Inequality As a Left-Wing Principle

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note: The group quota regime operates on an understanding of justice that is alien to the American political tradition. This is what makes the present political conflict a cold civil war: two competing conceptions of justice cannot coexist in a single nation. The woke idea of justice, the foundation of the group quota regime, is a false doctrine of equality that seeks to graft itself onto the American political tradition of true equality.

If we are to head off that revolution before it is complete, we must reorient ourselves toward the principles of the Founding. And we must re-familiarize ourselves with Abraham Lincoln, who successfully defended them in this nation’s first civil war. A series of essays exchanged between Harry V. Jaffa and M.E. Bradford half a century ago, republished here with a new introduction by Glenn Ellmers, provides a fine place to start.

“Equality” is in bad odor on the Right these days. This is hardly new. Traditionalists have always had suspicions about America’s theoretical foundation in equal natural rights; although the feeling has become more widespread in recent years as the cancer of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion seeps into every organ of American society. The reigning ideology of the ruling class contends that we are born unequal — either victims or oppressors — and it is the duty of our scientifically trained experts to correct this injustice by making us all equal. 

The noxious agenda of equal outcomes leads to a suffocating project of social engineering: ethnic and gender parity, biological males in women’s sports, and the repudiation of merit (or even effort) as “systemic racism.” All decent Americans should oppose these tyrannical policies. But what is the appropriate response? 

The solution, according to some on the Right, is to reject the delusion of equality by embracing the opposite principle of inequality. We are all different, after all, and it’s our differences that distinguish and elevate us as unique, free individuals. A healthy society should therefore recognize and celebrate…diversity? 

Maybe things are a bit more complicated than they first appear.

Consider America’s two-tiered justice system, which is now more or less the official policy of the ruling class. Hunter Biden is effectively above the law, while Daniel Penny (the ex-Marine who defended fellow subway passengers from a deranged habitual criminal in New York City) is relentlessly prosecuted. The violence and mayhem of the BLM rioters gets a free pass, while the J6 prisoners endure indefinite pre-trial detention, in clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution. Is this a problem of equality or inequality? 

Dividing Americans into favored and disfavored classes, with different standards of conduct, seems more like a return to feudalism’s division of lords and serfs. And of course it was precisely this artificial aristocracy of hereditary privilege that the American founders rejected when they established the United States on the basis of equal, natural rights. One of the most important provisions of the founders’ Constitution was the guarantee of due process to all individuals, regardless of social status, family connections, or party affiliation. Yet how can we demand that the government uphold the equal protection of the laws if we insist that inequality is the central principle of political justice? 

The problem, of course, is that these words can and do have different meanings. Things can be equal in some ways, and unequal in other ways. Ours is not the first generation to be confounded by these difficulties. It is easy to forget, amidst all of today’s DEI fanaticism, that confusion about these terms is almost as old as the republic itself. Intense and sometimes violent disputes about the meaning of America’s fundamental principles — especially equality — have animated our politics since the very beginning. 

That brings us to the three essays reprinted here. 

Although their context requires some explanation, the arguments — because they bear on the most fundamental questions in political life — have a remarkable contemporary relevance. The first essay, Harry Jaffa’s “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” was presented exactly 50 years ago at an academic conference, and then published the following year in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. Jaffa was responding to the paleoconservative or traditionalist critique of equality made in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey, published in 1970. Jaffa’s essay occasioned a response from Kendall’s student, University of Dallas professor Melvin E. Bradford, which appeared in the Winter 1976 issue of Modern Age, followed by a rebuttal by Jaffa in the following issue. (It is worth mentioning that despite the vigor of their intellectual disagreements, Jaffa maintained cordial friendships with both Kendall and Bradford.)

Both of Jaffa’s essays were reprinted in his 1978 book How to Think About the American Revolution, where he remarks on “the intellectual sterility and political irrelevance of much of so-called present-day American Conservatism,” which reveals “its underlying agreement with the Liberalism it purports to attack.” Conservatism’s bankruptcy, he argues, arose from its perplexity about what it wanted to conserve. Above all, it did not understand the principles of the American founding — the noblest elements of our political tradition. The problem, in Jaffa’s view, was that conservatism had accepted liberalism’s misrepresentation of the founders’ ideas. Mainstream conservatism’s underlying agreement with liberalism’s distorted understanding of equality (along with rights, liberty, etc.) was the source of its sterility and irrelevance. 

So far from being oblivious to how equality had become a force for political mischief and bureaucratic tyranny, Jaffa was only too aware that the Declaration’s ringing phrases had been co-opted by the modern progressive project. But Jaffa, unlike Kendall and Bradford, was not prepared to concede to the Left’s revisionism. Never one to shy away from a fight, Jaffa thought any conservatism worth its name must defend by tooth and nail the correct, original meaning of equality. But this meant, first of all, understanding it; and especially understanding that equality was an indispensable element of the framers’ social compact theory. 

As these essays show, one can no more remove equality from Jefferson’s and Madison’s conception of legitimate government than one can remove the drive shaft from a car engine and still expect it to function. Consider, in particular, the key principle of consent. Most people on the Right immediately grasp the importance of consent as an essential component of just government. Yet Jaffa shows in these essays that “the people’s right to give their consent is itself derived from the equality of all men.” The fact that no man may rule another as God rules over man, or as man rules over the animals, derives—and can only derive—from the fact that all human beings are equally members of the same species, below the angels and above the beasts.

In explaining how the founders’ conception of political equality, or equality of natural rights, was virtually the opposite of today’s “equity,” Jaffa notes that the founders’ classical liberalism 

saw life as a race, in which justice demanded for everyone only a fair or equal chance in the competition. [This view] preserved the inequality of the Few over against the Many. It demanded the removal of artificial or merely conventional inequalities. But it recognized and demanded the fullest scope for natural inequalities. 

Whereas many paleoconservatives want to separate the Declaration from the Constitution, Jaffa saw them as entirely consistent. Madison’s statement in Federalist 10 that “the first object of government” is protecting “the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” is therefore nothing but a variation on what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration. 

Jaffa did not live to see the emergence of “equity” as a goal of social engineering, but he would not have been surprised. Today’s traditionalists and paleoconservatives ought to pay more attention to this change in language, which seems to show that Jaffa was right all along. Equity is nothing but an arbitrary standard for what self-appointed experts determine to be fair. This shift reveals that the real goal is, and has always been, the inequality of a ruling class, or vanguard, tyrannizing over favored and disfavored classes, which they uplift or degrade according to their own self-interested agenda. Jaffa saw this clearly a half century ago, during the height of the Cold War, when he pointed to the ideology of “the totalitarian slave states.” Today, a variation on that ideology has taken root here in the United States. Both rest “upon theoretical propositions in which race or class differences delude some men to consider themselves as superhuman.” 

And does not this delusion lie at the root of their bestiality?  Is it not this that makes them think that, for the sake of the classless society, or the thousand year Reich, everything is permitted to them?

The solution is, and can only be, to recover the entirety of the founders’ teaching about just government — a comprehensive and coherent philosophy in which each element, particularly equality, has its necessary and proper place. 

All of these points — both the arguments and counterarguments — are developed in fascinating detail in these spirited essays, which we invite you to read in their entirety.