The values of the state's higher education system cannot be reconciled with the values of its justice system

I have written before that all democracy is liberal, all justice is liberal, all intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.(1) If all justice is liberal, then the political orientation of any judge is the jurisprudential outlook of those who love justice above all else. It follows that there cannot be a "Republican judge" or a "Democratic judge." If a judge's highest loyalty is not to "the known rules of ancient liberty", to eternal justice, they could at best preside over a kangaroo court, at best practice a travesty of justice. (The current practice here in the United States where the Republican Party nominates judges and justices only from a list of candidates provided by the Federalist Society violates the principles of the legal profession, since its intent is to guarantee that only jurists who are activists committed to the doctrines of a partisan ideology rather than universal justice will be appointed. Edmund Burke, in a related case, argued against "instruction" whereby legislators were constrained to proceed only under designated foregone conclusions.)

I know a person who is a dean in the local state higher education system, and is also licensed to practice law in this state. If he were to praise "social justice" as widely understood in the current campus outlook, in writing, he could be in danger of having his law license revoked, since "social justice" lacks the elements of due process.(1) If he were to say, as a practicing legal professional, that "social justice" is, from the standpoint of the legal profession, an oxymoron, the same block of students who prevent speakers with the wrong viewpoint(2) from appearing on campus under the "no platforming" standard would likely hound him from campus (as, below, "a hobgoblin whose career needs to be ended").

Andrew Sullivan describes the illiberal campus intolerance:

And yes, I’m not talking about formal rules — but norms of liberal behavior. One of them is a robust public debate, free from intimidation. Liberals welcome dissent because it’s our surest way to avoid error. Cultural Marxists fear dissent because they believe it can do harm to others’ feelings and help sustain existing identity-based power structures. Yes, this is not about the First Amendment. The government is not preventing anyone from speaking. But it is about the spirit of the First Amendment. One of the reasons I defended Katie Roiphe against a campaign to preemptively suppress an essay of hers (even to the point of attempting to sabotage an entire issue of Harper’s) is because of this spirit. She may be wrong, but that does not make her a hobgoblin whose career needs to be ended. And the impulse to intimidate, vilify, ruin, and abuse a writer for her opinions chills open debate. This is a real-world echo of the campus habit of disrupting speakers, no-platforming conservatives, and shouting people down.

The tragic aspect of this is that it not only erodes the student's sense of justice, but is deeply and thoroughly anti-intellectual. Higher education is not about teaching only the right things, it is about learning how to determine what the right things are. It is not a platform, it is an arena where competing viewpoints are debated and compared. Anything that "chills open debate" is by definition anti-intellectual.

Why are the state's universities and colleges substituting indoctrination for education? Why are they teaching, and that most stridently, principles of intolerance and censorship which the state's own justice system explicitly forbids?

You can be expelled from one set of state institutions for refusing to endorse unconstitutional practices which another set of state institutions consider worthy of legal sanction. "Brethren, these things ought not to be so."


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(1) Commitment to evidence and reason: Democracy (the informed consent of the governed); Justice (rules of evidence); Intellectuality (rejects false premises and invalid syllogisms); Science (testable predictions). Egalitarian and universalist: Lincoln, praising the Declaration's "All men are created equal," called it "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times."

(2) First Amendment jurisprudence explicitly prohibits viewpoint discrimination and prior restraint.

It is time to be clear about the difference between the Democratic Party and the campus left

There’s no overlap.

One is liberal, one is a form of Marxism. And Marxism never cared about equality, about civil rights, about the dignity and privacy of the single person, about the right to the pursuit of happiness.

On NPR a few months ago, Linda Wertheimer responded to a study in which women came off better than men by saying, “Perhaps women are just better people.” Would it have been okay to say, “Perhaps men are just better people?”

We may be used to this sort of implicit sexist, inegalitarian, prejudicial language, but we shouldn’t be.

In “We All Live on Campus Now,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, “In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes.” He identifies these as effects of “neo-Marxism.”

Democrats hold that such implicit race and gender prejudice is morally wrong, since it is about attacking people because of immutable characteristics, race and gender, which they can’t change, rather than harmful attitudes, habits, and social conventions, which they can.

Sullivan adds, “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

And, sure enough, the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege” — is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites.”

The Constitution is a representative Enlightenment document; and the Democratic Party honors “the Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment.” By contrast, the no-platforming of the campus left violates the free speech principle of the First Amendment by engaging in viewpoint censorship of prospective campus speakers, sometimes specifically because they endorse liberal values such as the central intellectual concept that competing ideas should be freely debated in the University.(1)

Finally, campus left politics of identity is about approved identity. As Linda Wertheimer inadvertently revealed, this is inseparable from its counterpart, the unacceptable resurrection of such politics of disapproved identity as sexism. The campus left meets a definition which once appeared in the OED: “Not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, and liberties of others: narrow-minded.”

(1) “Academic freedom is the freedom to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline.” — Mary Lefkowitz

Then and now

All democracy is liberal, all intellectuality is liberal, all science is liberal, and all justice is liberal

Personal reflections on the America I knew in high school (I went to high school during the second Eisenhower administration, college during the first Kennedy administration), contrasted with the America I write about now. This will not be particularly organized or structured: it is exploratory.

It is my impression that the Great Break in American principles occurred about the time I graduated from college in the spring of 1964. That fall the news was full of Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement on the Cal campus at Berkeley. I had missed the revolution.

Roger Ebert: 

The great divide was November 22, 1963, and nothing was ever the same again. The teenagers in “American Graffiti” are, in a sense, like that cartoon character in the magazine ads: the one who gives the name of his insurance company, unaware that an avalanche is about to land on him. ... The music was as innocent as the time. Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later. (Emphasis added)

From the Founding until the counterculture, the methodological, liberal approach of the Declaration and the Constitution had held ideological impulses in check. Ideology is the deformation of thought and language in the service of power, as a result, it feels free to silence expressions of ideas not its own.

The difference was that up through JFK's time the right of people to have diverse opinions was accepted. This had an advantage: the various sides of an argument could be discussed, generally to everyone's benefit.

An acquaintance of mine who works in the state higher education system recently defended "no-platforming," the prevention of speakers who have the wrong opinions from appearing on campus. (I'm reminded of the Stalin era Soviet writer Isaac Babel, who said that he and his comrades had every right except the right to make a mistake.)  Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, spoke of the university [PDF] as the "church of reason," where ideas could be debated. The university was an arena, not a platform. To allow a diversity of ideas to be presented for educational purposes did not arouse the fear of legitimizing wrongthink.

So this is one primary difference between the America of my K-12 years and America now. The earlier America honored a principle which makes ideology uncomfortable: the liberal free speech provision of the First Amendment. And our universities did not need "safe spaces" where one retreats to avoid being traumatized by an opposing viewpoint.

The difference is the difference between liberalism, which is an information methodology that proceeds from foundational values, and constantly advances human knowledge; and ideology, which operates from undiscussable doctrines and dogmas and is afraid of free debate.

The "tribalism"(1) issue of today's media is a symptom. The underlying point is the prevalence of ideology, which turns every conceptual position into an armed camp, and which speaks the language of enmity and battle. This is fatal to democracy, which is based on friendship, cooperation, pluralism,(2) altruism, and constructive thinking.

For example, the watchwords of left ideology are "oppositional," "adversarial," and "subversive." Right ideology is concerned with nationalism, strength, supremacy, and bell curve racial superiority (the post-Nazi euphemism for Herrenrasse).

The ideologies (left and right) are about enmity; liberal information methodology is about friendship. As Amy Walter recently said on PBS, "fight or fix."

Foundational characteristics: Ideologies are characterized by zero-sum-game thinking; liberalism by positive-sum-game, win-win outlook. An acquaintance described zero-sum-game as "when somebody wins, somebody else loses." The leftism of Marx was clear: Everything should go to the proletariat, who by the labor theory of value deserved it, none to the bourgeoisie. The size of the pie is fixed: the point is to get the larger portion. The problem is mostly unnoticed: Under zero-sum-game thinking, there is no reason for generosity, pluralism,(2) or altruism. To be anti-racist makes no sense, for then the other guy wins and you lose.

By contrast, for liberalism a foundational value, such as liberty or freedom of speech, benefits everybody. For example, while freedom of speech allows bad people to get away with verbal abuse and racial slurs, without freedom of speech Martin Luther King would have had no influence on civil rights history. With liberalism you have democratic dispositions, what Washington described as "the public good," and enlightened self interest.

A probable second foundational characteristic of ideological thinking: belief in original sin. Original sin is a negative, destructive, theological notion which has no place in liberal democratic thinking. (The parable of the prodigal son seems to indicate that the founder of Christianity had moved beyond original sin. The son's prodigality is presented as reversible error ("he came to himself"), and the successful outcome is presented as developing without needing the intervention of a Redeemer or an Atonement.)

There is no upside to thinking in terms of original sin. "We are all sinners!" does not point to a solution: it displaces the solution. Original sin creates a hostile, "gotcha" social climate with what literary critic Frederic C. Crews called "the reckless dispensation of guilt." Original sin facilitates targeting and provides spurious justification for imputing bad motives to others.

(1) Andrew Sullivan: nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/09/can-democracy-survive-tribalism.html

(2) The acceptance of Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign by the mainstream is an example of liberal democratic pluralism. The mainstream for years worked against segregationist opposition to make their country more just towards African Americans.Pluralism in this sense is ethically responsible action to benefit those who are different from oneself.

Randall Kennedy's "My Race Problem"

No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. — Randall Kennedy

A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. ... In choosing how to proceed in the face of all that they encounter, blacks should insist, as did Martin Luther King Jr., that acting with moral propriety is itself a glorious goal. — Kennedy

Unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. — Kennedy

I would propose a shoe-on-the-other-foot test for the propriety of racial sentiment. If a sentiment or practice would be judged offensive when voiced or implemented by anyone, it should be viewed as prima facie offensive generally. — Kennedy

In 1997 Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote "My Race Problem: A consideration of touchy matters -- racial pride, racial solidarity, and racial loyalty -- rarely discussed."

"What," he asked, "is the proper role of race in determining how I, an American black, should feel toward others?"

It was a liberal African American's response to a left issue of the time, multiculturalism. Today we would call it the politics of identity.

The politics of identity is the politics of approved identity. Professor Kennedy immediately objects to the proposition that

There is nothing wrong with having a special -- a racial -- affection for other black people. Indeed, many would go further and maintain that something would be wrong with me if I did not sense and express racial pride, racial kinship, racial patriotism, racial loyalty, racial solidarity -- synonyms for that amalgam of belief, intuition, and commitment that manifests itself when blacks treat blacks with more solicitude than they do those who are not black. ... [There is a] notion that blackness gives rise to racial obligation and that black people should have a special, closer, more affectionate relationship with their fellow blacks than with others in America's diverse society.

Professor Kennedy replies, "I reject this response to the question. Neither racial pride nor racial kinship offers guidance that is intellectually, morally, or politically satisfactory. ... the belief that because of racial kinship blacks ought to value blacks more highly than others." Such attempts to counteract discrimination recreate discrimination in another form.

Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School writes, in Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, "Each December, my wife and I host a holiday dessert for the black students at the Yale Law School." He says that he feels a special "solidarity" with them, a racial love for "one's people."

Professor Kennedy:

I contend that in the mind, heart, and soul of a teacher there should be no stratification of students such that a teacher feels closer to certain pupils than to others on grounds of racial kinship. No teacher should view certain students as his racial "brothers and sisters" while viewing others as, well, mere students. Every student should be free of the worry that because of race, he or she will have less opportunity to benefit from what a teacher has to offer.

Randall Kennedy suggests that instead of the left principle of solidarity, which tends to result in a double standard, we should engage in a liberal method: outreach:

The justification for outreach ... is that unlike an appeal to racial kinship, an appeal to an ideal untrammeled by race enables any person or group to be the object of solicitude. No person or group is racially excluded from the possibility of assistance, and no person or group is expected to help only "our own." If a professor reaches out in response to student need, for instance, that means that whereas black students may deserve special solicitude today, Latino students or Asian-American students or white students may deserve it tomorrow.

History, Kennedy argues, is a poor argument for a double standard:

Some will argue that I ignore or minimize the fact that different groups are differently situated and that it is thus justifiable to impose upon blacks and whites different standards for purposes of evaluating conduct, beliefs, and sentiments. ... A brute fact does not dictate the proper human response to it. That is a matter of choice -- constrained, to be sure, but a choice nonetheless. In choosing how to proceed in the face of all that they encounter, blacks should insist, as did Martin Luther King Jr., that acting with moral propriety is itself a glorious goal.

People who have suffered past wrongs, unfortunately, are no more immune than anyone else to the temptation of favoritism toward one's own:

In seeking to attain that goal, blacks should be attuned not only to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses of others but also to the all too human cruelties and weaknesses in themselves. A good place to start is with the recognition that unless inhibited, every person and group will tend toward beliefs and practices that are self-aggrandizing. This is certainly true of those who inherit a dominant status. But it is also true of those who inherit a subordinate status. Surely one of the most striking features of human dynamics is the alacrity with which those who have been oppressed will oppress whomever they can once the opportunity presents itself. Because this is so, it is not premature to worry about the possibility that blacks or other historically subordinated groups will abuse power to the detriment of others.

Another argument against double standards concerning identity is reciprocity: They don't meet the "shoe-on-the-other-foot test":

A second reason I resist arguments in favor of asymmetrical standards of judgment has to do with my sense of the requirements of reciprocity. I find it difficult to accept that it is wrong for whites to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of white advancement but morally permissible for blacks to mobilize themselves on a racial basis solely for purposes of black advancement. I would propose a shoe-on-the-other-foot test for the propriety of racial sentiment. If a sentiment or practice would be judged offensive when voiced or implemented by anyone, it should be viewed as prima facie offensive generally. If we would look askance at a white professor who wrote that on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of whites more than those of blacks, then unless given persuasive reasons to the contrary, we should look askance at a black professor who writes that on grounds of racial kinship he values the opinions of blacks more than those of whites.

Liberalism is the underlying principle of modern civilization. It has nothing to do with the outlook of the left.

Because Enlightenment liberalism is universalist, egalitarian, committed to the dignity and rights of the single person, committed to evidence and reason where they apply, and characterized by a passionate desire for optimum outcomes, all democracy is inherently liberal, all justice is liberal, all genuine intellectuality is liberal, and all science is liberal.(1) As argued in The Liberal Founding, what is sometimes called the American idea is liberal.

One guide, in a milieu where media often treat "liberal" and "left" as more or less synonymous, is that liberalism has no Marxism in it. No collectivism with its "moral ties antecedent to choice";(2) win-win thinking instead of zero-sum-game thinking; cooperation, friendship, altruism, and meliorism rather than "adversarial," "oppositional," and "subversive." Liberalism rejects Marxism's romantic, anarchic, faux-heroic, anti-institutional, visionary narcissistic ruler whose self-affirmation is ultimately autocratic.

Stephen Holmes, in The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, distinguishes nonmarxist antiliberalism from Marxist antiliberalism:

Marxists are no less secular than liberals (they would eradicate religion, while liberals would depoliticize it). Nonmarxist antiliberals see secularism as a moral disaster. Like liberals, Marxists view ethnic identity and national solidarity as particularistic atavisms (they would eradicate ethnicity while liberals would demilitarize it). Nonmarxist antiliberals, by contrast, see the cutting of ethnic roots as an unparalleled human catastrophe. ... Marxists extol science, technology, and economic development, for example. Nonmarxist antiliberals interpret the authority of science and the spread of materialistic attitudes as two of liberalism's most abhorrent sins. ... Antiliberals in my sense assert with one voice that Marxism and liberalism, while superficially opposed, share a common ancestry and are secretly allied. They are two offshoots of a single and spiritually hollow Enlightenment tradition. (pp. 1-2)

An important difference in how the term "left" is used today is that the campus left, and opinion writers under their influence, such as the recently highly popular Ta-Nehisi Coates, are, as Andrew Sullivan recently described them, "neo-Marxist."(3)

Elected Democrats, with some exceptions, are closet liberals. As would be expected in a nation with an Enlightenment liberal founding, they honor such liberal principles as reason and universalism ("let facts be submitted to a candid world," says the Declaration); The Rights of Man (see Bill of Rights in the Constitution) and optimum outcomes ("We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty ..."). "Closet liberals" because in the current media climate we do not have a politician who can discuss liberalism as liberalism effectively with the American public.

Both Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, and I. F. Stone's The Trial of Socrates are about liberalism, but seldom use the term. By contrast, Fritz Stern's Five Germanys I Have Known, and The Failure of Illiberalism, address applied liberalism directly. All are recommended, the last three highly so.

This cultural inability to have a meaningful discussion of liberalism in our politics may be a substantial reason for the calamitous dysfunction in which the Republic finds itself at the current moment.



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(1) Commitment to evidence and reason: Democracy (the informed consent of the governed); Justice (rules of evidence); Intellectuality (rejects false premises and invalid syllogisms); Science (testable predictions). Egalitarian and universalist: Lincoln, praising the Declaration's "All men are created equal," called it "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times"

(2) De Tocqueville, surveying the young American nation, found "voluntary associations"

(3) Andrew Sullivan: We All Live On Campus Now: "Over the last year, the most common rebuttal to my intermittent coverage of campus culture has been: Why does it matter? These are students, after all. They’ll grow up once they leave their cloistered, neo-Marxist safe spaces. The real world isn’t like that. You’re exaggerating anyway. And so on. I certainly see the point. In the world beyond campus, few people use the term microaggressions without irony or an eye roll; claims of “white supremacy,” “rape culture,” or “white privilege” can seem like mere rhetorical flourishes; racial and gender segregation hasn’t been perpetuated in the workplace yet ..."

The "president" as Romantic hero: Anarchic optimistic will to power, unending series of self-affirmations, fighting against insuperable odds

"Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders … 'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues … Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump."

Writing during the presidency of George W. Bush, Ethan Fishman recalled  Richard Hofstadter's article on “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt.” It was "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." "A politics," Fishman continued, "that emphasized unarticulated psychological impulses over reasonable analysis—a politics of the gut, in other words, rather than of the mind." Pseudo-Conservatives were "those who discount reason to practice a politics of largely inchoate sentiments."
Fishman added:

Pseudo-conservatives are suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rely on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions.

Fishman saw a resemblance between today's pseudo-conservatives and the ideologues of the French Revolution:

In the context of Iraqi history, therefore, the administration’s vision of a democratic Iraq is reminiscent of the mistakes made by the French revolutionaries. Both acted as if dreams can easily be translated into political reality. Both upheld the ideal of freedom, but neither was able to adapt that ideal to the specific circumstances they encountered. Both were unable to appreciate the staggering costs in human lives and property that are unavoidable when radical change is pursued over a very short period of time.

Donald Trump's politics are those of W. taken to an extreme. He is "'more than ordinarily incoherent' about political issues." In a recent article:

Trump, in his recent interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times, showed that he does not comprehend the system of global alliances the United States has developed, does not understand international trade, is unaware of the importance of the military bases the US has around the world, and is ignorant of nuclear protocols.

The pseudo-conservative as the person who is "suspicious of reasonable analysis and often rel[ies] on knee-jerk reactions to reach policy decisions" is exemplified in another recent article:
"Trump, with his daring, will save us from our unresponsive elected leaders."

Pseudo-conservatism is thus a form of romanticism. "Romanticism," as Professor Ian Johnston argued [PDF]:

celebrated, above all, the figure of the heroic visionary artist, struggling over time against a hostile or uncaring world, never giving up until death, living life as an unending series of self-affirmations, moments of collision in which the power of the individual's mind and his or her faith in the imagination, imposed a sense of order and gave value to his or her life against insuperable odds.

Such heroic vitalism, characteristic of Central European thought in the first half of the last century, contributed to the aura of such authoritarian figures as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, as it now constitutes part of the charisma of Donald Trump. Such icons, symptomatically, are believed to represent "the power of the will."

The attractiveness of such willful political figures as Trump to youth is part of the pattern. The glamor of the romantic, larger-than-life authoritarian politician has an appeal, Johnston continues, to an anarchic youthful spirit:

At this level the Romantic spirit is a relatively uncomplicated celebration of the anarchic, optimistic, youthful spirit of sheer potentiality, an unfocussed affirmation of energy, motion, and good feelings. And if this were all there was to the Romantic ethic, it would never be much more than a pleasant but ultimately rather adolescent yearning for a spirit of total freedom (a good deal of popular Romanticism is little more than that).

"What happens," Johnston asks, "to this youthful creative spirit when it encounters the real world?" As we noted in Trump Reveals What's Wrong with Conservatism, it could "result in the selection of a dissimulating, bigoted, immature, bully":

In Trump, Republican voters have found their anti-Obama. Trump spurns not just political correctness, but correctness of any kind. He lies about Muslims and 9/11, insults women and people with disabilities, accuses a judge of bias for being Hispanic, and hurls profanities. ... Republicans are [at risk of] nominating a child.

Writing during the previous Republican administration, Fishman accurately predicted:

Just as McCarthyism was followed by the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” the Reagan presidency, and the current administration, it is inevitable that another version of pseudo-conservatism will appear on the American political scene.

The current state of the Republican party is a catastrophe decades in the making. Since at least the Goldwater era, Republicans have leveraged cheap, doctrinaire, simplistic politics to distort the deliberative character of American democracy. They sowed the wind, and now reap the whirlwind.

The battle-cry, “social justice,” is an oxymoron

“There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.” — John Stuart Mill, opposing the extrajudicial determination of guilt; and extrajudicial punishment

Andrew Sullivan: “Social-justice ideology does everything a religion should. It offers an account of the whole: that human life and society and any kind of truth must be seen entirely as a function of social power structures, in which various groups have spent all of human existence oppressing other groups. And it provides a set of practices to resist and reverse this interlocking web of oppression — from regulating the workplace and policing the classroom to checking your own sin and even seeking to control language itself.”

“Social justice,” from the Roman lawyer Cicero’s appeal to “right reason” to the present, has lacked the fundamentals of actual justice:

1. Presumption of innocence
2. Notification
3. Rules of evidence
4. The right to confront witnesses  
5. The right of appeal 
6. Most important, constraint by the existing body of law
   

In short, due process.

If the judgment of “the community,” the collective, the mob, anyone who wants to gang up on someone who is different, was sufficient, the justice system would not be needed. “The madness of crowds” determines your fate.

In On Liberty, about page 3, the author questions the valorization of “social” implied by such terms as “social justice.”

“Society can and does execute its own mandates,” wrote Mill, “and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

Mill continued, “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.”