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Wang Huning, the court philosopher of the CCP, diagnosed the fundamental American contradiction in "America against America":
Americans believe they are free and equal, but free men will not be equal, and equal men are not free.
This caused less problems in the past, when America had a shared culture - the draft, Christianity, nuclear families, the three TV channels, etc. We could be equal because we were only pretending to be free, and so much of life was actually constrained.
Today, everyone gets to choose their life path, and divergent paths yield divergent results. There are those (broadly on the left) who would sacrifice freedom for equality, and those (broadly on the right) who would sacrifice equality for freedom. Most of the culture war comes from people not realizing that you can't have both. The left thinks the right hates equality, the right thinks the left hates freedom.
I'm not quite so inclined to let my enemies redefine my values for me. When I say that Americans should be free and equal, I do not mean to say that we need some Harrison Bergeron weights to make sure that no one can run too fast, but to say that we should all receive equal treatment before the law and be treated with some measure of égalité by our peers. I expect that the result of this will be rather unequal outcomes, I am not surprised or affronted by that outcome and I do not see any conflict of values in striving for equal justice while having unequal abilities, desires, and luck.
Problem is, it's too tough a bullet to bite that people who make bad choices get bad outcomes. There's always going to be a drumbeat to save them from their choices, both from the right (ban those choices) and from the left (take from the people who made better choices to help those who made bad ones). The first goes against freedom, the second for equality, and the argument that the wealthy can afford to support the self-destructive in their freedom without limit will never sound as mean as biting that bullet.
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But crucially, and assuming you're a Liberal, you have no possible convincing argument to someone who would propose such a thing , or going in the direction of such a thing.
We all saw what happened to Affirmative Action and other various spoils policy the US has seen fit to implement. Equality of opportunity has always and will always just be a canard. So long as we don't live in a totalitarian state where children are taken from their parents, educated the same and cloned with the same genetics, no such thing is possible, and therefore any push in that direction (such as taxing inheritance harshly or enacting redistributive policies) cannot be successfully opposed by Liberals in principle.
Rawls always comes in to use the underlying philosophy to justify unsustainable expansions beyond political liberalism.
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