.

For decades, the divide between winners and losers has been deepening, poisoning our politics and setting us apart.

It came to a head in 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected, by speaking to those grievances.

And I think the way they arose, Walter, is that for decades, Democrats and Republicans alike had carried out a kind of neoliberal, market-friendly globalization project that delivered enormous rewards to those at the top, but left the bottom half of the country, basically, with stagnant wages and outsourced jobs.

So there was widening inequality of income and wealth.

But not only that.

The governing elites, Democrats and Republicans, had told working people, 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.

What they missed was the insult implicit in that bracing advice.

If you're struggling in the new economy, and you didn't get a degree, your failure is your fault.

That's the implication.

So it's no wonder that many working people felt not only dispossessed and economically squeezed by the new economy, but also insulted, looked down upon by governing elites.

Hey, but the Democratic Party used to be in favor of the average working person.

Why do you think they got tagged as the party of what you call the meritocratic elites that down on others?

It's really an important question, Walter, because you're right, there has been a reversal.

Traditionally, the Democratic Party, going back to the New Deal, was the party of the people against the powerful, the party of working people.

And affluent folks tended to vote Republican.

Those with college degrees tended to vote Republican.

Those without college degrees and working people tended to vote Democratic.

By 2016, this had flipped.

Donald Trump did very well among those voters without college degrees.

And those of us who spend our time in the company of the credential can easily forget the fact that most of our fellow citizens don't have four-year degrees.

Nearly two-thirds do not.

But with the Democratic Party, the way it evolved during the age of globalization, there was a kind of market triumphalism, but also a kind of meritocratic triumphalism.

Though there was such emphasis on getting a college degree as the avenue to success, and also to respect, then by 2016, the Democratic Party had become more attuned to the values and the interests and the outlook of credentialed elites and professional classes than to the blue-collar voters who once constituted their primary base of support.

Why has social mobility stalled, and how does that fit into this?

We have long consoled ourselves in America that we don't have to worry so much about inequality as those old European countries, because in America it's possible to rise.

No one is consigned to the fate of his or her birth.

But what's striking is that the rates of intergenerational upward mobility are higher in the more egalitarian European countries than they are in the United States.

And that's because having a strong welfare state, strong public education, and housing, and health care, provide the kind of stability and strength that actually enables people to rise.

And so what we found is that we have widening inequality, but also stalled mobility.

And yet the story we tell about ourselves, that in America you can make it if you try, is demoralizing under conditions where many people found over the last few decades that no matter how hard they worked, they couldn't get ahead.

So not only was there economic inequality, and job loss, and wage stagnation, but there was also a demoralizing message pronounced especially by credentialed elites who said, if only you work hard, you can make it.

If only you get a degree, but it's on you, you can make it.

And that in a way prevented, I think, progressives, and the Democratic Party in particular, from stepping back and asking a fundamental question.

If Donald Trump is as unfit and as serious a threat to democracy as we say he is, why is it that half the country, now more than half the country, prefers him to what we've been offering?

That's a sobering question that Democrats need to ask themselves, looking in the mirror and asking, how do we need to rejuvenate the mission and purpose of progressive politics or the Democratic Party if we're to address these sources of grievance and discontent, Walter?

When you talk about Trump and why he appealed to things, break down the reasons for me.

To what extent was it economic?

To what extent was it cultural, social issues?

To what extent was it a condescension amongst the elite?

I think it was all of those things.

The election itself, I think, boiled down to one fundamental question, which candidate would be able to present themselves as the candidate of change, because people wanted change.

They were not happy with the way things were going.

Donald Trump won that argument.

Kamala Harris was not able, for various reasons, successfully to present herself as the agent of change.

But beyond that, we have debates in the postmortems.

Was it economic grievance, or was it cultural anxiety and anger and grievance?

Or was it elites looking down?

It was all of those things.

And I think we make a mistake, both as analysts trying to figure out and comment on the election, but also I think the political parties make a mistake, by distinguishing too sharply between economic issues, things like inflation, jobs, economic growth, distribution of income, on the one hand, and cultural grievances.

They're closely connected because the economy, of course, it matters how well the economy does in producing jobs and keeping prices down, and so on.

But it matters above all as a system for allocating social recognition and esteem.

And this connects to the cultural question.

Part of what's turned working people against the Democratic Party in recent years is not only that they've been left behind economically, and the Democrats participated in deregulating the financial industry and promoting market-driven globalization.

That all mattered.

But Democrats didn't focus on the dignity of work, didn't focus on honor, respect, social esteem, and recognition.

And the emphasis on telling people that the solution to their troubles was to get a college degree contributed to that, to a kind of credentialist condescension.

So people not only felt left behind economically, but they also felt that they were being looked down upon.

And this is a volatile brew of economic and cultural grievance that I think Donald Trump very successfully tapped into, and the Democrats haven't quite come to terms with it.

One of the philosophical concepts that goes through all of your books, and I think the course in justice that you teach at Harvard, is the notion of the commons.

And at a time when there's rising inequality, as we said, and also a little bit less social mobility, at least there's this concept that there's certain things we have in common.

We all form a line at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

We all get to use the same parks.

We all go to the stadium together.

And yet, I've seen you write about this sorting, sort of a skybox phenomenon, where no longer are we all sitting together in the same common spaces.

Yes.

And I think this is at the heart of what people long for when they feel that they're unmoored, and we don't have a sense of community that holds us together.

You mentioned, my name for it is the skyboxification of American life, because in the 90s and early 2000s, sports stadia, which once served as class mixing occasions and places, increasingly even sports stadia, were separated.

Those who could occupy the luxury corporate boxes, and those fans, common folk in the stands below.

And what really has unfolded during the last several decades is that the most corrosive effect of the widening inequalities has been on the erosion of those public places and common spaces that gather us together as citizens in the ordinary course of our lives.

Increasingly, those who are affluent, and those of modest means, live separate lives.

We send our kids to different schools.

We live and work and shop and play in different places.

This isn't good for democracy, because democracy is about more than just voting on election day.

It's about sharing a common life that reminds us that we are all in this together.

And increasingly, the way our civil society has unraveled, the way there is less and less encounter among people from different walks of life in the ordinary course of our lives, that erodes the sense of commonality that democracy requires.

And here's another thing that Democrats and progressives have missed.

Even those who have seen the importance of alleviating the inequality, and even those who have called for some populist economic programs to take seriously the dignity of work, need to connect that economic rejuvenation with a sense of community, and that includes to claim a kind of monopoly on national pride.

Make America great again?

Well, there are a lot of problems with that.

But it suggests, it speaks to the aspiration for national pride.

There's a tendency, understandably, to say, well, that's the MAGA project, a kind of hyper-nationalism that is ungenerous to immigrants, and to outsiders, and to inclusiveness.

But the answer to that is not to cast a kind of suspicion on all things patriotic, but to articulate a progressive vision of what patriotism, and national pride, and a sense of community can mean.

Tell me what that vision is.

Part of it is to launch a serious project to renew civil society, to strengthen public places and common spaces of shared democratic citizenship.

And that means investing, often at the local, state and local level, in everything from municipal parks, and public that bring people together, and especially, and above all, I should say, the public schools, to bring people from different classes into a shared democratic encounter.

So that's one.

But in speaking about the economy, I think we can bring patriotic themes to bear there, too.

Part of what the age of globalization did was to say, to imply, and to teach national borders and national identity, they don't matter so much.

We don't really need to depend on those folks who live nearby, or for that matter, in our country, either for production or for consumption.

We can collaborate and produce with people anywhere in the world.

And this underlay the outsourcing.

But it also conveyed a certain attitude of less and less dependence on those with whom we share a country.

And so I think this, too, is part of unraveling of a sense of national community.

I think it has fueled the anger that those who have broken away with enormous wealth seem to feel less need to rely on fellow citizens closer to home.

So an economic patriotism, we've seen at the beginning of it, with friendshoring, or bringing supply chains closer to home, with making public investments to manufacture key goods, to support key industries domestically, that can all be articulated in terms of a kind of rejuvenated patriotism that is connected to the dignity of work, and our mutual dependence, and our mutual obligations on one another, for one another, as fellow citizens.

Michael Sandel, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Walter.