Mr. Rawls, your time has come
I think one reason the New Conservatism got as far as it did was that the champions of liberal egalitarianism viewed their position as so self-evident that no rational person could challenge it. That is to say, they were lazy in their defense of basic civil principles. Obama's great achievement, so far, has been to deliver a rousing (and needed) social studies lecture to the American people.
I've long believed that we need champions of the center who have the same energy and commitment as their rivals at the extremes - a Radical Moderate party, if you will. But what succint statement of principles could we begin with? I'd personally go to the barricades waving John Rawls' A Theory of Justice.
Ok, I know that's a hard sell. But here is a nice episode of Philosophy Talk, with special guest Joshua Cohen, discussing Rawls' principles.
A few quick quotes:
Cohen: "Rawls didn't care about the gap between the top and the bottom...what he said is: 'justice requires that [the] lifetime expectations [of the least well-off] be as high as they can be.' "
Cohen: "You need to be able to say to them - 'if we had less equality, you'd be worse off, and if we had more equality you'd be worse off.' "
Cohen: "The United States isn't just a market. It's a political society...and it's a division of labor."
Q: "If I were a utilitarian...you could make the worst off as bad off as possible...it might maximize the well-being of society as a whole. What's wrong with that?"
Cohen: "I think Rawls's idea is...what if you applied that to religious liberty? You think it's ok there, too?"
posted by The Front at 4:15 PM
1 Comments:
First, the opening paragraph is perfect. It has been true my entire life.
On the other, while I have generally felt that the idea of a moderate center was an illusion, a political rather than a policy position, and this tended to be demonstrated by the reduction to absurdity of what became a "moderate" position during the Bush disease, I mean era, a move to avoid challenging cancerous crypto-fascism when direct challenge was most needed.
But this is not perhaps fair- it has just left me with a permanently bad taste for the words "moderate" and "centrist."
What I am very interested in right now is where Barack Obama, who is building a sort of left-centrist apparatchik hotrod as we speak, will drive it. The man is a consumate pragmatist, but to what purpose? I believe it is because he is a progressive willing to abandon ideologies and symbol blocking the delivery of actual progress, by which I mean many of the far left radical ideas of Rawls.
Rawls is far more radically progressive by the recent standards of U.S. political discourse- to understand that actual liberty depends on material need - this is Roosevelt's four freedoms: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, and to condemn bombing - even in WWII, where he served in the Pacific -as war policy.
The centrism you are describing was centrist when there were these interesting people called communists. Now, when there are only liberal socialists and various flavors of watered-down corporate-state fascists, Rawls is radical left, and possibly pragmatic.
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