This week, with the horrific murder of innocent children at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, “trans” issues are back in the news… again. Trans issues are, it seems, always in the news, for one reason or another. In many ways, they have come to define the differences between the parties. Moreover, they have become an anchor around the neck of the Democratic Party and its allies, who are unable to help themselves and reflexively support and defend trans individuals, even when they are guilty of violence as heinous as that committed this week by Robert “Robin” Westman. While normal people were mourning the loss of innocent life and decrying the bloodshed that has become too much a part of American urban life, Democratic politicians like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey were insisting that it is hateful to mention the trans status of the killer, and Democrat-aligned media figures like CNN’s Jake Tapper were churlishly scolding others for not respecting the murderer’s pronouns.

How did this happen? How did American society come to be divided over the inability of a minority of the population to distinguish men from women? And how did the Democratic Party come to stake its entire future on an alliance with this minority faction and its contempt for biological reality?

I blame John Rawls.

Well…kinda.

The history of Western politics since the Enlightenment is marked in large part by the conflict between negative and positive liberty (and negative and positive rights). In brief, negative rights are those that are presumed to be “endowed” by man’s “Creator” and which government cannot violate. Man has the right to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, free speech, freedom of religion, a free press, to bear arms, and so on. All the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights and derived from the “classical” liberal tradition are “negative” rights.

By contrast, positive rights are those fashioned primarily by a separate faction of the liberal project, that which we know today as the “Left.” Positive rights are those that are intended to promote a “just” society. They denote the rights that a person has and that are provided to him specifically by a just sovereign. The right to a job, to food, to housing, to medical care, to personal safety, to equity (as opposed to equality), to education, etc., are all examples of positive rights.

In a very broad sense, the conflict between negative and positive rights is the conflict between (most of) the contemporary right and the contemporary Left, between Locke’s vision of the social contract on the one hand and Rousseau’s interpretation on the other, and between the individual and the state. (Both of which abandon the conservative notion of voluntary community, but that’s a story for another day).

For most of its history, the United States has been primarily a nation dedicated to negative rights. That all began to change in the Progressive era and continued to change, slowly but surely, throughout the first seven decades of the 20th century. In 1971, however, a “modestly successful” Harvard moral philosopher named John Rawls changed everything, insisting that the negative rights of traditional American politics were necessary but were not sufficient for the operation of a “just” society. I discussed Rawls at some length in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital, noting, among other things, the following:

For many on the Left, the turning point in the battle for control of the hearts and minds of the people and the battle for the soul of liberty came in 1971 with the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Before the publication of this book, Rawls was largely unknown outside of the provincial world of moral philosophy; he was an average and modestly successful philosopher, whatever that means. After his Theory, however, Rawls became a global superstar and among the most prominent voices in public morality in the West. When he presented Rawls with the National Humanities Medal in 1999, Bill Clinton declared emphatically that the philosopher’s work had “helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself.” And indeed, as much as anyone, Rawls has been the inspiration for the “learned”—which is to say the liberal Left—for nearly the past half-century….

Rawls’s “expanded” social contract blends both negative rights (the First Principle) and the supposition of positive rights (the Second Principle). The First Principle dictates the minimum liberty afforded to all members of society, while the Second stipulates that justice can only be achieved if all are provided the same opportunity, including the same economic opportunity. Hence, a “just” society demands economic redistribution….

In many ways, Rawls and his theory of justice allowed the contemporary Left to embrace its fetishization of positive liberty. He squared the circle left by Rousseau, conceding the necessity of basic negative rights but emphasizing the moral requirement of positive rights as well. He provided the best of both worlds and thereby offered what the Left has seen ever since as a plausibly ethical political platform, limited acknowledgment of individual liberty coupled with a far less limited demand for economically just institutions….

I included Rawls in a book about “woke capital” for the same reason I bring him up today, namely because his theory of justice and his normalization of positive liberty have been expanded far beyond their traditionally accepted bounds and have distorted many people’s expectations of government and society. Historically, Rawls is considered an advocate of economic justice. His theory discusses economic inequality, the ownership of property, and the means to remedy the disparities that exist in negative-rights-based societies. Rawls was an opponent of the traditional welfare state, but he was a powerful advocate of government intervention in leveling the economic playing field. In many ways, his ideas have served as the line of demarcation between classical liberalism and contemporary state-liberalism for the last half-century.

Or to put it more plainly: Rawls’s theories are part and parcel of traditional politics in this country and the traditional divisions between Republicans and Democrats.

At the same time, however, his theory of justice has been embraced by cultural activists as well, those who believe that positive rights have a role in normalizing racial, sexual, and identitarian disparities as well.

If you look at the history of various civil rights endeavors, you’ll notice that they all begin with a demand that negative rights be applied uniformly. Martin Luther King, for example, sought the right to vote, to assemble peaceably, and to participate in society without the burdens of the endemic racism of Jim Crow. He sought equality under the law. Likewise, the rioters at Stonewall sought nothing more than to live their lives free from undue government interference and oppression. They wanted to be free to live and love as every other American. They wanted the government to leave them alone and to do its job defending their Creator-endowed right to pursue happiness.

As these movements matured, however, and as the nature of the Left changed in response to Rawls’s advocacy of positive rights, demands began to change as well. Some expanded, positive demands were economic and logical. Affirmative action, busing, etc. made a certain amount of sense, given the perpetuation of economic inequity that would otherwise have been the result. Likewise, the demand for the state to treat monogamous same-sex couples as they treated traditional married couples—i.e., giving them the same medical rights, same tax treatment, etc.—seemed like a small and sensible increase in positive liberty.

Eventually, however, as traditional America became accustomed to and stopped objecting to the normalization of that which should, by right, have been normalized, the cultural Left shifted tactics and became more confrontational. This is a complicated evolution, but for our purposes today, it should suffice to say that traditional civil rights movements—for racial and sexual minorities—were successful enough that the cultural Left needed new weapons to sow dissent. And it found them in an expanded version of Rawls.

What we see today in the Left’s obsession with trans “rights” and the demand that reality be bent to suit trans ideology is the expansion of positive rights to their illogical conclusion. This isn’t really a fight between straight and gay, cis and trans, religious and secular, etc. It’s the same old fight about positive rights, about what government and society “owe” their citizens in the pursuit of justice.

The Left and its allies are all demanding that the state and society take positive rights as far as they can be taken and provide all individuals with recognition, confirmation, and endorsement of their lifestyles and identities. A just society no longer merely requires that the state leave people alone to let their freak flags fly. It requires that the state—and everyone in it—provide support and validation of the freak flags. Anything less is unjust, unkind, unfair, and unacceptable.

Needless to say, that way lies madness—or at the very least, extended conflict and, for Democrats, ongoing electoral disaster.