See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here
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About Lambert Strether
Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered.
The article concludes:
“[John Rawls] remains an inspiration to those of us who believe that it is possible to reason together about the meaning of justice and the common good, at a time when we seem to despair of the possibility of doing so.” The spirit of his work is summed up in the injunction that we should “agree to share one another’s fate”. This, says Sandel, “is an enduring moral argument against inequality. And a reminder that the world is not necessarily the way it has to be.”
Unfortunately I think the more clear-eyed view is that expressed by Yves.