From “Societal Improvement” to “Equality and Justice”

Carson Holloway, writing for Public Discourse, urges libertarians and conservatives to work together against what he diagnoses as their common enemy, egalitarian liberalism. Where laws are legislated in favor of progressive interests, but framed in the language of repairing oppressive injustice, there are indeed bigger fish to fry:

Precisely because of their dogmatic egalitarianism, they could not defend the new law as a mere societal improvement, but had to frame it as remedying a basic injustice, a step without which we could not claim to have a decent society. Doubtless if the health care law survives the political and legal challenge it now faces, the next generation of liberals will insist, with indignation, that the government role in health care needs to be expanded even further in order to address the remaining inequalities in this area.

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