[wakawaka28]

I think "liberty and justice for all" is actually the norm in the US, at least within fairly ordinary bounds. We can only have liberty up to a point being under a government. A human living in the wilderness, in anarchy, would also have liberty limited by other humans.

You can say "oof" to "under God" but most of the founders believed in the divine and cited it as a reason for granting "god-given" rights to the people. I am an atheist and I kinda don't like the religious aspect of the pledge, but I'm not so upset about it either. Most people believe in a deity, even in 2026, and on the whole I've been treated better by those people than by fellow atheists. Regardless of whether God exists, Christian moral standards are mostly beneficial and too often abandoned when people give up religion. It represents hard-won cultural knowledge and survival strategies for civilization.

[UncleMeat]

"Justice for all" is demystified by spending any amount of time looking at the criminal justice system, which regularly abuses people in about a thousand different ways. The fact that the courts depend on the bulk of defendants taking plea deals to function at all is sick.