Thanks, Mark, I am planning to still read it.

The question of Rawls’ voting patterns is highly relevant to the actual question about the relationship between philosophical liberalism (Rawls) and actual political liberalism (th Democratic Party). If Rawls were a classical (pre-New Deal) liberal, the question would be different, but he wasn’t.

Veterans benefits aren’t really redistribution. They’re back-payments on an underpaid, slavish job which is often fatal. Non-combat soldiers are probably overpaid, but when people go in they don’t know that they’ll stay out of combat, and that line is being blurred anyway.

It’s more reaonable to think that the US relies for its soldiering needs on a bunch of guys who are willing to accept a very bad deal.

Liberalism is the ideology that unites the two major American parties. Liberalism is pretty much the raison d’etre for this whole political system.

There’s an obvious qualification about the direction of redistribution that I’ll give someone else the pleasure of making! But to turn in the other direction, most of my Republican relatives support public education and veterans’ benefits, which are progressively redistributive, and they don’t really think in terms of ideological anathemas. The basis of this statement “Republicans find…” is unclear. There are some sophisticated polling projects—I’m thinking about the Pew Center’s work—that try to work out in some detail what people believe, and you might want to start there.

The reason why Rawls would be a Democrat is that he is preoccupied with progressive redistribution of wealth, within the bounds of respect for individual freedom. That makes him a Democrat rather than a Republican, if the choice is one or the other. Because Republicans find proposals for redistrubition to be ideologically anathema.

Of course it’s not. Since the 1970’s, the left/liberal/Democratic coalition has tended to include the well-educated, white-collar professionals, government and nonprofit employees, and those affiliated with cultural and creative work. These are demographic and interest groups, not philosophical communities—and John Rawls falls squarely into all of them. If he’d been a professor of biology rather than political philosophy, one would still consider him more likely to vote Democrat than Republican.

Now let’s consider a more interesting case. How do you think Allan Bloom tended to vote? Personally, I’m not at all sure. A brief Web search offers one claim that “Bloom argued that his cultural concerns were of a more radical nature than any party affiliation could satisfy, whether conservative or liberal.” I could certainly imagine him refusing to vote for any standing candidate; picturing him voting for, say, Ronald Reagan is rather more difficult.

Do you disagree? And if not, then why should John Rawls’ hypothetical Democratic party ballot be taken as implying some kind of connection between political philosophy and party affiliation?

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