The World Is Unfair
President Trump in his video speech to the notables gathered in Davos Switzerland for the World Economic Forum said that the world has been unfair to the United States. “many, many things have been unfair for many years to the United States.” His ire, this time, was directed mostly at Europe and especially at NATO. He has a point. Europe has prospered for many decades behind the shield of NATO which has been disproportionally manned and funded by the United States. Europe has basked in a dream world where their security is assured without taking any responsibility. This is free riding. President Trump intends to wake them up.
Fairness is an extremely important concept to President Trump. He mentions it repeatedly at his campaign rallies. He believes that he has been treated very unfairly, by the press, by the Justice Department. He believes America has been treated very unfairly, by NATO, by our trading partners, by China. He may also have a point here as well. But there is a problem with the concept of fairness.
I have written many commentaries about the problem of fairness, (Righteous Thinking and Foolish Nature, July 17, 2017, The Unfairness of Fairness, July 12, 2018, Uncompromising Fairness, October 29, 2018, among others). I hate to keep harping on the problems with fairness but political leaders from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders keep demanding fair public policies. The basic problem is that what seems fair to one person may not seem fair to another person. Jonathan Haidt wrote is his book, The Righteous Mind, that people have different moral foundations and that peoples’ sense of fairness is bound to these moral foundations. The moral foundation for many people on the progressive left is fairness, but there are different kinds of fairness. On the left fairness is an egalitarian distributive fairness as described by John Rawls in his book, A Theory of Justice. But Rawl’s theory only deals with distributing what already exists. He does not waste time (or other intellectual effort) considering how the things to be distributed are produced in the first place. The moral foundation of conservatives, on the other hand, is based on proportional fairness, people that work harder should receive more compensation for their efforts.
Fairness is not a good standard on which to base public policy. Any “fair” policy will make some people very happy and some other people very unhappy. That may not matter in a dictatorship or a monarchy where people just have to follow the rules whether they like them or not. But in a democracy that is a problem. You might think I spend too much time discussing why fairness is not a viable policy objective for governments, but fairness, and the different moral foundations of fairness, are at the very heart of our divisive politics in America. Fairness is a gut feeling. People do not have a reasonable, rational reaction to what they perceive is unfair treatment. They get angry. They get red in the face. Their blood pressure soars. They all look like Bernie Sanders railing about billionaires. Left or right or slices of pizza it doesn’t matter. If you think its unfair you get angry.
That is why I have always supported the concept that the standard for good public policy is that it should not be too unfair. Not too unfair means, that while a policy is not ideal, it is acceptable. This is the basis for building consensus. We all know that the US Constitution approved in 1789 was not ideal but it was acceptable. And it had a mechanism to make changes over time, but only those changes approved by a super majority. That requires consensus, not fairness.
I do not think that President Trump would agree with my “not too unfair” idea. His four years in political exile has hardened his determination. In his zero-sum worldview there are winners and losers and “not too unfair” is still losing and definitely unfair. But Mr. Trump’s victory in 2024 was far from a landslide. Many of his votes were from moderates that rejected the incumbent Democrats progressive concept of fairness, and not a wholehearted acceptance of the MAGA Republican concept of fairness.
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Trump and his MAGA Republicans are now the incumbents and that makes them vulnerable. Their grip on Congress is feeble and off-year elections most often go against the party in power. Democrats could make significant inroads and set themselves up for 2028 by moderating their demands for egalitarian fairness. Some of Mr. Trump’s policy proposals are not totally bad and an effort to support and possibly modify these proposals might work in the Democrats favor better than an outright rejection of everything he proposes (which is what they are doing now). This strategy would likely require a purge of far-left progressives from the Democratic Party, similar to Trump’s purge of non-MAGA Republicans.
The demand for fairness will destroy America. But if Democrats could accept a “not too unfair” policy agenda they could be successful. I am sure there are a lot of Americans that would prefer public policies that are not too unfair compared to the partisan agendas the political parties are pushing right now.
