TRUMP

254 ANATOMY OF A MONSTROSITY
such lives. This principle can be consistently applied across scenarios.
Why do we want nuclear arms control? Because if someone’s city gets
blown up and their children die, their life is less fulfilling. Why do
we want to reform the criminal justice system? Because it destroys
lives, too. Why do we want maternity leave and adequate child care?
Because motherhood should be a rewarding and fulfilling and joyful
experience, not a struggle for subsistence. Simple universal principles
can therefore create a compelling moral framework for left-wing political
positions. They do not involve fancy “dialectics” or social theory.
All we need to do is reflect on what it means to have a good life, and
those economic and social factors that stand in the way of people
having good lives. 746
Of course, there are plenty of disagreements over what constitutes
the social good. It’s worth having serious debates over the nature of
our values, of interrogating them ruthlessly and seeing whether they
are consistent and make sense. But the progressive left can nevertheless
hopefully reach some consensus sets of goals, e.g. preventing the
environment from falling apart, preventing nuclear war from obliterating
humankind, trying to dismantle the prison system without
causing new unintended harms, making it so that people don’t have to
toil and suffer, making people healthy, happy sociable, and free, and
keeping people from being discriminated against, mistreated, bullied,
harassed, raped, and murdered. 747
u u u u
The left has not done a very good job of communicating its
ideas to people. Perhaps that’s because, at heart, we don’t know our
own ideas very well. In the 19 th century, utopian socialists like William
Morris and Edward Bellamy wrote elaborate fictional visions of
what ideal future societies would look like. 748 Today, we know the
future society we are fighting for largely in terms of what it is not (it is