Can We Build Public and Political Support for Tackling Inequality?

Wherever you live these days, you’re likely seeing plenty of evidence that political polarization is increasing all around you. Some of this polarization is reinforcing conventional left-right fault lines. Elsewhere in the world, other divisions — cultural, social, geographic, intergenerational — have ripped up and replaced those traditional polarizations.

Socio-economic inequality has, of course, long rated as one of those conventional fault lines. The right has typically seen inequality as an inevitable — perhaps even necessary and desirable — byproduct of the dynamism that drives prosperity. Inequality, this argument contends, incentivizes and rewards effort and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

Inequality, those on the left counter, will always remain morally objectionable, for a wide range of reasons we need not rehearse here.

But, as with seemingly everything in politics these days, even this well-rehearsed debate no longer lines up along traditional left-right fault lines. Figures on both the right and left, as well as in the center, are sharing increasing alarm over how deeply socio-economic inequality is damaging our economies, democracies, and environment.

People who disagree over the fairness of inequality are now coming together to voice their concerns about inequality’s consequences, the negative spillover effects, if you will, that extremely high levels of socio-economic inequality create. Even right-wing populist leaders, in their own contradictory fashion, are occasionally nodding in this direction. At his inauguration in January, surrounded by billionaires, President Trump railed against an establishment that has “extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.”

In the UK, a growing chorus of conservative thinkers is beginning to question our economic orthodoxy. This dogma has created a situation that has companies making more money by owning assets — and extracting rents from those assets — than by actually contributing to the economy, a situation that has individuals’ life chances influenced more by what they own or inherit than what they earn. In the United States, conservatives like Oren Cass are rejecting globalized free markets and calling for a national political economy that provides dignified work and economic security for all.

But if we look back into history, this broad-based grumbling about inequality turns out to be not so new after all. As David Lay Williams outlines in his recent book, The Greatest of All Plagues, the conservative canon comes riddled with thinkers who object to inequality.

Plato identified inequality as a central problem of politics. Inequality, this ancient Greek philosopher warned, undermines “civic friendship and harmony.” Our wealthiest, he believed, should have “no more than four times the property of the poorest citizen.”

Adam Smith, the 18th economist and philosopher ordinarily linked to unrestrained capitalism, considered inequality morally corrupting. Capitalism, he held, encouraged the “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or at least to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition.”

Today’s free-market evangelists, for their part, ignore this history and continue to treat economic egalitarianism as an invention of the political left. But David Lay Williams helps us see their take as simply wrong. The casual dismissal of inequality by modern-age thinkers like Milton Friedman, Williams shows in The Greatest of All Plagues, constitutes a break from a rich conservative tradition that emphasises prudence, loyalty, and stewardship.

Yet the neoliberal view of inequality as a natural consequence of untrammelled market forces and meritocratic societies remains dominant in most modern societies, even amid the mixed views about inequality that many right-wing populists hold dear.

How deep does this neoliberal mindset run within 21st-century publics? The year before last, those of us at the Fairness Foundation joined with Ipsos polling experts to research public attitudes on inequality in 33 nations. We found pluralities of people in almost all these nations more likely to attribute success in life to individual merit and effort than factors beyond people’s individual control. Some 38 percent of Britons identified as “individualists” in this sense, alongside 45 percent of Americans, and 43 percent on average across every country.

The powerful meritocratic myth — the idea that “you can make it if you try” — continues, in other words, to shape how many people see the world, despite increasingly clear evidence to the contrary. If we can’t do more to challenge this meritocratic narrative, we’ll continue to struggle to build the level of public support and political will needed to boldly tackle socio-economic inequality.

Fortunately, some glimmers of hope amid the gloom have appeared. More than four in ten people in both the United States and the UK, the 2023 polling we conducted found, see inequality as one of the most important problems facing their nation. More recent polling conducted by the Pew Research Center echoes that finding, with majorities in most of the 36 countries surveyed — including the United and Britain — describing the gap between the rich and the poor in their country as a major problem.

So we do have a partially open door to push upon, as well as a growing body of evidence-driven suggestions — addressed in a new report from FrameWorks UK — about how to talk about wealth and other forms of inequality. We most certainly can, this report contends, help people focus more on the structural barriers to opportunity when they think about their economy and society.

Talking about fairness, in particular, has a powerful potential to build a public and political consensus about the need to tackle socio-economic inequality, and our Fairness Foundation has identified five “fair necessities” that can appeal to people with a wide range of political views.

We’ve specifically geared these “fair necessities” to appeal to a British audience. But we believe that these five core principles can be equally as useful in the United States and other nations. The five elements we see as central to fairness:

• Fair essentials: Everyone should have their basic needs met so no one lives in poverty and everyone can play a constructive social role.
• Fair opportunities: Barriers that prevent people from having equal opportunities should be removed so everyone can have a decent chance to succeed.
• Fair rewards: Everyone’s hard work should be rewarded on the basis of the contribution they’re making to our society and economy.
• Fair exchange: Everyone should contribute to society by paying the taxes they owe and should be supported by society when they need help.
• Fair treatment: Everyone should be treated according to need and should enjoy equal respect and influence on decisions made in their name.

We see these five principles of fairness as complementary, not mutually exclusive. And these principles, polling in the UK shows, can attract public support across political and demographic lines.

Underlying all these five necessities: the notion that unequal outcomes can only be fair if equal opportunities exist. But decidedly unequal outcomes in one generation lead inexorably to unequal opportunities in the next. We can’t build fair societies without reducing inequality from its current levels, and we can build a consensus around this perspective without needing everyone to agree exactly what level of equality we should be aiming for.

Mounting evidence from Australia, Germany, and other nations makes plain that political leaders who talk about their values — and, ideally, align those values to a strong and positive vision for the future — can reap the benefits at election time. In Australia, Anthony Albanese’s “social patriotism” welcomes “all backgrounds, embraces government intervention in the market,” and recognizes “that injustices and inequalities hold us all back.” This patriotism has “fairness, equality, and respect for one another” at its core.

Progressive politicians throughout the world should take note. Communicated well and designed and implemented effectively, action to tackle inequality can be both necessary and popular.