The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (22 page)

Similar statements can be found in scores of education colleges around the country. For example, the School of Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, requires students to demonstrate a “shared commitment to
evidence-based policy and practice and to democracy, diversity, and social justice
” (their emphasis). The education program at the University of Kansas expects its students to be “more global than national and concerned with ideals such as world peace, social justice, respect for diversity and preservation of the environment.” Graduates from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, are expected to be “leaders in their schools as well as advocates for democracy and social justice.” The education program at the University of South Carolina aims at “preparing educators to have a sincere understanding and appreciation of diversity as we challenge ourselves and others to work for social justice.”
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This is the beauty of the phrase social justice. It means everything to those who care about it and it means nothing to those whose eyes glaze over when they hear what they think is mere boilerplate. The “social justice disposition” that these colleges are “measuring” has nothing to do with the substance of the disciplines being taught—or that are supposed to be taught—and everything to do with filtering out those who aren’t part of the movement without having to admit to discriminatory policies.

So far we’ve just been dancing around the heart of social justice’s historic and core meaning: spreading the wealth around. The
Oxford English Dictionary
lists “distributive justice” as a synonym of social justice, and defines it as “justice at the level of a society or state as regards the possession of wealth, commodities, opportunities, and privileges.”

Before we go any further, a very brief (and thus overly simplified) history of how the term emerges in its current context is in order.
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The phrase social justice began as a technical term within Catholic theology—coined by Catholic moral theologian Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio in an
1840 treatise on natural law. Taparelli was concerned that with the growing popularity of various social contract theories of the nineteenth century (Rousseau’s in particular), people might lose sight of the “the social fact” of humanity. Simply put, we humans are social beings. We are born into families, and live in communities. An individual belongs to more institutions—more “societies”—than just the State. In other words, there isn’t just civil society, there are civil
societies.
And those societies maintain a level of autonomy apart from that of the State. We form groups and associations in order to obtain basic goods and complete tasks that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish.

These intermediary associations act as both bridge and buffer between the individual and the State. The associations of “lower society” maintain their own autonomy so long as they do not threaten to destroy the unity of the “higher society”—i.e., the State. The State, in turn, has a responsibility to not “destroy the inner unity” of those associations, but rather respect their freedom and autonomy within the society. In other words, the government cannot trample the structure of social ecosystems that make life worthwhile.
¹³

Against the backdrop of the dramatic rise in the size, scope, power, and authority of the nation-state system, Taparelli worried that the traditional language of “legal justice”—i.e., plain old justice, according to most people—might reinforce the erroneous and dangerous idea that the only society that exists is the one that people call the State, constraining the autonomy and spiritual authority of, among other things, the Church. Recall that later Mussolini would define fascism as “everything within the state, nothing outside the state”
¹⁴
—a view that earned the condemnation of the Church for “statolotry,” or the sinful worship of the state.

To remedy this misunderstanding, Taparelli introduced the phrase “social justice” as a way to emphasize that much of the important stuff lay outside the realm of the State. It had nothing to do with redistributing wealth (never mind fighting for gender equity). Taparelli thought of and employed social justice in a completely different way than almost everyone, Catholic and otherwise, does in contemporary society.
¹⁵

The concept percolated within the intellectual machinery of the Church for years. Another priest-philosopher, Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, popularized it in his
Constitution of Social Justice
. Eventually, advisers to Pope
Leo XIII suggested he take up Taparelli’s idea of replacing the phrase legal justice with social justice in his 1891 encyclical,
Rerum Novarum
. Being a good Thomist, Leo decided not to make the swap. Twenty-one years later, a former student of Taparelli’s by the name of Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti was named Pope Pius XI. And nine years after that, he celebrated the fortieth anniversary of
Rerum Novarum
with a social encyclical of his own that fully embraced the language of social justice, and thus introduced it formally into the Catholic lexicon.
¹⁶

It needs to be understood that pretty much the whole intellectual world was fixated on the adjective “social” back then. The “social question” was the central question of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What was the social question? You name it. Urbanization, unification, industrialization, democratization, deracination, and consolidation: These trends worked with and against each other to churn nearly every settled assumption about how the world works. The rise of “mass society,” the crumbling of monarchy, and the economic transformation of traditional agriculture meant pretty much everything was “in play.” Today we think of socialism as a purely economic doctrine of one kind or another. But when the term gained widespread currency, it had a more inclusive connotation, suggesting how people should
live
, not just how people should work or be compensated for work.

Social justice got thrown into this intellectual blender. Many theologians became involved in the late-nineteenth-century movement known as Social Catholicism, and unlike their (classically) liberal counterparts, who held that charity in the form of alms giving ought to be the primary way to help those in need, the Social Catholics argued that social justice demanded more charitable economic arrangements. Of course, only the state itself could impose such arrangements. And so social justice developed a political and ideological charge that was never intended by its formulator—but would prove wildly useful as a rallying cry for progressive economic policies.

When planted in American soil social justice grew into something even more warped. The phrase kept a religious connotation, but it evolved into a more explicitly political and economic doctrine, thanks largely to two left-wing American priests, Monsignor John Ryan and Father Charles Coughlin. Ryan was the most respected liberal Catholic intellectual and theologian in
America during the early twentieth century. He spearheaded the use of social justice to mean the moral obligation of the state to ensure the well-being of all citizens, and of the poor, vulnerable, and elderly in particular. His 1906 book,
A Living Wage
, largely introduced the concept to American progressives. He insisted that
Rerum Novarum
had changed the living wage “from an implicit to an explicit principle of Catholic ethics.” Later, and not surprisingly, he became one of FDR’s biggest supporters, earning the nickname “Monsignor New Deal” for his sharp-edged rhetoric:

It should be obvious that insurance against unemployment and old age is an elementary measure of social justice. The sum of the matter is that these and several other enactments of the New Deal constitute moderate measures of economic reform which were long overdue in the United States. They are mild installments of too long delayed social justice. If they are denounced as communistic, it is simply because this is the most damaging epithet that can be hurled against them by beneficiaries of social injustice.
¹⁷

It’s a small sign of how deeply the Manichean categories of Marxism had seeped into liberal argumentation. If you feared that guaranteed income was “too communistic,” it can only be because you are a beneficiary of “social injustice.”

But Ryan was a pussycat compared to the “little flower,” Father Charles Coughlin, when it came to championing the need for social justice policies in America. Coughlin—a cliché unto himself insofar as he is routinely described as the “right-wing radio priest”—was well to the left of Roosevelt and Ryan. Early in his career as a pundit of sorts he was one of FDR’s most influential defenders. It was “Roosevelt or Ruin” in the 1932 election. The New Deal was “Christ’s Deal,” for had not FDR promised to “drive the money changers from the temple” in his inaugural address? Coughlin quickly became disillusioned with the New Deal. Not, mind you, because he thought the New Deal was too intrusive or too leftist, but precisely because it was not aggressive enough in fulfilling all the socialist requirements of social justice.

In 1934 Coughlin founded the National Union of Social Justice and outlined sixteen requirements of social justice, only some of which according to him were being fulfilled by the New Deal. Among the articles of faith for this new superlobby:

•  That every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family…

•  Nationalizing those public necessities by which their very nature are too important to be held in control of private individuals
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The following month Coughlin issued another seven principles to elaborate exactly how the NUSJ would combat the horrors of capitalism and modern commerce. Among them: The government must guarantee the production of “food, wearing apparel, homes, drugs, books and all modern conveniences.” “This principle,” Coughlin rightly explained, “is contrary to the theory of capitalism.”
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In the years leading up to the 1936 election, Monsignor Ryan and Father Coughlin—once friends and political allies (Ryan once said Coughlin was “on the side of the angels”
²⁰
for his work in social justice)— became embroiled in a public battle for the political hearts and minds of the Catholic faithful. Ryan argued that Roosevelt was a champion and the New Deal an embodiment of social justice. Father Coughlin, however, was convinced Roosevelt still favored “pseudo-capitalistic monetary policies,” and campaigned against his reelection with vigor:

The great betrayer and liar, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who promised to drive the money changers from the temple, had succeeded [only] in driving the farmers from their homesteads and the citizens from their homes in the cities.… I ask you to purge the man who claims to be a Democrat, from the Democratic Party, and I mean Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.
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In other words, by the time FDR was reelected in 1936, the only live debate on how to fulfill the requirements of social justice was whether moderately liberal policies were enough to get the job done, or if it required even more radical government intervention and redistribution.

This use of social justice—an empty vessel to be filled with any and all leftist ideals, and then promptly wielded as a political bludgeon against any and all dissenters—is precisely what F. A. Hayek had in mind in his
Mirage of Social Justice
, the most extended, and definitive, assault on the topic to date. Hayek came out swinging: “I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term ‘social justice.’”
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No one should be surprised that the twentieth-century heir to Adam Smith would have a problem with the concept of social justice. But why describe it as a
mirage
? To begin, Hayek wisely identified justice in the classical sense as a particular action of
persons
. “[O]nly situations that have been created by human will can be called just or unjust.… Social justice,” Hayek concludes, “does not belong to the category of effort but that of nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone.’” Whining about how high unemployment is “unjust” is dangerously misleading nonsense. Justice creates a claim on others. So who is being unjust? The employers who cannot afford more workers? The consumers who refuse to create enough demand to justify more workers? The government for not taxing innocent parties to pay for labor that isn’t needed and that they did not vote for? Social justice assumes rights—social rights, economic rights, etc.—that cannot be enforced.

It’s a brilliant and fun read that I can’t summarize adequately here, but it’s important to note his overriding conclusion: It makes no sense to speak of social justice in a free society, because to do so assumes that we should not in fact live in a free society, at least not as classically understood.

Think of it this way. The Bill of Rights is framed in the negative because your rights are prior and independent from the government. “Congress shall make no law…” infringing on this or that right. A “social justice bill of rights” might begin, “Government must provide…” a home, car, job, French bulldog puppy, whatever. You cannot truly “have” such rights, because you are not born with them. How can you be born with an “inalienable right” to
a home? Why not an inalienable right to a hovercraft or a jetpack?

In a society that relies upon the invisible hand of the free market, social justice is a nonsensical concept, in precisely the way saying “let the market decide” would make no sense in, say, North Korea today. The only way for social justice to make sense is if you operate from the assumption that the invisible hand of the market should be amputated and replaced with the very visible hand of the State. In other words, each explicit demand for social justice carries with it the implicit but necessary requirement that the State do the fixing. And a society dedicated to the pursuit of perfect social justice must gradually move more and more decisions under the command of the State, until it is the sole moral agent.