My political thoughts recently have been despondent. If you’ve a philosophical bent, this deeply critical essay on John Rawls might interest you: https://unherd.com/2021/01/the-american-dream-that-failed/ It paints Rawls as white, privileged and a creature of the 1960s, quite unsuited to our age in which discourse has been displaced by an insistence on taking sides. Of course, the taking of sides in a conflict has always been essential but something has changed. Philosophy is no longer widely accepted as where dispute takes place; its place is now disputed.
Clearly, there’s nothing new in this; anti-intellectualism is a long-term force. What seems to be new is the numbers. This is the age that motivated Bannon and Cummings to mobilise voters for Trump and Brexit. This is the age in which opposition to thought and theorising has inched towards majority support. Moreover, information technology has made such mobilisation effective.
In other words, John Rawls may well be the tiresome anachronism that Dominic Sandbrook suggests. However, that’s not because he represents a bourgeois, elite, liberal viewpoint but because he asked his interlocutors to engage in a thought experiment. My recent despondency arises from facing up to the question, whither democracy when opposition to the very idea of thought experiments, theorising, discourse, politics moves from a minority to a majority perspective.
Colum McCaffery's Weblog 