It was a long time before I began to see political philosophy in a realistic way. When I was in college, and well beyond, I could discuss aspects of Marxism as if it were not some kind of demonic disease. Which I now think it is. Not one whit more defensible than National Socialism. And because it masquerades as a non-racist angel of light, more dangerous.
But one of the binomials which started to make things clearer to me was the realization that what our Pledge of Allegiance names as allies --liberty and justice-- are in fact very uneasy partners.
It is all to easy to assume that good things cooperate with each other. In this fallen world, they often compete against each other. The French Revolution, father of all failed revolutions, held the incompatible values of liberty, equality and fraternity. Not on this planet.
Justice has come to mean social justice, which means socialism: control of the economy by the state in the interest of creating economic equality. And in its race-and-gender format, the state attempts to engineer ethnic and sexual equality, too. Here, freedom is necessarily lost. And is indeed a threat to righteousness.
Libertarians are a small bunch, with more intellectual than actual power. But for them, individual liberty is the ruling principle. Where you really leave people free to act, as long as they do not directly infringe on others' actual rights, you are going to have winners and losers.
Both of these positions are extreme; in John Kekes' words, ideological, since they privilege a single value as the regulating principle of all the others.
Any decent Western society will have to work out how to successfully relate the often antagonistic values of liberty and justice. And it is not easy.
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