“The Left maintains a monopoly on one term of special political significance: “social justice.” Since the George Floyd riots, talk of social justice has formed the superstructure of American and global political deliberation. It’s a very powerful idea, and conservatives’ avoidance of the term ... has worked to our opponents’ great advantage.

As a professor at a public university, nary a faculty meeting since 2020 has passed without some reference to social justice. For a while, I asked my colleagues to define the term. I wanted to have a discussion. I wanted to show them that their definition was debatable — that there is legitimate and substantial disagreement about the characteristics of a just society. But not a single member of the faculty indulged me. It took some time for me to understand why.

The reason is that they intentionally use the phrase as a political cudgel: in the mouth of the Left, social justice means nothing more or less than the full implementation of the Democrats’ radical, ever-evolving agenda. They’ve replaced the ancient philosophical question of defining the just society with a moral absolutism that implicitly and falsely posits a broad agreement on the answer. This is a technique to forestall any meaningful debate. By appealing to a consensus that doesn’t exist, they dare their interlocutors to take issue with their presumption. When someone does, they get to smear their opponents as enemies of justice itself.”

https://tomklingenstein.com/reclaim-social-justice-for-the-right/
.