Politics A Deep Dive Into Why Everything Is Bonkers in Trump’s America By Jonathan D. Simon, 03/20/25 | Philosopher John Rawls dared to envision what a truly good and fair society would look like. It doesn’t look anything like us.
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.
