Authentic conservatism has a temperament as much as it has its sentiment. One reason we know Donald Trump isn’t a conservative is through his temperament. He often sounds angry and he surely taps into the angst of modern times – a trait of populists not conservatives. Unfortunately, Trump couches his anger in the warm embrace of the thoroughly conservative term “justice.” He demands justice. His followers demand justice. From the brown hoards streaming across our southern border to the rich soaking the poor, the battle cry for many distraught Americans today is justice.
But as a conservative icon, the late Russell Kirk, shared about justice, there are two kinds. One kind of justice is reciprocal – the kind where we contract to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” The other kind of justice is distributive – the kind of justice not bound by contract but impressed upon us from within, thorough our soul. It means we see people as ourselves, as human beings just like us.
Today’s politics of anger, as Trump displays, represents the reciprocal form of justice. He and his followers are offended by the injustices of immigration laws and imbalances in trade with China and their answer is to punish the people behaving unjustly – kick them out of the country and engage in economic warfare.
And as popular as Trump seems these days, there are good reasons to be uncomfortable with his temperament and words – the best reason to be uncomfortable with Trump is his lack of humanity that translates into a lack of distributive justice. He doesn’t see others as he sees himself. In fact, Trump is quite the opposite. Trump is a classic narcissist. And while we all want to be treated fairly in our dealings with our fellow men, the sheer absence of humanity is what makes Trump such a concern for many Americans. He really doesn’t understand the meaning of justice. He uses the rhetoric of justice to behave unjustly. The only way rounding up millions of people, separating families and forcing them to other countries sounds anything close to reasonable is because your sense of justice has been perverted. And it’s a true sense of justice that makes the rest of us cringe when we hear Trump say those things.
But it’s not just Trump. A perversion in the meaning of justice infects progressives as well. The problem of progressives is their ideological penchant to treat everything the same when we know, instinctively, that everything isn’t the same. They demand recognition of human dignity without defining the meaning of dignity or even what it means to be human. Their justice is their equality and their perversion of justice is their perversion of equality.
And the progressive right, our libertarian friends, suffer the same affliction. My friends, if you can’t see the difference between selling human flesh and selling an orange, you don’t understand justice. If everything is a commodity, nothing is ever human and if nothing is ever human, justice will be nothing more than a contract between consenting adults. In other words, we lose our humanity equally well from the progressive left as well as the progressive right as well as from Donald Trump and his followers.
Author Arthur Brooks is right when he says conservatives need to reclaim the word justice and its true meaning. Policies that overlook the humanity of people in the name of justice should be opposed. Likewise, we should remind progressives that it’s unjust to treat unequal things equally.
Trump will fade but his perversion of the meaning of justice will remain until smart conservatives reclaim its historical and moral definitions.
