Philosopher John Rawls dared to envision what a truly good and fair society would look like. It doesn’t look anything like us.
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It says something instructive about America that Lou Rawls would doubtlessly score an order of magnitude higher on a name-recognition poll than John Rawls. Because while Lou had a nice voice and a couple hit songs, John’s work goes a long way to explaining the political death spiral our nation finds itself in.
John Rawls (I’m done with Lou) was the 20th century’s answer to Plato, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, and Kant — a preeminent and groundbreaking political philosopher whose A Theory of Justice, published in 1971, dared to envision what a truly good and fair society would look like, how it could be created, and how it would work.
What was remarkable about his vision was that it was rooted not in any moral or ethical mandate for how we should behave, but rather in a logical examination of how we would behave in collective pursuit of our own self-interest — with a very big if.
The Wise Veil of Ignorance
The novel question Rawls posed was, what kind of governmental and political arrangements would we set up, what kind of constitution would we draft, if we didn’t know who we’d be, what our station would be, in the nation we were establishing.
Rawls referred to these hypothetical blinders variously as the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance.”
In other words, unlike our Founding Fathers, the founders of our new state wouldn’t know whether they themselves would be rich or poor, landed or landless, man or woman, young or old, artist or tradesman, mogul or manual laborer, C-suite or mailroom, master or slave.
They’d have to take their chances, and the question was: How would that fundamental ignorance shape their choices?
Rawls’s answer was subtle and detailed — the book runs nearly 600 pages — but, needless to say, the impact of the veil of ignorance is substantial and leads to a political edifice quite different from our own, let alone from more oligarchic, aristocratic, or authoritarian models.
One guidepost is the principle Rawls called “maximinning,” which posited that drafters who didn’t know whether they would be top or bottom would set things up so that the bottom was not too terribly low — which is a prescription for what we generally refer to as “distributive justice,” and what right-wingers deride as “socialism.”
Or, to take a very stark and concrete example, if you didn’t know what your lot would be, how likely would you be to enshrine in your constitution the institution of slavery that the Founding Fathers, with just token hand-wringing, signed off on in ours?
A Measuring Stick, Not a How-To Manual
I initially encountered Rawls’s theory as an undergraduate and — having taken it all in, and skimmed the really tough parts — my first reaction was, “Well, this is silly!”
For starters, nobody was about to sit down and draft a new constitution, certainly not here, where even amending our existing one had become all but impossible. And if they did, perhaps in some new-sprung third-world aspiring democracy, they sure as hell wouldn’t do it from behind any veil of ignorance. For all its subtlety and intricacy, Rawls’s magnum opus struck me as hopelessly naive.
It occurred to me more recently, though, to wonder whether I hadn’t missed the whole point. Rawls was way too sophisticated and schooled in history to think for a moment that anyone anywhere was about to sit down with their cohorts and follow his guideposts for birthing a just society.
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice establishes a baseline from which we can assess with some precision just how far a given society, including our own, has departed from the ideal. Put slightly differently, just how much is our knowledge of our own position and interests driving the “principles” we promote?
Rather than a how-to manual, his work serves another very valuable function: It establishes a baseline from which we can assess with some precision just how far a given society, including our own, has departed from the ideal.
Put slightly differently, just how much is our knowledge of our own position and interests driving the “principles” we promote?
I think it is fair to say — and Rawls would concur — that measuring that distance from Rawls’s ideal can tell us much about the health of our political system and how likely it is that it will continue to enjoy the support and allegiance of the population under its sway.
Rawls’s theory is, in essence, a kind of analytical extension of the Golden Rule. When actions are undertaken for immediate unilateral advantage — with no apparent consideration for what one’s opponents or enemies might then do, following your example, were they to assume power — the distance from Rawls’s ideal grows dangerously wide. When those actions are aggressive or brutal — giving the finger to the courts and the rule of law, invading sovereign nations, threatening or targeting one’s own people — the gap rapidly becomes irreparable.
Where To Put That Right-Field Fence
Before turning to a few troubling and newsworthy examples of our drift away from Rawls, I should point out that there is an ongoing tension between process and outcome determinants in just about every aspect of human life. When setting up the rules of any game or relationship, it is a real challenge to resist opportunities for unilateral outcome advantage. Take, for example, baseball.
The basic rules of baseball specify parameters that apply to all teams at all times: 90 feet between bases, the size of the plate, the height of the pitcher’s mound, three strikes and you’re out, etc. One parameter not mandated is the precise dimensions of the ballpark itself.
The old Yankee Stadium, known as The House That Ruth Built, was designed with a short right-field fence, which made it easier for Babe Ruth, a left-handed pull hitter, to hit home runs that would have stayed in the park if Yankee Stadium had symmetrical dimensions. Over in Pittsburgh, right-handed power hitter Ralph Kiner was similarly favored with a short left-field fence, known as Kiner’s Korner.
Teams built their ballparks free from a veil of ignorance — they did what they could to maximize their competitive advantage, without looking too far into the future, though not averse to changing dimensions as their rosters changed over time.
In the modern era, such “short porches” as in New York’s Yankee Stadium and Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field have pretty much disappeared — Rawls, I suppose, would be pleased. Most sports strive mightily to provide a “level playing field,” though home-field advantage persists and even the smallest variabilities are mined for all they are worth. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi put it so memorably, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
It’s crucial to note that, as first commissioner of baseball, Rawls would not have insisted that all ballparks have uniform dimensions, or even that they all be symmetrical. What he would have insisted on is that the rules governing ballpark dimensions be established before any team knew who its players would be.
Would they, in that “original” position behind their veil of ignorance, have mandated uniform or symmetrical dimensions, just as they mandated 90-foot baselines? Or would they have said, “That’s too boring! We’ll just have to take our chances and if whoever winds up with Babe Ruth builds a skewed House for him, well, we can live with that”? Who knows! But their decision would have derived from some form of principle, not a play for unilateral advantage.
What sets Trump apart is not so much that he views things transactionally — with little or no regard for principles and values that don’t translate to money or power — but that he is not at all interested in fair transactions.
As you can see, the structure Rawls was contemplating has multiple levels, different points along the way to setting up a game or a system where knowledge and ignorance of one’s position would lead to different decisions about structure and process — one reason his book runs to 600 pages.
But while it’s by no means a simple book or theory, it does shed a strong and rather lurid light on the road America is taking, especially since Donald Trump got behind the wheel of the bus.
Justice Meets Donald Trump
Trump is often described, by friend and foe alike, as “transactional” — everything is a deal to be made. But the world — certainly the world of economics and politics — can itself be fairly described as transactional.
What sets Trump apart is not so much that he views things transactionally — with little or no regard for principles and values that don’t translate to money or power — but that he is not at all interested in fair transactions.
In fact, his behavior throughout his career makes it clear that he regards a fair transaction as a defeat. The idea is always to come out on top, get more than you give — as much more as possible. Politics, like all business, is a zero-sum game of winners and losers and only winners have any right to self-respect, or respect of any kind. Losers are the worms of the earth; principles are the soil they crawl through.
This attitude — which, by political osmosis, seems by now to have permeated MAGA World and the Republican Party — sets one at about as great a distance from the Rawlsian ideal and concept of justice as it is possible to travel.
What To Do About the Insurrection Act?
We’re not in the process of drafting a new constitution, but the Rawls yardstick can readily be applied to infra-constitutional politics — that is, legislative, judicial, or executive decisions regarding processes that can be seen, in part or whole, through an outcome-focused lens.
Take, for example, the Insurrection Act. There were discussions throughout 2024, originating with a bipartisan group of high-level former legal and security officials, about passing legislation to impose various restraints on the power of the president to declare martial law and deploy US military personnel against civilians.
Taking a Rawlsian view, you might say that legislators contemplating such legislation were behind something like a veil of ignorance — because they did not know what president the new law might restrain.
In one scenario, the Democratic candidate (assumed at the time to be Joe Biden) would narrowly win the election, MAGA Trump supporters would riot en masse, and it would be Biden looking to call out the troops to quell the uprising. In another scenario, Trump would win, fulfill his promise to be a dictator on Day 1, not stop on Days 2 and 3, etc., and he would be invoking the Insurrection Act to deal forcibly with the resistance.
Reform of the Insurrection Act did not happen. Was it because — behind its veil of ignorance, or at least uncertainty — Congress reached the conclusion that the country would be better off with an unrestrained president invoking a 200-year-old law to crack down on an aroused populace?
Perhaps. It is equally possible, however, that those who opposed the reforms — mostly Republicans, but some Democrats — made the bet that their party’s president would be in power at the moment of truth. In this view, those who gambled that Trump would win the election won their bet.
One thing is certain: With democracy under attack, resistance mounting, and talk of invoking the Insurrection Act in the air, there will be no reform now.
The Republican congressional majorities know who is president — for the next four years, at least. They know who would be calling out the troops against whom. They know which side their bread is buttered on. The veil of ignorance torn off, we see what real politics, as opposed to Rawlsian politics, looks like.
A Calculated Immunity
For a judicial example, we can turn to the Roberts court, which rendered a key decision in 2024 that put Rawls’s theory to the test.
With Trump facing criminal prosecution on federal charges related to his attempt to interfere with the certification of his 2020 election defeat, the former president claimed immunity from such prosecution.
Initially regarded as a Hail Mary argument put forth primarily as a delaying tactic — with the ultimate aim of running out the clock on the prosecution, which would be scotched in the event Trump won back the presidency — Trump’s immunity claim was firmly and comprehensively rejected by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. In February 2024, SCOTUS agreed to review that unanimous decision, hearing oral arguments in April and issuing its decision in Trump v. United States on July 1, 2024.
To the surprise and dismay of virtually all non-MAGA observers, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the six-justice conservative majority, which included three Trump appointees, found near-blanket constitutional immunity for presidents acting under color of their office. Because there is no actual constitutional provision for such immunity, Roberts and his right-wing cohorts found themselves in the Rawlsian position of creating such a provision — essentially acting as latter-day founding fathers — and they went whole hog.
Abstractly, as a matter of foundational principle, the Trump case can be viewed as presenting a choice between concerns: on the one hand, concern for a president having to worry unduly about the potential criminality of his or her official acts; and on the other hand, concern for the rule of law and the principle that no person should stand above the law, as well as about the removal of both accountability and deterrence from patently illegal presidential actions.
Roberts and his colleagues in the majority knew all too well that they risked immunizing a president who might well commit more and even greater crimes in his next round in office, might well attempt to assume dictatorial powers. This awareness would certainly tilt the purportedly principled balance of concerns steeply away from worry about over-encumbering a president with fears of future prosecution. And yet it did not.
Advocates for presidential immunity noted that impeachment and conviction would remain on the books as mechanisms to restrain a president from going rogue — while glossing over the fact that the supposed backstop of criminal liability had been put forward, by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), in arguing that conviction of Trump in his second impeachment trial, for the very activities being considered by SCOTUS in Trump, was not necessary.
But, such galling Catch-22 ironies notwithstanding, the Trump decision could perhaps be presented as the triumph of one principle — presidential elbow room — over another, checks and balances.
Except that it wasn’t — or at least was something else as well. Because it wasn’t a hypothetical, unknown ex-president in the dock — it was Donald Trump. And that particular criminal defendant stood, at the time the decision was handed down, a better than even chance of regaining the presidency in a few months’ time. A man who had faced two impeachments and was facing multiple indictments — a man, that is, with a demonstrated penchant for law-breaking.
Roberts and his colleagues in the majority knew all too well that they risked immunizing a president who might well commit more and even greater crimes in his next round in office, might well attempt to assume dictatorial powers. This awareness would certainly tilt the purportedly principled balance of concerns steeply away from worry about over-encumbering a president with fears of future prosecution.
And yet it did not. Knowing that impeachment had proven to be effectively a dead-letter, and knowing that Trump had little or no regard for guardrails or the rule of law, the Roberts majority rested their decision squarely on their prioritization of the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by a president.
The three liberal justices dissented, in what can only be described as horror: The foundation was all too obviously being laid for an all-powerful president, not much distinguishable from the king against whom the Declaration of Independence had been penned — and the specter of some future would-be monarch arising on these shores, against which the US Constitution had been designed.
Applying the Rawls test, as a thought experiment, what would this same court have decided about presidential immunity if Joe Biden had been in the dock facing trial and likely to be reelected? It’s not entirely clear what the liberal justices would have done — stuck with the “rule of law” principle or tried to bail Biden out — but it is all but certain that Roberts and his right-leaning majority would not have bent over backwards jurisprudentially to greatly expand the powers of a left-leaning odds-on favorite to regain the presidency.
And it is hard to imagine any Supreme Court, deliberating from behind a veil of ignorance, unilaterally ceding judicial authority and upending the system of checks and balances enshrined for two and a half centuries in our nation’s founding document and governmental blueprint.
It can, I suppose, be argued that Roberts strove for nuance, setting out distinctions between “core” responsibilities worthy of absolute immunity, other official responsibilities covered by “presumptive” immunity, and unofficial acts for which liability would still adhere. But the practical impact of this “nuanced” framework was, in fact, to create yet more time-consuming work for the lower courts, setting up yet more delay.
One need not be a cynic to conclude that the impact of the SCOTUS decision on the prosecution’s timeline — necessitating fresh arguments, decisions, and appeals that would push the trial well past the election and inauguration — was intentional. If Trump won, his DOJ would be ordered to drop the cases against him and he would never face a jury.
And his Get Out of Jail Free card would be good throughout a second term — and perhaps beyond — no matter what crimes he committed in the course of exercising his ever-expanding presidential powers and prerogatives.
It might also be objected that the Biden presidency still had a half year to run as of the date of the decision in Trump. Would there not be great concern on the part of Roberts that the license bestowed by the Trump decision would be subject to abuse by Biden?
Could Biden not, as part of his execution of presidential duties, declare martial law, cancel the election, order the arrest or even assassination of Trump, all under the Trump immunity blanket without concern for legal accountability? How about leading another January 6 insurrection, this time to block certification of a Trump victory?
Technically, the answer would be yes. But it was certainly a chance worth taking, knowing that Biden was no outlaw, no aspiring dictator remotely likely to resort to law-breaking to maintain his grip on power.
There was no reason for such concern, because Biden is no Trump, as Roberts and his cohorts knew perfectly well. Even if Biden won reelection, there was little reason to anticipate second-term law-breaking. In the abstract, perhaps; in actuality, no. And if there were any such concerns, they were, well, trumped by the goal of getting Trump off the hook.
Is it any wonder, then, that going down the receiving line at his recent address to Congress, Trump’s sotto voce words to Roberts were, “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget it?”
The immunity decision is just one of many decisions by the Roberts court that would have come out differently if considered behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance. The combined effect has been a strong rightward veer, weakening constitutional protections for voting rights and minorities, weakening separation of church and state, and weakening virtually all civil liberties except for gun rights, while strengthening the powers of the executive branch, and specifically of Donald Trump, to at least authoritarian-adjacent levels.
The court has yet to rule on the long-fringe “unitary executive theory” claims that could destroy all independence of agencies and departments within the executive branch and go a long way toward handing Trump truly dictatorial powers. It is yet to be seen whether the decision of the six conservative justices will rest on sound principles of governance — as it would in a Rawlsian polity — or rather, on a desire to hand another huge win to their political ally Trump.
Selecting Your Electorate
No look through the Rawls lens would be complete without a glance at the rules regarding voting.
Since our country made it through 131 years of male-only voting — 81 of which were almost exclusively white male-only voting, often with property restrictions to boot — it is fair to say that the veil of ignorance, with regard at least to the franchise, had some good-sized eye holes.
Would the well-off white men who bestowed upon themselves this exclusive and all-important right without much fuss have been so quick to set it up that way if they weren’t so sure they wouldn’t be women, or Black, or poor in their new nation? Of course not.
So the progressive expansion of the franchise can be viewed as something of a Rawlsian triumph. True, the white men who passed the 15th Amendment knew they would remain white — and true, too, extending the franchise to the newly freed Blacks in the South served an important political purpose for the Northern victors. Likewise, the men who passed the 19th Amendment knew they would remain men.
But somewhere in both processes abided a Rawlsian spirit, a capacity at least to imagine what one would do if one were ignorant of one’s own particular station or fate, and then follow that prompt.
There is a certain congruence, or at least a strong overlap, between what we intuitively perceive as just and what we would do from behind a veil of ignorance. That alignment has been reflected in at least our formal advances in suffrage, although these have of course been coupled with bouts of fierce pushback, the Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests being one glaring example.
Many of us older folk came of age buoyed by the conviction that progress towards what we intuitively recognized as justice would be, if not always steady, then pretty much inevitable — that, in Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous formulation, the arc of the moral universe, while it might be long, bent towards justice. Now we are not so sure.
And indeed the battle rages on today — with a renewed fierceness correlated with the tribalism and political polarization of the Trumpocene. Quite consistently, blue states look for ways to make it easier to vote and expand the electorate while red states come up with ways to make it harder to vote and contract the electorate.
Rarely does anyone on the right say the anti-democratic quiet part out loud — that certain groups or types of people should not be entitled to vote.
The red states attempt to justify the added hurdles by claiming they are necessary to combat “voter fraud,” which is something of a tell, since study after study has shown voter fraud — that is, individuals taking it upon themselves to vote illegally — to be virtually nonexistent, and certainly not the “major problem” or “crisis” invoked by the vote suppressors. Indeed, Trump’s own blue-ribbon Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which set out to find the millions of voters the president claimed had voted illegally in 2016, found nothing in the nine months it went looking before being suddenly and unceremoniously disbanded in January 2018.
Rarely does anyone on the right say the anti-democratic quiet part out loud — that certain groups or types of people should not be entitled to vote. Rarely, but not never.
SAVE: A Cynical ‘Solution’ to a Nonexistent ‘Problem’
Because so much involving the conduct of elections in America is left to the states and counties, we soldier on with something of a blue-red patchwork of facilitation and restriction. This year, however, Congress is looking to get into the game in a big way — with the GOP-sponsored SAVE Act.
SAVE stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (beware those apple-pie-esque acronyms!) and the bill would do this by imposing a nationwide proof-of-citizenship requirement for voting and registration. If that sounds “reasonable” to you, check out what some watchdogs who focus on the actual impacts of such reasonable sounding provisions have to say.
The Center for American Progress:
The SAVE Act would disenfranchise millions of citizens. [It] would require all Americans to prove their citizenship with documentation unavailable to millions and upend the way every American citizen registers to vote.
[SAVE] could silence millions of voters by creating new barriers to voter registration that make it harder for Americans to make their voices heard. [Here] are some of the many ways the SAVE Act could prevent Americans from participating in the democratic process: Documentation Barriers…; Eliminating Mail Registration and Disrupting Online Registration…; Promoting Voter Purges…; Imprisoning Election Workers.
The SAVE Act would undermine voter registration for all Americans… If enacted, it would devastate voter registration while disenfranchising tens of millions of eligible American citizens.
The condemnation from both progressive and pro-democracy groups has been near universal because SAVE would require citizenship documentation — such as birth certificates and passports — that millions of Americans can’t access.
Married (and divorced) women whose birth certificates and other eligible documents retain their maiden names would be out of luck. Other groups impacted include the young living away from home (e.g., college and graduate students), the elderly, the poor, naturalized citizens, and those not prone to global travel. Those least impacted? Middle-aged white males of comfortable income and wealth.
So the practical impact of SAVE would be to disproportionately suppress the vote of several such Democratic-leaning constituencies — and, most significantly, to extend the reach of such proof-of-citizenship requirements, already being ginned up in red states, to blue and swing states, where the GOP would not otherwise have the political power to implement them.
And it would do this on the pretext of preventing noncitizens from voting illegally — when there is no evidence that noncitizens have been attempting to vote. And when simple logic tells you that, facing stiff punishment and deportation if caught doing so, a noncitizen would have to be plumb crazy to take such a risk for the purpose of adding their one extra vote to the pot. But neither evidence nor logic has stopped the GOP from seizing on this flea on the tip of the tail to wag the dog.
Voting is a pure numbers game: Discouraging or suppressing 10 or even 5 percent (1 in 20) of opposing voters is enough to swing most close elections. The SAVE Act is yet another attempt to shift enough numbers to put a big red thumb on the electoral scale. In this case — given the absence of evidence for “voter fraud” committed by noncitizens — the eyes of SAVE’s proponents could not be any more wide open. No veil. No principle. Rawls would weep.
Who Could Be Against ‘Making Elections Secure’?
Another GOP-sponsored bill, the Making Elections Secure Act (MESA), appears, at first glance, to be far less cynical than SAVE.
Oversimplifying a bit, MESA would ditch computerized ballot-marking devices and mandate hand-marked paper ballots; has a whole section devoted to hand counting of ballots; purports to increase transparency in record creation, retention, and public availability; would include proof-of-citizenship requirements; and would effectively end voting by mail.
It’s a mixed bag of reforms, some of which, at one time or another, have appealed to right- and left-wing advocates — which would seem to make it something of a Rawlsian success story.
If the GOP is so very worried about “making elections secure,” why did Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal agency responsible for that, just confirm that it has “halted election security activities and ended funding for the system that alerts state officials of election security threats across state lines?”
While an in-depth analysis is beyond the scope of this column, hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, along with more transparency, have been long-held goals of the election integrity movement in which I have long played a significant part. Such long-sought reforms would seem good cause to get behind this bill and celebrate the fact that Republicans, who have determinedly blocked such reforms in the past, seem to have had a change of heart.
But we have learned through bitter experience to beware of such Greek-borne gifts. And to ask questions like: If the GOP is so very worried about “making elections secure,” why did Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal agency responsible for that, just confirm that it has “halted election security activities and ended funding for the system that alerts state officials of election security threats across state lines?” Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?
In the case of MESA, the red flags show themselves on closer inspection.
For starters, nixing mail-in voting would have a massive, decisive partisan impact. The reality is that Democratic voters have embraced voting by mail far more than have Republicans, and it’s really hard to change those habits and patterns. Like the SAVE Act, this part of MESA puts a heavy thumb on the scale.
Then a close read reveals that the MESA text does not actually ban optical scanners — which are, in fact, programmable vote-counting computers — or mandate hand counting. It’s either sloppy or tricky: MESA has a “Hand Counting Procedures and Reporting” section with a “shall” in it, but that is very different from saying “ballots and votes shall not be counted by electronic device,” a prohibition that is conspicuously absent. That’s a really wide loophole, subject to ultimate interpretation by a right-wing SCOTUS, which is hardly reassuring.
MESA would also require the precinct hand count be completed within four hours of poll closing (including challenges, disagreements, adjudications), which is simply not feasible, and makes no provision for when hand counts drag on all night or for days. There’s also no provision restricting the hand count to federal races; so MESA contemplates hand counting entire ballots, many with dozens of contests, in four hours. This indicates that the whole provision for hand counting is not thought through, which further suggests that MESA’s author, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) isn’t really serious about that part of his bill..
Finally, pardon my cynicism, but MESA currently exists as a first draft that has yet to go through the Congressional Car Wash. There’s virtually zero chance the Republican majorities are going to kill what at least the higher-ups know is their computerized vote-counting golden goose.
It’s to be expected — in fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s a lock — that as the inevitable revisions kick in, they will keep the mail-in ban but soften or eliminate virtually all the “good stuff” that they’ve gone to such pains to vote down or filibuster over the years when the Democrats have proposed it.
It’s a shame, because the MESA bill, with a few clarifications and modifications, would be the kind of legislation that one might associate with at least a partial veil of ignorance, a nod in Rawls’s direction. Yet, as such, it would also be a shocking departure from the prevailing political philosophy of our times — and hence pure 18-carat fool’s gold.
As Far From Rawls as Pluto Is From the Sun
It is fair to say, in conclusion, that no nation, no city-state, no form of government anywhere has ever lived up to the Rawlsian ideal. As Lou Rawls’s biggest hit asserted, “You’ll never find…” a real polity adopting laws guided by the veil of ignorance. It’s a hypothetical notion; no founding fathers or ordinary politicians have ever literally embraced it and donned that veil.
In one of the earliest of all attempts at understanding the roots and fruits of a truly just polity — The Republic of Plato (c. 375 BCE) — the very first putative definition of justice to be discarded was “Doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.”
Yet America has had its moments of close approach. And I would submit that those moments have, for the most part, jibed with our eras of peak fairness and justice: color- and gender-blind extensions of suffrage; protections of the rights of individuals (sometimes against majority opinion); attempts to equitably distribute wealth; tolerance of “the other” (who might one day be us).
Alas, this is not one of those moments.
Look at each and every thing Trump and Musk are doing, domestically and globally, and ask whether it is remotely compatible with the kind of justice imagined by Rawls or, for that matter, any kind of justice at all.
It is worthy of note that in one of the earliest of all attempts at understanding the roots and fruits of a truly just polity — The Republic of Plato (c. 375 BCE) — the very first putative definition of justice to be discarded was “Doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.”
That’s a pretty exact description of where we are right now, where Donald Trump and his minions have dragged us. It should be no surprise that the stench of injustice seems to permeate the very air we breathe.
