“Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off).

Nobody gets to design a society, especially not from scratch so all of these principles, while nice of paper are moot. And since liberals have a complete "inability" (lack of desire really) to defend democracy from capture by wealthy, these principles are nothing more than liberal masturbation.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Wow, I thought this writer was incapable of making a sensible point. I guess I can give some congratulations for him pointing out the obvious.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South

And yet the people who "design" any given society know very much what position in the social hierarchy they will occupy. This shit is why liberals are categorically incapable of doing class analysis even when they recognize the existence and damaging effects of class.

It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician.

You don't say?

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—

This whole section assumes that these liberal politicians believed in the ideals of liberalism and were operating from a place of sincerity. I have literally never seen a liberal ever question the idea that their dear leaders were committed and sincere.

Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

If these liberals will for once in their lives try to analyse the cause of these oscillations, they will realize that it has jack shit to do with "the right to talk back to the planners" and everything to do with material conditions. Liberal society's only real "breakthrough" is managing to convince its leaders and population that they are above natural forces and above social forces because of their mighty rational powers. This kind of "rationality" is even worse than believing in the existence of God, as at least that can confer some level of humility and acknowledgement that not everything is under our control.

The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture.

Not only does this ahistorical view forget that it was the "western liberal democracies" that spread homophobic beliefs around the world in the first place, it also completely ignores the fact that gay rights were won through immense militant struggle after decades of fighting against the police, liberal politicians and the majority view.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

The people of Gaza beg to differ. I swear, fuck this author. What a removed.