The Tyranny of Equality

Let me begin my response to Glenn Ellmers’s thoughtful rejoinder to my comments by stating my agreement with his initial point: Much too much fragging has occurred on the intellectual right. Paleoconservatives have certainly contributed to this deplorable practice, but they have been following a pattern of behavior modeled by the conservative establishment since the 1950s. Paleoconservatives have taken over, albeit in an ineffective way, the gatekeeping habits of those who expelled them from the conservative fold decades ago. Victims of intolerance, unfortunately, often act like those who persecuted them.

If I understand Ellmers’s argument, he is stressing the difference between, on the one side, Harry Jaffa’s understanding of Nature and his accompanying defense of equality and, on the other, the “lawlessness” and “two-tiered justice system” that arises from the Left’s instrumentalization of equal rights. According to Ellmers, “no major American politician prior to the second half of the 20^th century ever believed that equal rights, or equality before the law, required government intervention to overcome ‘social hindrances.’”

John Marini, whom both Ellmers and I know and respect, offers in a well-researched book a refutation of Ellmers’s contention about the newness of the American government’s egalitarian fixation. According to Marini, the stifling administrative state under which we now live, has deep roots in the Progressive Era. Political reformers and reform-minded politicians from the early 20^th century on were committed to removing barriers to their conception of democratic life. Herbert Croly’s widely read and widely quoted The Promise of American Life (1909) and the tracts of John Dewey already outline at the beginning of the last century an extensive program for having the administrative state micromanage our egalitarian future. Governmental social planning has a venerable genealogy in this country.

Where Ellmers and I obviously part ways is in my critical view of the very ideal of equality. I think it is an inherently dangerous ideal that inevitably leads toward the total state and the dismantling of intermediate institutions (as it is doing right now throughout the Western world) unless it is strenuously circumscribed (which it no longer is). 

The policy of government imposing only measured amounts of equality has failed miserably. If, as Ellmers correctly observes, our government is now a tyranny waging war against its own citizens, I see no reason to be surprised. As wise men going back to Plato understood, attempts to implement democratic equality can have dire consequences; and we may not see even now, how dire those results can be. 

Pace Ellmers, I am not sure we can enforce equality of opportunity, certainly not as an administratively supervised policy, without having to endure grotesque attempts at “leveling the playing field.” Mind you, we are not speaking here about the merits of “careers open to talent,” which was a principle that Napoleon and other European rulers pursued mostly for pragmatic reasons. We are talking here about “equality of opportunity” as an ideal overseen by a modern state bureaucracy. If equality by itself is a dangerous intoxicant, once it becomes the announced goal of the administrative state and is pushed by our “fake media,” it becomes pure poison. “Equity” is now the label worn by the poison bottle. 

Ellmers may well rejoin that we are not addressing here the proper concept of equality, one rooted in Nature, guaranteeing certain universal rights, and requiring a democratic polity. It is this concept of equal rights that I should be looking at, instead of confusing it with today’s pseudo-democratic tyranny. But I may see more of a connection between the two situations than he does. It took but a few generations to move from a more limited to a less limited application of the egalitarian principle in the United States and elsewhere in the West. Historically speaking, the distance has not been very great. 

It has also proven futile to try to halt the march toward erasing inequality by citing prudential or other practical considerations. Those who warned about making the franchise too widely available have been predictably attacked as reactionaries or worse. But let’s imagine how much less radical and controlling our political system would be if the franchise were restricted to, say, male property-holders voting at supervised polling booths on election day. Of course, we are well beyond the point where our organized perpetual battle against inequality would allow us to go back to a less “democratic” time. Even speculating about alternatives to the system we now have (or are moving toward) is enough to cause the speculator to be identified as irredeemably evil.  

All the same, we would not be “fighting” what Ellmers calls “resurgent feudalism” if the franchise had been as zealously protected here as it was until recently in the Swiss Republic — or as it was in the America of our forefathers. Equality as the highest principle does exact a price. Any deviation from it in the name of maintaining social and political stability has come to be regarded as immoral. Equality may not be like other political principles, e.g., freedom or deference to traditional authorities, which allow themselves to be measured and mixed. It is rather like Kudzu, a luxuriant plant that smothers anything it touches.        

Let me also make clear that, like Ellmers, I believe that all human beings have worth as creatures of God. I can also accept some notion of metaphysical equality that flows from our inherent spiritual dignity. But such beliefs do not oblige me to accept inborn political rights attached to each individual across the globe. Nor does the acceptance of metaphysical equality require me to believe that only democratic polities founded on the notion of universal equality can be morally acceptable (which I think is the implication of Professor Jaffa’s political philosophy). 

Ellmers seems a bit unsettled (or, perhaps, amused) by my references to “organic” societies held together by “tradition” and “convention.” Quite predictably, he reminds us that this is not the model that the United States was meant to follow. In fact, it was the model, as Barry Shain shows in The Myth of American Individualism, that American communities followed at the time of America’s founding and even afterward. Life in early American society was hierarchical and often built around some non-established but still very powerful public confession. This remained the pattern for generations in many American towns and villages, where it is doubtful the inhabitants devoted much attention to natural right.

Nor was life in the Old World quite as immutably feudal or seignorial as Ellmers suggests. By the time our republic arrived on the world stage, the politics of much of Western and Central Europe was already characterized by constitutional monarchies and the growing influence of the merchant and banking classes. Although the United States, particularly the industrialized North, was economically more dynamic than most of Europe in the middle of the 19^th century, Ellmers’s picture of the Old World as trapped in static custom is a bit overdone. The days of divine right monarchy and frozen caste systems to which he refers were ending in much of Europe by the end of the 18^th century. Further, that description may have been a rhetorical exaggeration in England, Holland, and elsewhere in Europe even earlier, when monarchs still exercised considerable powers.

I would also question Ellmers’s view of the present age as a return to some past state of political oppression. Our present dispensation is not a going back to the past; it is an unprecedented opportunity for totalitarian control in an order that falsely describes itself as the “free world.” Today’s ruling class is not a collection of feudal lords and vassals except in a very loose sense. They belong to and command in an age in which modern technology, political organization, and the battering of intermediate institutions allows the kind of terrifying, overarching control that George Orwell only hinted at in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

What is both diabolical and brilliant about this arrangement is that the population votes to be enslaved. Please note that almost all the leftist parties that locked down entire countries and wrought havoc on their economies in a hyped-up health scare were rewarded by being reelected. White citizens, who have been demonized by their government, will in many cases continue to vote for their defamers, even while their borders are being overrun and crime rages in their cities. 

Many onetime citizens now accept Newspeak and even try to incorporate it into their lives. I doubt that anything like this mental self-enslavement existed in the Western world a hundred years ago; in less centralized societies with lower levels of technology, it may be far less likely to occur even now. We are experiencing a peculiar type of tyranny, in which the ruling class entirely determines the reality of its subjects. That said, it may be superfluous to point this out to Glenn Ellmers. He is at least as aware as I am of those problems our society faces; and he has written about them just as passionately.