Emmott argues that the financial interests of banks and big companies have distorted and disarmed public policy. Both of America’s political parties are culpable. “Most notorious, in the U.S. at least, was the successful lobbying in 1998 by Wall Street of the treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, and his deputy, Larry Summers, to block regulation of the trading of complex derivatives products which had been proposed by the then head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born.” Emmott also criticizes big companies like Google, which have the lobbying and financial heft to get whatever they want in Washington. Campaign finance scandals have likewise revealed the political influence of money in Germany, Japan, France, Britain and elsewhere.

The greatest source of unfairness stemming from the 2008 crash, according to Emmott, was the political and civic inequality it revealed. He believes that to preserve an open society we really do need, as Trump has said, to “drain the swamp.” Getting big money out of politics would enable us, for example, to combat the rigidities and high prices of monopolies through strong antitrust enforcement, and to remove the exorbitant privileges that allow big banks to make profits at the expense of the rest of society. But to do this we will need a new, or at least restored, vision of equality, based not on redistribution or socialism but on equality of voice and rights, so citizens can demand such reforms.

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Emmott sees political and civic equality as the means to an open society. But why shouldn’t such equality be an end in itself? In “One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality,” Jeremy Waldron, a professor of philosophy at New York University School of Law, argues that Western thought has been rooted in the moral imperative that people be treated and respected as equals, whatever disparities may exist between them in wealth or talent. Waldron sees moral equality between human beings as what’s left over when “merit” is set aside. People deserve equal concern and respect because they are humans. Differences in wealth and power are consistent with this imperative if those differences serve the interests of all. Thus the answer to whose good is to be promoted in our social arrangements is — everyone’s good.

Waldron warns that wide inequalities of income and wealth can erode this moral imperative because they make it harder to make the mental leap it requires: The poor may come to seem so different from the privileged and prosperous that the well-off cannot understand a moral principle that assigns equal value to the living of a human life as such. “We might become so accustomed to economic inequality, so inured to the spectacle of it despite its being unjustified, that we cease to recognize those who are deprived as nevertheless our equals,” he writes, clearly alluding to modern Western society. “It may even be morally embarrassing for us to recognize them as such,” he argues, “since we would then have to acknowledge the injustice. Better perhaps to turn away, or to try what it feels like to deny or suppress the proposition that poor people too are entitled to equal concern.”

Waldron urges the same sort of political equality as does Emmott, but he gets there from the opposite direction. For him, the purpose of political equality is not to preserve an open society. It is to honor basic human equality. “It is because we are one another’s equals that we ought to have concern about high levels of economic inequality,” he writes.

Viewed from either Emmott’s or Waldron’s point of departure — the necessity of preserving an open society or of respecting the moral equality of human beings — the surge toward widening inequality is endangering the West. The culprit is not economic inequality per se. It is the political inequality that economic inequality can spawn. How will the vicious cycle we are now experiencing come to an end? These two insightful books suggest that if we don’t recommit ourselves to political equality, we will become ever more closed, authoritarian societies. Economic elites should understand this. As Emmott notes, without openness, the West cannot thrive. But without equality, the West cannot last.