Social Justification

Catchy phrases enable political decisions that don't actually have any merit.

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A climate change rally in New York. (Photo by: John Senter III/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.)

Hi,

So I wrote my normie column this week on Biden’s and Trump’s shared love of “Buy American” policies.

(What do I mean by my “normie” column? I mean the one that starts in the LA Times and has to be about 750 words with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s therefore very hard to squeeze in long parenthetical asides and non-sequiturs that have as much to do with my main point as the pope reading the instructions on how to replace the carburetor on a Dodge Charger from the Vatican balcony.)

I also just finished a conversation with Coleman Hughes for The Remnant in which we talked a lot about race and identity politics. One of his critiques—and mine!—of a lot of talk about institutional racism is that it gives the self-appointed police of racial bias an open-ended writ to do things they couldn’t otherwise justify.

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  1. Walter Schoen

    You’re wrong. For thousands of years, people have believed the allocation of resources was a topic of justice, and people on the left and right argued how best to distribute resources. Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics book V chapter 3 argued

    “[…A]ll men agree that what is just in distribution must be according to merit in some sense, though they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with the status of freeman, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or with noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence.”

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    1. Alex G

      Resources aren’t distributed. They’re acquired through exchange in gazillions of individual transactions across a society.

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  2. Jayjr2

    Easy and old liberal arguments.
    Alot of public $$$$s allocated.
    Don't hear much talk about that.
    I'm good with equality.
    Work towards that.
    Retribution and Equity are troubling.

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    Ben Connelly

    “ When we lived under monarchs, everyone understood that the king or queen got to decide such things because they were anointed by God to make the decisions. This is what John Locke and others called “arbitrary power,” and our whole system was intended to restrain or eliminate arbitrary power. Concepts like social justice are a way to sneak the concept of arbitrary power back into our political system. We all intuitively understand the problems with the logic of the Divine Right of Kings. What a lot of people miss is that the same logic applies when we divinize our political preferences.”

    Brilliant.

    Life may not be fair, but it isn’t unjust. Life is neither just nor unjust - it simply is.

    I want a t-shirt that says, “Buy Global.” Just so people know that I’m a neoliberal shill.

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    1. Keith Blank

      https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Globalization-by-bedakdhemit/128052672.IJ6L0

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        Ben Connelly

        Ha!

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  4. Dennis.Trask.Z

    Do we walk away from Red Lining where stated federal policy damaged economic opportunity to own a home because of race? Am guessing that does not fall under the definition of social justice described and is actually an overt act of racism with clear economic harm.

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  5. Childofpurpose

    I still need to read Scott's piece. While I think the economic argument for "buy American" is terrible, I'm interested in learning more about the national security argument, and alternatives.

    However, I was disappointed to see such a wimpy treatment of the very important issue of social justice. Certainly the issue of convenient definitions is at play, but your article makes it too easy to dismiss all the issues that claim the title of social justice. Many of these problems ARE simply issues of justice, but the conventional pathways to justice have utterly failed or even made situations worse. What word would you have people use when "conventional justice" isn't really justice?

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  6. Nancyhiggins742

    Thanks for helping make sense of nonsense.

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      Ben Connelly

      “ Many of these problems ARE simply issues of justice, but the conventional pathways to justice have utterly failed or even made situations worse. What word would you have people use when "conventional justice" isn't really justice?”

      Hard to say without any examples. Could you give a couple examples of what you mean by that? I think I could take a stab at it. Just based on what you said, I think the phrase I would use would be “not justice,” but if you mean “inequality” I suppose I would say that I don’t consider that to be unjust (even if it isn’t just - some things simply are what they are).

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  7. Jayjr2

    I would suggest folks espousing social justice, equity, equality, etc are really promoting retribution .... sins of the father sort of thing.
    The folks wanting retribution weren't the actual ones harmed.
    Unless of course you have the incredible ability to go back in time and replay history with a new set of circumstances.
    And the ones paying aren't the ones who caused it.
    No one wants to defend retribution, so social justice it is.

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    1. John Geffel

      Ah, but perhaps we white people should consider how we have actually and tangibly benefited from racial inequalities, by the privileges that have come to us at the cost of racial minorities. I know, in conservative circles “white privilege” is a toxic expression but things like better education, better housing, better infrastructure, better health… all the metrics are plain to see. BIPOC communities continue to ‘pay’ for our advantages to this day. We pay for their’s… never. We hide our privileges under the facade of meritocracy.

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    Earl King

    Equity in todays parlance simply means lower the standard to the least able. For they are the least among us and deserve the best from us. Nobody believes we should make the poor feel guilty for their situation. However what we should expect is that each human behave in a manor that a civil society needs to survive. We also expect everyone to do their best. The least able among us, if they are doing their best we can support them. It doesn’t mean we get rid of merit, achievement, the concept of hard work and finally this. Allow and work for yourself to get educated. Learn something to be of value to society. I don’t care what it is, just be the best your can be at it.

    Equity turns all of that on its head. Equity may be warranted if you were an interned Japanese American during WWII. If you were a victim of Jim Crow or of the Tulsa Race Riots, we have the obligation to make you whole.
    This is why Israel is in existence. The world felt guilty as they should and attempted to make the Jewish Diaspora whole.

    So all of this is really about black Americans and what do we owe them. We do not owe them a largesse without work or merit. We do owe them for 100 years of Jim Crow. We owe them a path to success. I don’t care if we make a step or two just for them to get on the path. We owe them. So what do we create. The American Japanese got $20,000 and an apology. I think in todays money it’s around $100,000. We could start a Roth for the dependents. Or we could create an environment for the poor black Americans, the ones who live in shitty housing, attend unsafe shitty schools, and mentors, parental education, individualized plans for success with the proviso that they work it. In America everybody works. That is the gig. We are not going to give black Americans the generational wealth that some would wish for. Not every victim of Jim Crow would have been generationally successful. I am for giving them the most gilded prepared path that requires them to work it that at the end if they do work it they will be successful.

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    1. John Geffel

      Well said.

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  9. Michael Young

    Ah, sort of. Inverting the phrase “Buy American” to “Don’t buy Chinese” provides greater relief to the embedded logic. There are indeed valid, and existential, reasons to direct your purchasing decisions by considerations beyond “best product”. B

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  10. Mary Stine

    While I do agree with almost all of this substantively, I wonder what Jonah think is the "just" response to the environmental disasters unfolding in Ohio. The none-too-wealthy residents, small in number, lack the financial resources to mount a years long campaign for restoration of their environment, livelihood and lifetime investment in houses and land now rendered worthless. Where the law fails to protect the innocent poor from the ruthless wealthy, the term "social justice" emerges. If the EPA and the Federal Government are able to prevail on behalf of the residents in lawsuits, "social justice" will lose cachet. However, if Norfolk Southern is able to slime out of it's responsibilities there like Exxon in Alaska, the social justice drums will keep beating.

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