In a system that disproportionately harms poor people and people of color, too many Americans have lost faith in the essential American principle of equal justice under law.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity, the Christian love that it would take.
You know what Americans are really sensitive to? Issues of fairness. I think this is a modern phenomenon, born of the civil rights movement. Once you convince Americans that something is basically unfair, you've got a winning cause.
That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.
Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector's work subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.
America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
If the law doesn't apply equally to everybody, then you don't really have a system of law.
I've always been driven by the concept of equal justice under the law, but only the rich can pay great sums of money for legal assistance and that puts them at an advantage over the poor.
We're constantly told that all cultures are equal, and that every belief system is as good as the next. And it led to a kind of - and generally, that America was to be known for its flaws rather than its virtues.
Many countries struggle and never get to the point where people have faith that laws are executed fairly.
The magic of the American experience is that we've upheld the rule of law for everybody, everybody treated equally beneath the law.