Confronting race through Rawls's political philosophy

 Rawls believes that a just society must be a pluralistic society, and that means that it must be neutral across (reasonable) comprehensive conceptions of the good. Citizens must be enabled to pursue their own comprehensive conceptions without interference from the state. Does this imply that a comprehensive conception based on the idea of ethnic or racial superiority over another must be condoned? It does not, because Rawls is not in fact neutral across all comprehensive conceptions. He believes there is a background condition that is both morally and sociologically necessary for the maintenance of a just society — the requirement that recognizes equal freedoms, dignity, and opportunity for all groups of citizens and that cultivates citizens who share these commitments. This has a very powerful implication: Rawls’s theory implies the urgent need for finding means of developing citizens who embody respect, tolerance, and compassion for others. This means finding effective means of reducing and eliminating racism in our society.

Consider this short text from section 7 of Political Liberalism:

Think, then, of the principles of justice as designed to form the social world in which our character and our conception of ourselves as persons, as well as our comprehensive views and their conceptions of the good, are first acquired, and in which our moral powers must be realized, if they are to be realized at all. These principles must give priority to those basic freedoms and opportunities in background institutions of civil society that enable us to become free and equal citizens in the first place, and to understand our role as persons with that status. (Political Liberalism, 41)

This paragraph merits close attention. Let’s start with the idea of “forming the social world in which our character … as well as our comprehensive views … are first acquired”. This is an acknowledgement of the plasticity of character, conception of the good, and moral powers in real human beings. These features of the person must be acquired, and they are shaped and influenced by the circumstances in which the individual develops. This introduces a fundamental aspect of historicity into the question of justice: a society both shapes the individuals who constitute it and is the result of the moral identities of past generations of individuals. Moral development is a crucial part of the creation and maintenance of a just society.

This idea has an important implication: a society founded on “bad” institutions, practices, and principles will result in the creation of individual persons — the constituents of the next phase of the social order — who are morally flawed. And this implies that the society that they play a role in creating will itself be morally flawed.

As an example, imagine a society in which sons and daughters are treated very differently within the family, with sons having a privileged role and daughters being expected to behave in subordinate ways and to accept different kinds of opportunities (schooling, employment, sports). How will the institutions and social arrangements of adult society be affected by this feature of family behavior? The answer seems clear: privilege and subordination between boys and girls in the family will seem “natural” and this inequality will carry over into civil society. The institutions of a society consisting of individuals shaped within these family norms and practices will themselves reflect the domination and subordination associated with familial roles for boys and girls.

So what kind of principles and practices must a healthy just society embody? The final two sentences of the paragraph bring the point home. The background principles of a just society “must give priority to those basic freedoms and opportunities … that enable us to become free and equal citizens in the first place, and to understand our role as persons with that status.” Conversely, a society that does not give priority to equality and basic freedoms will result in generations of citizens who are unable to become “free and equal citizens”. Such a society requires reform before it can become a just and equal democracy.

So a just society over time needs to ensure the legal, normative, and institutional principles that establish basic (and equal) freedoms and opportunities. This means that social, familial, or cultural practices that are inconsistent with equal freedoms and opportunities must be altered. The practice of treating daughters as subordinate is toxic to the creation of a just society because it fails to embody the conditions required for creating men and women who understand themselves as free and equal citizens, and who respect each other accordingly.

This line of thought has direct relevance to the history of racism and racial discrimination in the United States and other countries. It is part of what Charles Mills is getting at in his critique of “the racial contract”. If racial subordination and discrimination are woven into the experience of childhood and young adulthood, then the ambient social institutions and practices fail the test Rawls is proposing. They fail to give priority “to basic freedoms and opportunities … that enable us to become free and equal citizens in the first place”. It is therefore a first priority that such a society, and the state that governs such a society, must make strenuous and sustained efforts at reforming the social environment in which citizens form their “moral powers” and develop their comprehensive conceptions of the good. That means finding effective ways of removing racial subordination and racist ways of thinking from society.

It is a fact that creating a just society is a process of “boot-strapping”, in which one series of improvements lays the basis for new improvements at the next level. Establishing legal and political equality for all groups — a basic tenet of progressive liberalism in the 1950s — was a pressing goal. It is not yet achieved. The next pressing goal is to find ways of changing the experiences that children and young adults have of inter-group relations. Forms of behavior and ideas of prejudice are formed through lived experience; so teachers, family members, members of civic associations and places of worship, and political leaders can provide powerful and transformative examples that cultivate mutual respect, tolerance, and compassion across groups.

But the point to emphasize here is that both activities — establishing equal constitutional rights and liberties, and changing the developmental environment so as to cultivate attitudes of respect, tolerance, and compassion for others — both these activities are mandatory for a “becoming-just” society, according to Rawls’s prescriptions here. The goal of both kinds of reforms is the same: to “enable us to become free and equal citizens” and to participate fully in a just and multicultural society.

Racial assumptions in western political philosophy

A prior post asked whether liberal political philosophy can be “anti-racist”. Charles Mills addresses a related question in much more radical terms. He offers a fundamental critique of European/American liberal philosophy grounded in his view that the “social contract” tradition embodies a comprehensive “racial contract” that embodies racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Here is Mills’s critical overview of the social contract tradition from Hobbes to Rawls:

The social contract is, by definition, classically voluntaristic, modeling the polity on a basis of individualized consent. What justifies the authority of the state over us is that “we the people” agreed to give it that authority. (On the older, “feudal” patriarchal model, by contrast—the model of Sir Robert Filmer, Locke’s target in the Second Treatise—people were represented as being born into subordination.) The legitimacy of the state derives from the freely given consent of the signatories to transfer or delegate their rights to it, and its role in the mainstream moralized/constitutionalist version of the contract (Lockean/Kantian) is, correspondingly, to protect those rights and safeguard the welfare of its citizens. The liberal-democratic state is then an ethical state, whether in the minimalist, night-watchman Lockean version of enforcing noninterference with citizens’ rights or in the more expansive redistributivist version of actively promoting citizens’ welfare. In both cases the liberal state is neutral in the sense of not privileging some citizens over others. Correspondingly, the laws that are passed have as their rationale this juridical regulation of the polity for generally acceptable moral ends.

This idealized model of the liberal-democratic state has, of course, been challenged from various political directions over the past century or so: the recently revived Hegelian moral critique from the perspective of a competing, allegedly superior ideal, a communitarian state seeking actively to promote a common conception of the good; the degraded version of this in the fascist corporatist state; the anarchist challenge to all states as usurping bodies of legitimized violence; and what has been the most influential radical critique up till recently, the Marxist analysis of the state as an instrument of class power, so that the liberal-democratic state is supposedly unmasked as the bourgeois state, the state of the ruling class.

My claim is that the model of the Racial Contract shows us that we need another alternative, another way of theorizing about and critiquing the state: the racial, or white-supremacist, state, whose function inter alia is to safeguard the polity as a white or white-dominated polity, enforcing the terms of the Racial Contract by the appropriate means and, when necessary, facilitating its rewriting from one form to another. (Racial Contract, 111-112)

Mills is especially critical of the choice made by modern liberal social contract theorists like John Rawls to restrict their attention to “ideal theory of justice” without paying attention to the actual systemic injustices that US society embodied. In particular, he is highly critical of the fact that these liberal political philosophers have completely ignored the history and current realities of racial domination and oppression in the United States. He argues, along the lines of the main argument in Racial Contract, that this reflects the continued hegemony of the assumptions of White / European supremacy that he maintains were present within social contract theory from its beginnings.

The retreat of mainstream normative moral and political theory into an “ideal” theory that ignores race merely rescripts the Racial Contract as the invisible writing between the lines. So John Rawls, an American working in the late twentieth century, writes a book on justice widely credited with reviving postwar political philosophy in which not a single reference to American slavery and its legacy can be found, and Robert Nozick creates a theory of justice in holdings predicated on legitimate acquisition and transfer without more than two or three sentences acknowledging the utter divergence of U.S. history from this ideal. (Mills 1997, Racial Contract, 106)

And in Black Rights / White Wrongs (2017) he argues: 

Rawls and Nozick may be in conflict over left-wing versus right-wing liberalism, but both offer us idealized views of the polity that ignore the racial subordination rationalized by racial liberalism. Rawls and Sandel may be in conflict over contractarian liberalism versus neo-Hegelian communitarianism, but neither confronts how the whiteness of the actual American contract and its conception of the right and of the actual American community and its conception of the good affects their views of justice and the self. Late Rawls may be in conflict with early Rawls about political versus comprehensive liberalism, but neither addresses the question of the ways in which both versions have been shaped by race , whether through an ” overlapping consensus ” (among whites) or a “reflective equilibrium” (of whites). (Mills 2017 : 32)

An important manifestation of the importance of features of “imperfect justice” is the fact that a current generation of society may embody ways of thinking, stereotypes, and prejudices that serve to reproduce racist, sexist, or religious discrimination in the next generation. Is there any doubt that cultures of discrimination, disparagement, and bias continue to exist in American society? Of course not; the persistence of these attitudes and behaviors are all too evident, even when expressed in indirect and “socially acceptable” ways. And these attitudes and emotions have consequences for the freedoms of the men and women who are the object of these prejudices. Mills writes in The Racial Contract:

Similarly, a study of how “American apart-heid” is maintained points out that whereas in the past realtors would have simply refused to sell to blacks, now blacks “are met by a realtor with a smiling face who, through a series of ruses, lies, and deceptions, makes it hard for them to learn about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighborhoods. . . . Because the discrimination is latent, however, it is usually unobservable, even to the person experiencing it. One never knows for sure.” (Mills 1997 [quoting Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 84, 97-98]

This is one concrete mechanism of cross-generational racial domination. A few minutes of reflection can allow us to identify numerous other mechanisms through which current racialized thinking leads to future racial domination and disparity. For example, health disparities often derive from assumptions made by caregivers based on racial or gender stereotypes — sometimes entirely unconsciously. Employment decisions are influenced by stereotyped assumptions about a person based on gender, race, or ethnicity. The racial assumptions and attitudes of police officers often lead to differential treatment of members of the public, including increased likelihood of excessive force and firearms against one group as compared to another. And there are many other examples as well.

Failing to consider “non-ideal justice” is crippling for political philosophy, because it leaves completely unspoken the moral fact that discrimination, oppression, and violence are morally and socially unacceptable and that these evils are pervasive in contemporary society; and it leaves no place for focused thinking about how to move from a non-ideal society to a more just society.

So far Mills offers a damning view of the social contract tradition. However, in Black Rights / White Wrongs he suggests that Rousseau does a better job of bringing “domination” into the discussion of justice and the state. Here he draws extensively from Rousseau’s discussion in the First and Second Discourses:

Rousseau can be seen as initiating an alternative, radical democratic strain in contract theory, one that seeks to expose the realities of domination behind the façade and ideology of liberal consensuality. He retains the two key insights captured by the contract metaphor, the constructed nature of the polity and the recognition of human moral equality, but he incorporates them into a more realistic narrative that shows how they are perverted. Some human beings come to dominate others, denying them the equality they enjoyed in the state of nature. (Mills 2017: 36)

Rousseau, then, is at least open to the idea that “non-ideal” features of social life demand philosophical attention. This view creates an entrance for a more fully anti-racist political philosophy within the social contract tradition. It aligns with the political philosophy of republicanism and Philip Pettit’s views in  Republicanism : a theory of freedom and government (link), in that Mills’s remarks here emphasize “freedom as non-domination”. If freedom means a set of social arrangements in which no individual or group has the power to dominate others, then a constitution guaranteeing freedom is one that authorizes appropriate steps for recognizing and ending past and present forms of domination.

Mills’s criticisms of the social contract tradition are highly negative. Mills seems to suggest that the tradition is entirely useless as a basis for thinking about justice. However, a more nuanced view would allow that this tradition has largely ignored racial domination, a gaping blindspot that demands correction; but that the abstract philosophical principles through which Rawls, Locke, or Rousseau reasoned about freedom, equality, and consent are indeed appropriate principles for thinking about the just society. Suitably embedded in a philosophy that acknowledges categorical inequality and racism, these principles can in fact be quite radical in their implications for needed reform. And it is worth noting that Rawls does not ignore racial discrimination completely; rather, he looks at its injustice as being obvious and beyond debate. His restatement of this point in Justice as Fairness emphasizes the topic of domination and subservience in language that converges with that of Pettit:

Significant political and economic inequalities are often associated with inequalities of social status that encourage those of lower status to be viewed both by themselves and by others as inferior. This may arouse widespread attitudes of deference and servility, on one side, and a will to dominate and arrogance on the other. These effects of social and economic inequalities can be serious evils and the attitudes they engender great vices… Fixed status ascribed by birth, or by gender or race, is particularly odious (Justice as Fairness, 131).

Particularly odious … that doesn’t sound like a silent endorsement of racial discrimination and domination.

Rawls also addresses the religious arguments used by the abolitionists and by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the context of the issue of public reason versus “comprehensive reason” (arguments based on a particular comprehensive conception of the good). From the point of view of justice, only public reasons have force, since there is no politically relevant comprehensive conception of the good.

On this account the abolitionists and the leaders of the civil rights movement did not go against the ideal of public reason; or rather, they did not provided they thought, or on reflection would have thought (as they certainly could have thought), that the comprehensive reasons they appealed to were required to give sufficient strength to the political conception to be subsequently realized. To be sure, people do not normally distinguish between comprehensive and public reasons; nor do they normally affirm the ideal of public reason, as we have expressed it. Yet people can be brought to recognize these distinctions in particular cases. The abolitionists could say, for example, that they supported political values of freedom and equality for all, but that given the comprehensive doctrines they held and the doctrines current in their day, it was necessary to invoke the comprehensive grounds on which those values were widely seen to rest.289 Given those historical conditions, it was not unreasonable of them to act as they did for the sake of the ideal of public reason itself. In this case, the ideal of public reason allows the inclusive view. (Political Liberalism, 251)

His view is that both the 19th-century abolitionists and civil rights activists like MLK made compelling arguments because their “comprehensive” (religious) arguments are entirely supported by public arguments based on equality and equal freedom. Here again, it seems clear that Rawls’s underlying view is one that regards racial inequalities as fundamentally unjust, within the terms of justice as fairness. Though Rawls did not explicitly put this point forward, it is a strong endorsement of the justice of the demands for equality being advanced by the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

Tommie Shelby has done substantial work in attempting to help thread the way between the ideal theory offered by Rawls and the concrete, sociological and historical realities of racial oppression that Mills believes must be incorporated into theories of the just society. Shelby’s 2017 book Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform offers an extensive and nuanced reformulation of “justice as fairness” in terms that do take racial oppression into account. Here is a key paragraph:

Rawls has suggested that if we were to conceive of society as a system of social cooperation over time and took an impartial view of what the distribution of benefi ts and burdens of participating in this scheme ought to be, we could arrive at conclusions about what social justice requires that warrant our rational assent. The idea of society as a fair system of cooperation is a moral notion to be used in the evaluation of institutional arrangements. Social justice is constituted by the legitimate claims and responsibilities individuals have within a fair overall social arrangement. Thought about in this way, justice is a matter of reciprocity between persons who regard each other as equals. Taking this approach to questions of social justice is particularly apt when considering criticisms often made against the ghetto poor. It provides a framework for settling whether the urban poor are doing their fair share in upholding the system of cooperation and whether they are receiving the fair share due them as equal participants in this system. Reciprocity, as a central value in liberal political morality, is the primary normative standpoint from which I reflect on family structure, joblessness, and crime in ghetto neighborhoods. (Dark Ghettos, 20)

Mills in turn expresses his own disagreement with Shelby’s approach to Rawls in “Dark Mores: Some Comments on Tommie Shelby’s Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform“. Shelby offers a concise summary of his own position in “Racial realities and corrective justice: A reply to Charles Mills” (Critical Philosophy of Race 1:2 (2013)):

In all these interventions, the main thrust of Mills’s critique is to emphasize the need to attend carefully to the realities of racial domination and to deny the value of a normative theory that abstracts away from the actual history of racial injustice. However, this critique has been mainly negative, telling us how not to derive principles of racial justice. Apart from vague suggestions that reparations are due for past racial injustices (e.g., for slavery and land expropriation), the positive normative analysis remains undeveloped. What we get instead is an emphasis on the necessity of getting the historical facts right about white supremacy. Mills does not offer his own positive normative principles for condemning or responding to the history of racial domination that he so forcefully describes. By contrast, Rawls does offer a specific set of normative principles of justice that, I argue, can be usefully applied to racial subordination. Mills, so far as I am aware, does not argue that if we were to follow his methodological approach we would arrive at principles that conflict with the ones that Rawls defends. Nor does he specifically attack or attempt to reformulate Rawls’s principles. So our dispute does not turn on the content of those two principles. (link)

Both Mills and Shelby offer deep and valuable new lines of thought to political philosophy, and their debate is a sign of healthy engagement within a field of philosophy that has sometimes come down to disagreements about the third decimal point. Bringing structures of race and domination into the dialogue within political philosophy is profoundly important.

A political philosophy for an inclusive multicultural democracy

 We might say that a political philosophy is a formulation of the normative ideals that the philosopher holds to be primary in implementing the moral and social facts of “assemblages of free individuals in society, with conflicts of interest and belief”. How should such a society be organized? What values should it aspire to realize through its laws and practices? What forms of constitution, law, and state are best for the realization of the individuals who live within the society?

Here I want to lay out the skeleton of a political philosophy incorporating the ideals of an inclusive multicultural democracy. I maintain that a stable and inclusive multicultural democracy is a positive value for the whole of society: all citizens are benefited by a varied and harmonious population of peoples with distinct traditions, values, and practices. This is a society in which there are many groups and identities in society (racial, ethnic, sexual, class, nationality), and in which members of these groups have the moral emotions of compassion and respect towards members of other groups. Difference exists without discrimination and prejudice; more fundamentally, difference exists within the context of a cohesive sense of shared community. Rather than antagonism there is friendship across groups.

This political philosophy corresponds closely to many of the ideas about racial justice formulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during his efforts to find a way towards greater racial justice in the United States. Several ideas in King’s political philosophy stand out in particular. First, his idea of the “Beloved Community” emphasizes that the transformations needed to achieve a good multiracial society go beyond establishing formal legal equality for all, to enhancing the moral emotions of compassion and mutual caring as human beings [“Birth of a New Nation” (1957), “Facing the Challenge of a New Age” (1957), “Stride Toward Freedom” (1958)]. The multiracial society that King envisioned involves a cohesive community of mutual respect, understanding, and compassion. Second, King’s discussions of a future for racial justice in America and other countries always invokes the need for moral transformation — for a change in the way that people think about their fellow human beings with compassion and respect. Third, King’s conception of a just future invokes a deep recognition of shared humanity across race, ethnicity, and other group identities. This advances the idea that citizens in a just multicultural democracy will experience the moral emotions of compassion and respect for each other. King described this as a kind of “civic friendship” in which people from different groups succeed in living together harmoniously and leads them to experience a sense of goodwill and shared identity with their fellow citizens.

All of this requires moral transformation of generations of citizens. Freedom from discrimination, violence, and prejudice is only the beginning of a good multiracial society. Rather, real, concrete human beings need to come to think and feel differently about their humanity and the humanity of others around them.

For King these ideas are placed within a religious or spiritual interpretation, but the theological point is not essential; the values King articulates can be equally endorsed from a purely secular and humanist point of view.

What are those good effects thought to follow from achieving a “harmonious, tolerant, and mutually respectful multicultural society”? Several lines of thought are relevant here. Take Martha Nussbaum’s argument that “compassion is the fundamental moral emotion” and her view that compassion must be learned (link). Exposure to the lived experience and traditions of people different from oneself is a powerful way of developing greater compassion for others — and this presumably makes for better neighbors, citizens, and human beings. Or take the idea that “ethnic conflict is a constant threat in divided societies” (link). It can be argued that a multicultural society that has extensive experience in engaging across communities (racial groups, religious groups, ethnic groups, sexual identities) will be more resilient when crises and conflicts arise (link). I’m thinking here of events like disagreements between neighbors that escalate along racial or ethnic lines; occasions when opportunistic political leaders actively cultivate inter-group suspicion and antagonism; or when economic events occur that seem to divide groups along racial, religious, or ethnic lines. A final benefit that we can imagine is the rewarding experience of learning from another person’s experience or traditions about the norms and events that shaped them, and the reflective benefit that such learning can have for one’s understanding of him or herself (link). For reasons like these we might say that we are all better off if we live in a tolerant and respectful community, and the community itself will be healthier and perhaps even more productive as a result.

So achieving a just, stable, and cohesive multicultural democracy is a worthwhile goal. But will a well-ordered liberal democratic state have the authority — and perhaps the duty — to take measures that enhance the workings of a multicultural democracy? These ideas about inclusive democracy make up a feature of a specific political philosophy, a theory of the values that a good and just society ought to strive to realize. But how can these features be realized within a liberal constitution defining “a good and just society”? Would we do better to recognize that these are ideas open to democratic debate for consideration by the population itself?

In order to bring about a “stable and inclusive multicultural democracy”, it seems evident that citizens themselves need to embrace these values. And this means education. This may mean taking steps to change the ways that children, young people, and adults think about the different groups in their society through education, celebrations, and “inclusive practices” in private and public institutions like corporations, places of work, and universities. This may take the form of promoting forms of education for children that emphasize the values of mutual tolerance and acceptance across lines of race, culture, or ethnicity; it may take the form of universities celebrating Juneteenth or the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.; or it may take the form of hosting a reading of the poetry of Audre Lorde or the fiction of James Baldwin. The goal of such activities is to actively encourage the psychology of acceptance and mutual understanding across social, racial, and cultural divisions in our society.

There are obvious ways of connecting “institutional encouragement of inter-group tolerance and respect” to the agreed-upon mandate of achieving “equal rights of liberty, participation, and opportunity” for all groups. It can be argued that persistent prejudice in a segment of a population is itself a mechanism through which out-group disadvantage is maintained (Mills, The Racial Contract). Residential segregation leads to other social ills for the segregated group (health disparities, for example) and so the mechanisms that lead to the persistent residential segregation, which surely include latent prejudice and negative affect towards the out-group, can legitimately be targeted by state programs aiming at reducing prejudice and antagonism. So “anti-prejudice” and “tolerance-enhancing” programs and educational initiatives are a legitimate mechanism for achieving progress towards civil and social equality, to the extent that we can demonstrate that these efforts are efficacious. This is an instrumental justification for public and private programs aimed at reducing prejudice, stereotype, disrespect for others, and outright antagonism.

However, MLK wanted to argue for a stronger view: that achieving a harmonious, tolerant, and mutually respectful multicultural society is good in itself as an important and beneficial goal for the whole of society — not merely instrumentally valuable for achieving civil equality. In fact, it is a fundamental value for a modern democracy. Can this position be supported within liberal political philosophy? And can achieving a tolerant and respectful citizenry be considered a legitimate duty of the state?

There is a strong basis for arguing that a political philosophy articulating the values of a respectful, compassionate, and free community of equals across all groups in society is an excellent basis for thinking about the challenges of twenty-first century social life. We can offer both intrinsic and instrumental reasons for thinking that progress towards this ideal — a version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beloved Community — would lead to a better social world. What is less clear is whether a state organized around the principles of traditional liberalism can effectively adopt — or even tolerate — the steps needed to transform society in a more tolerant and compassionate direction. Seen in this light, the struggle over DEI raises profound questions about the possibility of progress towards real racial justice in our democracy.

(Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry’s edited collection, To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., provides an excellent and detailed new beginning for understanding MLK’s political philosophy.)

The consequences of a trillion dollars

Many thoughtful people in the US are concerned about the effects that the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law will have on poor people in many states who are currently enrolled in Medicaid health coverage. KFF has put together a comprehensive analysis of the implications of this omnibus act for Medicaid patients here. I asked Gemini for a summary of the impact this massive change in Medicaid will have, with over $1 trillion reductions in Medicaid spending over the coming ten years(!). Here is the analysis Gemini provided:

________

QUERY:  what are the main effects of the 2025 budget bill on Medicaid recipients?

GEMINI RESPONSE 8/21/25

The 2025 budget bill, also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), includes significant changes to the Medicaid program, which is expected to have a considerable impact on recipients. 

Here are the main effects of the 2025 budget bill on Medicaid recipients:

• Significant funding cuts: The bill implements an estimated $1.035 trillion reduction in federal Medicaid spending over ten years. These cuts will necessitate states either increasing their own funding or reducing services, potentially affecting various benefits, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
• Work requirements: The bill introduces work reporting requirements, referred to as “community engagement” activities, for most Medicaid expansion enrollees aged 19 to 64. These recipients will need to work, volunteer, or participate in educational activities for at least 80 hours per month to maintain their eligibility.
• Increased paperwork and administrative burdens: The new requirements will place a greater administrative burden on recipients to verify their eligibility and for states to manage the process, potentially leading to some eligible individuals losing coverage due to difficulties navigating the system.
• More frequent eligibility redeterminations: States will be required to conduct eligibility redeterminations for Medicaid expansion adults every six months, rather than annually, starting January 1, 2027. This increased frequency could lead to coverage losses for those unable to complete the renewal process on time or with changes in circumstances.
• Cost-sharing requirements: States are now mandated to impose cost-sharing requirements of up to $35 per service for Medicaid expansion enrollees with incomes above 100% of the federal poverty level, says the Center for American Progress. Out-of-pocket costs will remain capped at 5% of family income.
• Restrictions on immigrant eligibility: Some categories of lawfully present immigrants will lose eligibility for Medicaid and Medicare under the bill, notes the Center for Medicare Advocacy.
• Potential impacts on specific services: Reductions in federal funding might lead states to cut optional benefits, including home- and community-based services (HCBS) that are crucial for individuals with disabilities and older adults.
• Increased risk for certain groups: Older adults, people with disabilities, and individuals in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to losing coverage or facing increased costs due to these changes. 

It’s important to remember that some provisions of the bill may have delayed effective dates, and future policy changes could still occur. 

________

So why is this a big deal for lower- and lower-middle income people in the United States? Because it seems likely that millions of people will lose affordable health coverage, and many thousands of them will sicken and die from preventable illnesses. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (link) estimates that as many as 36 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid eligibility as a result of new work requirements. The Modern Medicaid Alliance is collecting stories of individual people whose Medicaid benefits have been (or will soon be) cancelled (link). These are short items drawn from various news outlets, and they paint a tragic picture from all over the country of the situations that will confront struggling low-income people, young and old, when these new Medicaid reductions begin to hit.

Let’s recall as well that health disparities in the US are severe by almost any measure. Here are disparities of infant mortality in NE Florida noted by Northeast Florida Healthy Start (link).

Health Disparities by Race

And here is a comparison of urban and rural mortality statistics offered by the Rural Health Information Hub (link).

Does anyone seriously doubt that reductions in Medicaid eligibility to millions of individuals will worsen these disparities? And for what? To reduce taxes on the top 1% of income earners in the US.

Stock ownership as system-wide exploitation?

 

A prior post made an effort to gain greater analytical clarity concerning the unfairness involved in the separation between the “one percent” economy and the rest of us. In what ways is the wealth owned by the super-billionaires an “unfair” extraction from the rest of US society? How can we account for the very rapid accumulation of wealth in the hands of the richest 1 percent of US wealth holders since 1980? The answer seems to largely turn on the rapid expansion in wealth represented by the US stock market over that period, and the fact that a very small number of wealth holders captured the lion’s share of these gains. The following graph shows a five-fold increase in the value of the US equity market in part of that time, from about $12 trillion in 1998 to $52 trillion in 2024. The wealth owned by the top 1% of households increased at about the same rate, which implies that this class rode the wave to wealth right along with the stock market in those years. “Corporate equities and mutual fund shares” are the largest component by far of the wealth portfolios of the top .1% and 1%, as reflected in the second chart below, produced by the Federal Reserve.

Screenshot

It was shown in the earlier post that the growth of the super-billionaires’ share of the nation’s wealth cannot be explained in normal “business profit” terms. (For reference, the top twenty billionaires in the US own 2.8 trillion dollars of wealth; link.) Rather, the bulk of the wealth now held by individuals like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos represents the rapid appreciation of value in capital markets of the companies in which they have large ownership stakes. The companies themselves do not generate billions of dollars in dividends; rather, their total stock value has witnessed billions of dollars in gains over very short periods of time.

So why should we think this is in any way unfair? How is it exploitative? Is it not more like the fortunate visitor to “Antiques Road Show” who finds that the forgotten painting in the closet is in fact an early Picasso and is worth millions on the art market? This is good fortune for the owners of the canvas, but surely these facts don’t suggest “exploitation” of anyone else. Perhaps not in the case of the Antiques Road Show guest; but the majority owner of Amazon, Tesla, or Meta is in a different set of circumstances. Rather, the existence and continuing success of these companies depends on background conditions to which all sectors and components of the US economy contribute: a stable system of law and regulation, a robust education and research sector, a skilled workforce, an infrastructure of roads, ports, rail lines, fiber optic cables, and electricity providers. The value of US companies is at least in part a system effect: it is facilitated and constituted by a vast network of private and public stakeholders, all of whom contribute ultimately to the success of the company and the value it finds within the equity market. So the value of the US company is inseparable from the large and heterogeneous economic and political system in which it operates, and the increase in value over time of the US company reflects the continuing contribution expected by the investing public from the functioning of that system.

It will be said, of course, that the companies and their executives themselves contribute to the value that investors attribute to them: innovative products, good management systems, efficient decision-making, appropriate personnel practices, “entrepreneurship” and risk-taking. This is true. But it is also true that these contributions represent only a portion of the increase in value that the company experiences over time. The system effects described here represent an independent and important component of that substantial increase in value. So we might say that “system-created increase in value” is the uncompensated part of wealth creation in today’s economy. Companies pay little or nothing to cover the cost of these system-level inputs on which they depend; these are the inverse of “externalities”, in that they are benefits taken without compensation from the public (rather than harms imposed without compensation on the public). And these system-created increments in value constitute a very important part of the increase in value that they experience over time.

We might therefore look at “system-created increase in value” as the counterpart to “unpaid labor time” in the classic theory of exploitation. It is the source of wealth (profit) that the owners of wealth derive simply in virtue of their position in the property system and in their opportunity to benefit from the economic system upon which they depend. But now it does not derive from the “surplus value” contributed to profits by each worker, but rather from the synergies created by the socio-economic system as a whole.

It should also be noted that the ability of private companies to “extract” value from system-level inputs without compensation depends on their ability collectively to influence government policy. Therefore owners of private companies and stock wealth have strong incentives to shape the decision-making of elected officials, government policy makers, the fiscal system, and the regulatory process. This reinforces the arguments made by Thomas Volscho and Nathan Kelly in “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008” (link). It follows, then, that achieving powerful influence on public policy and economic rule-making is not just a hobby for the oligarchy; it is an existential necessity.

This analysis of “system-input exploitation” has important consequences for distributive justice. If the whole of society contributes to the creation of the system-level properties that generate a significant fraction of the new wealth created in the past forty years, then surely fairness requires that all participants should receive some part of the gains. It would seem logical for the non-wealth-holding stakeholders — workers, farmers, and uncompensated contributors to social reproduction — to demand economic reforms that direct a fair share of that new wealth to the benefit of the whole population.

The previous post suggested one possible mechanism that would do this. The post discusses a hypothetical “public investment fund” that “would be automatically vested with ownership shares of businesses and corporations as they are created and grow, and that would function as a ‘wealth reserve’ for all citizens”. This would constitute a large and growing asset to be used for the benefit of the whole of society. In that discussion a distribution of gains resulting in public ownership of 1/3 of all capital was considered. Such a division would reduce (though not eliminate) the most extreme inequalities of wealth that currently exist, and would provide a financial basis for a more genuine “free community of equals” through the secure establishment of a high level of the resources most needed — healthcare, education and training, environmental protection, and provisioning of basic human needs for children, the disabled, the elderly, and the unemployed.

This idea of a public investment fund corresponding to the “systemic value creation” of the economy might go a long way towards the securing political values embodied in John Rawls’s concept of a “property-owning democracy” (link). Rawls argues that “the equal worth of liberty” is incompatible with a society in which political influence is proportional to wealth and where wealth is extremely unequally distributed. Wealth inequality of this magnitude means that the oligarch’s liberty and worth are magnified many times relative to the ordinary citizen’s situation. The creation of a substantial public investment fund representing the value created by our social, economic, and political system of cooperation would reduce the total proportion of the total value of the economy that the multi-billionaire class is able to expropriate. It would create real property entitlements for the great majority of society, and it would redress the current horrendous inequality of political influence that exists between the super-rich and the ordinary citizen.

A new form of exploitation

 

Much thinking about economic justice for working people has been framed by the nineteenth-century concept of “capitalism”: owners of enterprises constitute a minority of the population; they hire workers who represent the majority of the population; wages and profits define the distribution of income throughout the whole population. This picture still works well enough for a range of economic activities in the advanced capitalist economies when it comes to manufacturing, agriculture, and service industries. According to recent tabulations by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (link), there were 158 million workers in wage and salary employment in 2023. Manufacturing represented 8.2%, retail and wholesale trade 13.7%, information 1.9%, financial services 5.8%, leisure and hospitality 10.5%, and federal and state government 14.4%. This adds up to 54.5% of the US labor force, and these workers and firms can be thought of in roughly the framework offered by the traditional idea of “capitalism”. Many of these workplaces are amenable to union representation (though relatively few are in fact unionized). But improving access to union rights and workplace consultation would significantly improve the conditions of life for this segment of the US population.

Marx’s view of the unfairness of capitalism, then, comes down to workplace exploitation — the capture of “surplus value” by the firm’s owner from the workers whom he or she employs. Profits derive solely from surplus value, so wealth accumulation is fundamentally limited by the size of an enterprise.

However, current realities seem to suggest that this classical Marxist account is no longer sufficient. To see this point it is crucial to look at the details of the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Consider the graph of median US income by quintile above in constant 2018 dollars. Since 1989 only the top quintile of household income has demonstrated significant growth (in a timeframe of more than thirty years); and the top 5% of households shows the greatest increase of any group. 80% of US households are barely better off today than they were in 1967; whereas the top 5% of households have increased their incomes by almost 250% in real terms. The bottom 80% range in household income from “poor”, the bottom 20% at an average household income of about $14,000, to the second quintile (60%-80%) of about $102,000. But virtually all of these households — 80% of all households — earn their livings through wage and salary income, in “capitalist” workplaces.

Further, only a very small fraction of these households are in a position to accumulate significant savings or investments. As the second graph shows, the bottom 50% of households have only 2.6% of all U.S. wealth, and the 50%-90% segment owns only another 30.8%. The top 0.1% owns 13.9% of all wealth, and the remainder of the top 1% owns 16.6%. That amounts to 30.5% of all wealth, held by 1% of households — and almost incomprehensible figure.

These two graphs have a very clear, unmistakable implication: that working people, including service workers, industrial workers, and most professionals have received a declining share of the economic product of the nation over the past 40 years. (Amazon warehouse workers fall in the 2nd-lowest quintile (poorest 21-40%).) Further, the vast majority of U.S. residents have only a tiny share of all property in the U.S. According to the Federal Reserve 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, median household net worth in 2022 was $192,700, including private savings, retirement savings, and personal property and home value (link). And, of course, this implies that the median household net worth of the bottom 80% of the U.S. population is significantly lower.

It seems apparent, then, that capitalist exploitation is no longer the primary mechanism through which wealth is accumulated by the top 10%, 1%, and .1% of wealth holders. The top group gains income at a rapid rate and increases its share of the national wealth comparably; whereas the bottom 80% have almost stagnant incomes and negligible wealth. And this accumulation occurs almost entirely through rising value of the stock issued on behalf of private companies. The national economy generates all of this wealth; but the vast preponderance of the fruits of this production flow to the top 10% and 1% of wealth holders. This is a different kind of exploitation: not exploitation of a specific group of workers (employees of General Motors, for example); but exploitation of the whole of the U.S. economy for the benefit of a tiny minority of wealth holders.

Essentially it seems fair to say that the contemporary U.S. system involves two economies — one that includes 60%-80% of all people, and who depend on wages and salaried income to earn their livings; and a second economy that is itself steeply stratified, involving only the top 10%-20% of households. This second economy includes highly paid professionals, executives, and individuals who derive a substantial income from investments, financial assets, and other capital assets. The distribution of income and wealth in this second economy depends on ownership of capital (including human capital) of increasing value in a “knowledge” economy.

It appears, then, that the gross advancement of wealth inequalities in the past three decades has little to do with traditional “exploitation” – an unfavorable wage relationship between owners and workers. Instead, the sudden explosion of tech-oligarchy in the US seems to have to do with financial markets, the stock value of private companies, and the environment of business and tax policy in which they operate. The super-wealthy class in the US came into multi-billionaire status through the rapid acceleration of market value of companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Facebook/Meta. And this process reflected a macro-level mechanism that we might describe as “exploitation of the US economy as a whole” rather than “exploitation of a specified group of workers employed by these companies.

Thomas Volscho and Nathan Kelly provide a careful analysis of the dynamics of income inequality in the US economy over time in “The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008” (link). They note that there was considerable variation in the share of income flowing to the top one percent between 1900 and 2020, with a rapid rise beginning in about 1980. And they attribute much of this variation to facts about political power, public policy, and fiscal legislation. (This bundle of hypotheses is referred to as “Power Resources Theory”.) And a key finding in this literature is that the relative levels of political power and influence held by economic elites versus working people have a very large effect on the degree and direction of change in inequality at the top.

Consider the short history of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth increased from 2008 from $1.5 billion to $236 billion in 2025. The employee count of Facebook/Meta increased comparably during that period, from 85 employees in 2008 to 76,800 employees in 2025. But Zuckerberg’s wealth does not reflect the “surplus value” created by these workers, but rather the perceived value of the company in the eyes of private and institutional investors. And critically, it is difficult to imagine institutional changes within Facebook/Meta that would lead to greater overall societal equity simply by providing the company’s workers more input into the management of the company. The median income for a Facebook/Meta worker is $257K – hardly an exploitative wage. It is the rest of society that is disadvantaged by Zuckerberg’s $236 billion, not the direct employees. The same seems to be true for Tesla and the wealth accumulated by Elon Musk and for Amazon and the wealth of Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s business operations have many of the same features of domination and exploitation identified by Engels in Manchester; but these operations do not constitute the fundament of Bezos’s wealth except perhaps for the “performative” of a company single-mindedly devoted to efficiency and speed of operations.

The experience of the reforms of the welfare state after WWII shows that capitalist exploitation can be reformed through measures that improve the public provision of some crucial services (education, healthcare, retirement income, unemployment insurance); improve the ability of workers to represent themselves effectively in the workplace (legislation ensuring unionization rights); and improve conditions of health and safety in the workplace (OSHA protection). These reforms are “redistributive” in the sense that they depend on taxation of income and profits of private individuals and corporations to fund public provisioning. But can reforms like these address the inequalities — economic and political — created by the two economies described here? Can the oligarchy economy be reined in? It would seem that the answer is “no”.

So we are forced to ask, what kinds of fiscal and tax reforms could effectively rein in the wealth inequalities created at the very top of the wealth distribution? The annual wealth taxes proposed by progressive Democrats extend to taxes in the range of 1%. But this would represent a negligible reduction in the oligarch’s portfolio, and does essentially nothing to reduce the steepness of the distribution of wealth in America. A “confiscatory” tax of 33% would have a measurable effect by increasing available public funds for expenditure; but even reducing Elon Musk’s wealth from $368 billion to $245 billion – still results in a staggering inequality relative to 99% of US workers. And this still leaves the wealth-holder with a million-fold advantage in his/her political and media influence relative to almost all other US persons. (As mentioned above, the median net worth of all Americans is currently about $192,000. It is of course striking that three of America’s largest tech-oligarchs privately own a media company: Zuckerberg (Facebook), Musk (X/Twitter), and Bezos (the Washington Post).)

It appears, then, that standard “New Deal” or “welfarist” approaches to greater economic equality have no prospect for success whatsoever when it comes to reducing the overwhelming inequalities of wealth that exist between the two US economies described here. A graduated income tax works to moderate income inequalities (when it works at all); but the rapid accumulation of wealth represented by the emergence of the “tech-oligarchy” and the graph of wealth distribution above do not derive from income inequalities. The richest 1% did not primarily gain their wealth through annual savings from their high salaries; rather, they gained their wealth through stock ownership in companies whose value appreciated exponentially during the time of their ownership. And taxing the holders of wealth on the income generated by their holdings does not materially affect the distribution of wealth across the population and across generations.

Suppose we viewed a national economy as an interconnected and highly complex form of “joint production”, in which the efforts of all parties are instrumental in the creation of the new wealth and prosperity of the economy. And suppose we believe that this system should be organized as a “fair system of cooperation” in which all parties benefit in a fair way. Can the workings of capital markets and financial systems be incorporated into our institutions in ways that would give the working public (the 80%) a fair share of the products of cooperation? Could we imagine a fiscal mechanism that would provide the public with a “fair share” of the U.S. economy as a whole, including the growth of the value of private companies (Caterpillar, General Motors, Krogers, Facebook/Meta, Microsoft, …)?

For example, would it be possible to imagine a public investment agency along the lines of CalPERS that would be automatically vested with ownership shares of businesses and corporations as they are created and grow, and that would function as a “wealth reserve” for all citizens? Suppose the hypothetical “public investment corporation” eventually possessed assets worth about 1/3 of the total value of the US stock market. (The value of stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange is currently $28.3 trillion, so we are imagining a public wealth fund of about $10 trillion.) On this model, private owners and shareholders would own 2/3 of the capitalized economy, and the public would own 1/3. Would such a system be feasible? Could such a system redress the insupportable economic and material inequalities that exist in our country? Could it redress the gross inequalities of influence and power that exist between a tiny class of oligarchs and the vast majority of democratic citizens? Could the shareholder voting rights that correspond to the public shares created in this way serve to alter corporate priorities?

It seems clear that the photo below taken from Donald Trump’s inauguration represents a horrendous flaw in contemporary democracy. The “tech oligarchs” turned out in force for the new administration, and a group of wholly committed political partisans stand behind them to enact policies in the United States that serve their interests. If this is the best that our democracy can currently offer working people, then we need to work much harder at finding political and economic solutions that can elicit broad support from ordinary citizens, workers, farmers, and Uber drivers to push forward a better agenda for democratic equity.

Classification of political systems and theories

Graph of political systems (click image for full resolution)

It is possible to analyze much of the history of modern political philosophy -- political theory since Hobbes and Locke -- in terms of answers to a few primary questions. (This post expands upon a discussion of the "topology" of the space of political theories; link.) The answers to these primary questions can in principle generate a tree-structure of variants of political theories and systems. This is depicted in the graphic above, derived from these primary questions. 

1. Is a system of coercive law required for a peaceful human society?

Hobbes has a decisive answer to this question, based on his analysis of the state of nature. But it is also possible to make a case for a human community based on free cooperation among equals (anarchism).

2. Must a legitimate state provide strict protections of individual rights and liberties? (constitution)

Locke and Jefferson argued for the necessity of establishing protections of central rights and liberties that were essentially protected from legislation by the sovereign state -- a constitution.

a. Are there distinct limits to the exercise and purpose of state power? (constitutionality)

b. Do these limits create constraints on the kinds of legislation that can be adopted by a majority of citizens for the whole of society?

The most common view of the content of a governing constitution for a legitimate state is the idea that it should embody the moral facts of liberty and equality for all citizens. But what does liberty involve? And what kinds of equality must be protected? Here are a few possible answers to the latter question.

a. Equality of worth and treatment
b. Civil and legal equality
c. Equality in opportunities to fulfill human capacities and plans

3. Is majority rule morally mandatory in a just state? (democracy) 

Is democracy required in a legitimate state, given the moral realities of human beings in association with each other? Is majority rule morally superior to other possible political decision rules -- dictatorship, oligarchy, random assignment of citizens to positions in government, ....?

What moral principles are involved in defending the idea that a majority is entitled to impose its will on a minority with respect to various issues of public policy?

4. Are there moral reasons for concluding that a just state must embody programs to ensure the basic needs of all citizens -- health, education, old age, decent housing, adequate nutrition? (public good)

a. Does the moral equality of all citizens create a broad social requirement that all citizens should be in a position to realize their human capacities and freedoms?

b. Do all members of society have obligations of concern for each other?

c. Is a society with extensive welfare provisions more politically stable and cohesive than one without those provisions?

d. Is a society with extensive welfare provisions more economically efficient and progressive than one without those provisions?

5. Do groups, nations, religious communities, classes, or races have independent moral value, over and above the value of the individuals who compose the population? (community)

a. Do citizens owe something to their fellow citizens (beyond not violating their constitutional rights)?
b. Should the state encourage or incentivize involvement in voluntary civil associations?
c. Can / should important collective tasks be left to the authority and competence of community associations?

The graph provided at the top of the post represents a tree diagram of kinds of political theories, depending on the YES/NO answers that a give theory provides to these questions.

If we conclude with Hobbes that a sovereign state is needed in order to secure public order and security in a society of independent and free individuals, then we are committed to the idea of a coercive state and system of law. If we reject that position, then we end with anarchism. (See Robert Paul Wolff's brilliant In Defense of Anarchism for coherent arguments along these lines.) As a next step, we ask whether there are moral limits on the scope of the state. Does a legitimate state require a constitution guaranteeing the rights, liberties, and equality of citizens? If yes, should the constitutional order be governed by majority rule (within the constraints of the constitutional protections)? if yes, then we get liberal democracy. 

We can next ask the question about the need for state-funded programs to ensure the basic needs of all citizens and protecting against life's unfortunate contingencies (illness, unemployment, disability, old age). If yes, we get social democracy (or the welfare state). If no, we get the classic laissez-faire constitutional democracy, the minimal state. 

Taking the anti-democratic route through the tree, we get various forms of authoritarianism and illiberal democracy; and depending on the answer to the question of redistribution for public wellbeing, we get fascism, populist authoritarianism, oligarchy, and populism.

The question of the moral importance of community is to some extent separate from this series of distinctions. But it can be related to a number of the outcomes in the diagram -- on both the conservative and the progressive side of the spectrum. Philosophers defending anarchism have argued for the ability of a community of equals to find cooperative ways of handling its social life. Republicanism attributes independent value to the whole, over and above the value of the individual citizens. Populism in its various versions highlights the primacy of specific groups (racial, ethnic, national, gender, ...). And communism puts the future of society as a whole ahead of the importance of individuals in society. 

One consistent set of political values leads us through this tree to a particular solution: the favored political system should be a constitutional social democracy. If we favor individual freedom, human equality, democracy, and social wellbeing, then what John Rawls refers to as a "property-owning democracy" (link) is the best solution. This system can be spelled out simply:

a. Constitutional guarantees of full and equal rights and liberties as citizens

b. Economic life is carried out in a market economy regulated to ensure fair equality of opportunity.

c. Taxation to ensure inequalities of wealth do not create inequalities of dignity and fulfillment of capacities

d. Public provision (tax-financed) of reasonably high level of basic needs -- food, shelter, education, healthcare

This amounts to Rawls's two principles of justice and his argument for a property-owning democracy (Rawls, Justice as Fairness). The liberty principle ensures the first point and the difference principle ensures the second point. The constraints involved in the idea of a property-owning democracy provide a solution to the apparent tension between liberty and equality.