You'd judge a 1000+ word essay by just two words early on? Perhaps that is exactly the point the author is trying to make about the state of things these days...

I'm not familiar with the term "social contract", but maybe you could enlighten me? I found it was an interesting way of describing quirks about our world that aren't readily describable.

I found it a bit ironic that in your comment you use the term "SJW", which literally has no function or meaning except as a dog whistle. The only way you could turn the idea of "someone who fights for justice" into a curse word is through the syntactic trickery of initialism, a diminution which lets speakers use their shared scorn as a shibboleth. It's the textual equivalent of repeating what someone else said in a "baby voice", in order to make fun of them.

Apropos of the article, I have been living in China for fifteen years (left the US a few weeks before 9-11), and am preparing to move back in a month. Everyone tells me I'll have reverse culture shock, and I guess I believe them, but I don't really know what to prepare for. Apparently I'll have to prepare for more people talking in baby voices.

lwhalen, social contract, like the word liberal, has two meanings.

Originally it was an idea of Edmund Burke, the Irishman who explained much of Conservative thinking in the book Reflections on the French Revolution. It meant the 'deal' between the generations.

An example of a positive intergenerational deal is the old quote I'll paraphrase/butcher here about 'A civilization is one in which people plant acorns which will one day provide shade for their grandchildren'.

Of course the Social Contract can be broken too. I would say the Bolsheviks and the French Revolutionaries (despite their long propaganda campaigns) broke the contract, leaving their grandchildren in a worse position than in a counterfactual history where their thought pattern did not fruit into horrific memeplexes devoid of natural adaption, totally contingent on holding up order with brute force.

The second meaning of the social contract is the Liberal version which is broadly the social democracy 'deal', originally from Roseau (I think), which also centers around mutual benefit, but I think more across space rather than time as with Burke.

If it is a positive deal, then money departs the pockets of those who don't strictly speaking require it to survive and the unfortunates of the world get propelled into better patterns of behaviour that ultimately generate a society than is holistically the better off because of it. So we get progressive taxation.

Just as with the first deal, there is the inversion of it also. So it could morph into a giant fraud where the already rich or well positioned in society exhort fiscal transfers from people who ought in fact to be receiving the very payments they are paying in tax.

So whether the phrase is a dog whistle depends on the intentions of the author, or (this is often my suspicion) whether they thought they understood the words 'social' and 'contract' and so why not the conjunction. The West is filled with literate people who don't read but who aquaplane their way through life until they hit the hard shoulder.