The Justice Myth: How Our Criminal Justice System and its Representation in the Media Fosters a False Sense of Progress

I think the use of "we" in this conclusion is valuable in helping to answer one basic question about any essay: to whom is it written? Here the audience throughout is clearly this "we." At one level, we could be everybody, but we are most likely to be the people who agree with you already. This, then, is writing meaning to be addressed primarily to those who are already bucking the received wisdom, for whom your analysis of the social situation is already largely agreed to.

I am one of those people to whom the essay is therefore intended. In general I agree with its analysis. Equality is undoubtedly a radical concept. We claim to be committed to it, but its radicalism—its disturbing recognition that we are neither raising those who are in subjection nor bringing down those who have inherited immense ill-gotten gains—implies that existing structures of power will never fully accept it. Making men and women and everyone in between completely equal: politically, socially, legally is among the forms of equality that we are therefore never actually honoring, though in order to stop wishing we were we would have to abandon mythologies of justice and societal commitment that we need in order to remain socially functional.

So the result is dissociative activity, repression of cognitive dissonance, mental process at the individual and social levels. Your basic argument is to force that dissociation into consciousness. By making no longer automatic our mental divisions, this sorting of the real and the allowable real into different buckets, we can no longer keep believing—personally and collectively—that we are for equality while not having to notice that we aren't. We have to think about what we believe and why we don't actually do what we think we want to do.

That forcing into consciousness could be called, for want of a better term, "law school." But the "we" of law school are not only the "we" you are addressing here. You aren't forcing into consciousness the condition of those who are not already conscious. The problem presented in politics, Arnold would say, is that the people who are already conscious of the chasm between real and allowable real are not the only people who need to be brought along.

This is why a draft that addresses not the "we" of the present draft but the "we" of law school—people not necessarily willing to be "forced" even by therapy into consciousness, but also our absolute equals in the civil struggles that must for the reasons you give be always going on—might be valuable for you. As political advocacy directed to the energizing and focusing of your own "party," the present draft could hardly be bettered. Is there a way to make it as effective in addressing the slightly broader range of readers law school, or at least this fragment of it, contains?