Inequality As a Right-Wing Principle

Editor's Note

The fundamental division in our cold civil war is over the sense of justice adopted by each side. More precisely, it is over equality: what the word means, and whether it is the proper end of politics. Glenn Ellmers recently penned a new introduction to two classic essays by Harry Jaffa on the subject, in dialogue with the paleoconservative scholar M.E. Bradford. Ellmers (and Jaffa) argues that the equality of all men proclaimed in the Declaration, and championed in practice by Lincoln, is essential to the tradition an American Right ought to conserve — and that this particular aspect of our tradition is the antidote to the false doctrine of equality that drives the group quota regime.

Carrying on the lively tradition of Jaffa and Bradford, Paul Gottfried, the editor of Chronicles, responds here to Ellmers with the argument that the political equality of citizens must not be construed as a universal proposition, and that conservatism is more properly interested in the “natural state” of society: traditional, hierarchical, and bounded, if imperfect.

Glenn Ellmers has written an eloquent defense of Harry Jaffa in which he tells us that the hallmark of the contemporary Left is not the drive for equality, but inequality. Ellmers does this by way of introducing two memorable essays by his teacher and a response by M.E. Bradford which remain relevant for our age. Jaffa, we are told, was on the mark when he presented the natural right passages in the Declaration, with their affirmation of natural human equality, as fundamental to an American conservative tradition. Unlike earlier exponents of American conservatism, especially the now all but forgotten paleoconservatives, Jaffa insisted that American conservatives should be celebrating equality as their tradition.

The fact that those who held his views are now the only ones effectively fighting DEI and other leftist spoils divisions supposedly proves that Ellmers’ teacher understood the nature of our ideological divisions. It is those who defend the Declaration and Lincoln’s vision of America, not a conservatism that has become archaic, who are fighting for the true American tradition. Ellmers suggests that alternative formulations of American conservatism have ceased to matter, which, although it pains me to say so, may in fact be true.

As the defender of what seems to me a truer Right, let me begin by conceding some ground to Professor Ellmers. Whatever we may call his preferred regime, I’d be delighted to go back to a pre-DEI, pre-woke America. I’m sure that Harry Jaffa, M.E. Bradford, and many who took different sides in past debates about natural rights (like Michael Anton and me), would see eye-to-eye in preferring to live in a pre-woke America over the one that is now being inflicted on us. Like Jaffa and his disciples, I also believe that traditionalist conservatives have gone too far in trying to make American conservatism, as they understand that term, fit a European counterrevolutionary model. Although one finds overlaps between European and American conservative thinking, the U.S. has had much less of a classical conservative tradition than did the Old World, although in both continents whatever conservative traditions once existed are being replaced by a uniformly oppressive woke Left. 

Let me finally concede that there have been paleoconservatives who have tried too hard to explain away natural right language in the Declaration and in early American state constitutions. I have never (to my knowledge) made that mistake, although I have noted that Jaffa’s disciples have exaggerated the dominance of natural right concepts in early America. They have typically minimized other influences on the American founding that seem at least as significant, e.g., biblical Christianity and English common law. 

Most credible American historians whom I have studied, like Bernard Bailyn and Forrest McDonald, present natural right as one among other influences that shaped early American political thought. Pauline Maier in American Scripture and Gordon Wood in Creation of the American Republic have extensive discussions of the ambiguous use of the idea of “equality” before and during the American Revolution. These historians don’t attribute to either natural right or democratic equality the unequivocal meaning that the students of Harry Jaffa do. They also emphasize how the historical experience of self-government going back more than a century molded perhaps more than anything else the building of an American nation state.

Finally, without imposing my own conceptual procrustean bed, I would submit that it is the Left, not the Right, that has been historically enraptured by the ideals of equality and universality. Pointing this out is not, as my critics insist, evidence of my authoritarian inclinations but an attempt to understand what divides the two political poles.

The historic Right starts with a vision of an organic, hierarchical society that was imagined having flourished until it was overtaken by a devastating crisis. The French Revolution and its effects provided such a crisis, according to late eighteenth and early nineteenth century conservative thinkers. As Karl Mannheim has argued in his seminal study of conservative thought, the traditional society exalted by European conservatives and their American counterparts was viewed as “the natural state” of human society. It was not seen as a remediable mistake that reformers or revolutionaries were obliged to fix.   

This “natural state” then gave way to upheavals against which the Right was destined to struggle. In his “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” Strauss correctly identified what he considered “the typical mistake of the conservative,” and it is certainly one that applies to those whom Mannheim describes. It 

consists in concealing the fact that the continuous and changing tradition which he cherishes so greatly would never have come into being through conservatism without discontinuities, revolutions, and sacrileges committed at the beginning of the cherished tradition and at least silently repeated in its course.

Please note that when Strauss critically examined conservatism, the model he accepts as normative is of a counterrevolutionary kind. Strauss was clearly not referring to egalitarian revolutionaries when he criticized the conservative vision of a harmonious, hierarchical past. His description indicates that he and I understand by classical conservatism the same entity or concept. Like Mannheim, Strauss also sees a frequently exaggerated theme of lost order as basic to the Right that sprang from those reacting to the French Revolution.

The Left, in contrast to “conservatives,” builds on a vision of universal human equality that good people or their self-appointed leaders are supposed to help bring about. This moral and social priority causes the Left to clash with the Right, which views inequality not as an accidental aspect of human existence but as a constant and necessary feature.

Contrary to Ellmers’ contention, the Left is by no means committed to an ideal of inequality. The relationship that he observes has developed because what the Left is striving to do is unnatural, although sometimes balanced in practice by what Bertrand de Jouvenel styles “makeweights,” like inherited constitutional restraints and still operative custom. The Left may also propose diluted forms of its ideology during a period of transition; and sometimes it is led by opportunistic politicians rather than true believers.

Where the Left is unbounded, however, efforts to realize its vision typically result in totalitarian governments or in the freak show that is the present woke West. Leftist utopian experiments end in tyranny because they are based on a rejection of what we know about human nature and because they treat the historical past not as a key to understanding social man but as an oppressive condition to be overcome. Their view of the past, like the one taught by classical conservatism, tends toward the simplistic but is infinitely more destructive and far less controllable.

Needless to say, I am not limiting my inquiry to particular conservative regimes but am trying to draw a more fundamental distinction between Right and Left. A major area of disagreement concerns the acceptance of equality as the highest value: The Left accepts it as such; the Right most definitely does not.

Although Professor Ellmers does not push the Left’s highest value as far as does the current Left, he has nonetheless embraced what I regard as an essentially leftist position. One might also contend that his distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of result may be less critical than he suggests. A government that focuses on the former will gradually move toward implementing the latter, when it becomes apparent that social hindrances stand in the way of achieving equal opportunity for everyone.

What makes Ellmers’ position in the present context less identifiably leftist, however, is situational. Ellmers and those who think like him are resisting our raging and now politically dominant woke Left. He is trying to keep that Left from wrecking our society more thoroughly, and he and other students of the late Harry Jaffa are defending a moderate egalitarian doctrine against a far more extreme one. They are also engaging in this struggle when there’s no possibility for anyone to their right having much impact on our political situation. A more conservative Right is no longer allowed to take part in this confrontation; and therefore, the oppositional role has fallen to the Claremont Institute.  

This reminds me of the overthrow of Jacobin rule in France in 1794. That achievement did not fall to the monarchists, many of whom had fled France or lost their onetime influence. It was the more moderate revolutionaries who could bring the Reign of Terror to an end. That did not render conservative those who by the standards of 1789 were revolutionaries. But events forced them to assume a counterrevolutionary role in the situation in which they found themselves. This necessarily pushed them toward the Right. 

Ellmers paraphrases an interesting argument by his teacher that would lead me to different conclusions from those favored by Jaffa:

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.

The right of a self-identified “people” to give consent is not necessarily derived from a belief in “the equality of all men.” It merely recognizes the equality of those who have been certified as politai (citoyens, Staatsbürger, cittadini) to exercise certain well-defined rights within a particular polity. The ancient Spartans bestowed on some of their residents the title of citizens omoioi (Equals) which certainly did not mean that whatever equality was enjoyed by Spartan citizens was open to everybody, including barbarians. The incorporation of popular consent into government also did not keep Athenians or Romans from owning slaves. The citizens of Geneva to whom Rousseau appealed were God-fearing Calvinists whose consent was needed to elect magistrates. But those “citizens” didn’t believe that because all human beings were created by the same Deity, they should all have the same right to become Genevan citizens or vote for Genevan magistrates.