The Middle Way of American Equality
Editor's Note
The woke Left believes that justice is served only when outcomes are perfectly equal across all groups. This utopian vision makes their politics necessarily (even if not admittedly) revolutionary, and places them at war with the American regime and its defenders. A nation cannot entertain two competing visions of justice; a house divided against itself cannot stand.
If we are to defend the American system of justice, we must first understand it. Daniel Mahoney argues here that its essence is equality rooted in order, as made clear by the language of the Declaration. With recourse to Lincoln, Tocqueville, and the literary tradition, Mahoney urges us to reclaim this understanding against the various extremes — false visions of equality — that have always threatened to undermine or destroy it.
The world we inhabit is obsessed with inequality. The proponents of doctrinaire egalitarianism, those who speak incessantly of “equity” or “social justice,” simply assume that all ‘disparities,’ racial or otherwise, are of themselves evidence of oppression and injustice. The discussion is thus closed off before it has even begun. The social justice warriors’ attempt to level everything, and to achieve untenable group outcome quotas, is totalitarian in principle and destructive in practice.
What the zealous advocates of “social justice” so construed fail to appreciate is that any reasonably free and decent society must do justice to the legitimate claims of both equality and inequality. Equality is indeed an honorable “conservative principle,” as the late Harry V. Jaffa memorably put it, if it is grounded in a proper respect for human dignity, liberty under law, and those “inalienable rights” (and concomitant duties) that flow from the very nature of human beings. Advocates of equality so understood avoid the temptation to make it the alpha and omega of the human word, an all-encompassing principle that knows nothing higher and that respects no intrinsic limits. This is a temptation — and distortion — that will always haunt the liberal order and must be strenuously resisted.
But it was not our original understanding as Americans. Human beings — “all” human beings — are “created equal,” our Declaration solemnly affirms. That equality is rooted in “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” a transcendent order above the human will which places wise constraints on hubristic and utopian designs. Equality rightly understood (that is, the equality enshrined in our Founding) presupposes a moral order we are not free to disregard if we wish to remain faithful to our legacy as Americans.
What the Founders Rejected
The Founders did not accept the argument of the materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book Leviathan, which reduced men to mere corporeal beings and appealed to no higher moral principle than self-preservation. This brand of liberalism thus made a case for equality and human rights, but a weak one, lacking the necessary foundation in a moral order.
The American way, in contrast, aimed significantly higher without succumbing to an unreasonable angelism or utopianism: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy,” wrote Abraham Lincoln in a private note to himself in 1858. In that lapidary note, Lincoln succinctly indicated the character of equality as a moral-political principle, a character equidistant from two humanly distorting extremes.
It has not always been noted or sufficiently stated that the advocates of debased egalitarianism reject the moral grounding in a created order that allows civic equality to find a place in the hearts of men and in the operations of a free and lawful political order. They reject equality in the name of “equity,” a fervent desire to redress and to level that respects neither the diversity of talents and human efforts highlighted in Federalist #10, nor the hierarchies implicit in any social order, even the most egalitarian.
For today’s activist-ideologues, the defining trait of America is “white supremacy.” Traditional American understandings of equality are racist to their core. There is no “promissory note” to deliver upon, since American principles and practice never contained, and never will contain, moral grounds for civic hope. Behind such fevered egalitarianism lie despair and negation. Indeed, the new racialist oligarchs wish to turn self-loathing into a public philosophy, a new national creed.
But what hope can such a hate-filled creed offer “people of color” and Americans more broadly? Can one preserve a free republic, a community of mutually accountable citizens, when the young are taught ingratitude and are deprived of any reasons to love their country? How shall we defend ourselves against China (or any foreign enemy) if we do not believe we are worthy of defending? Such self-hatred cannot give rise to any enduring project, but only civic dissolution and ideological tyranny.
Lincoln and the Plain Meaning of Words
Lincoln shows another way forward. In his “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision” delivered at Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857, Lincoln explained what the American Founders meant when they declared in 1776 that “all men were created equal.” They were not yet in the position to enforce fully that “abstract truth applicable for all men at all times,” but they hoped to pave the way for slavery’s eventual abolition. They were thus men of both principle and prudence, neither moral cynics nor ineffectual idealists who ignored the circumstances so important to judicious political judgments.
By falsely arguing that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were speaking only of white men, Roger Taney, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, Dredd Scott’s most determined defender, made a “mere wreck,” a “mangled ruin” of America’s “once glorious Declaration.” They put a dagger into the heart of the moral principle that sustained and ennobled American republicanism. In the process they deprived those unjustly left outside of the civic compact of hope for a better future, one rooted in truly noble principles of justice.
Yet Lincoln also rejected the reckless impatience of the abolitionists, as well as any confusion of the equality principle with a more thoroughgoing egalitarianism. He aimed to remain faithful “to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration.” As he so lucidly put it:
I think the authors of that noble instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this they meant.
To attempt to equalize human beings in all respects is to war with human nature and to undermine equality rightly understood, at the center of which are those inalienable rights. Lincoln’s humane and measured understanding of equality was equidistant from utopian dreams of thoroughgoing egalitarianism and the unjust failure of an elite, like the Southern aristocracy, to adequately acknowledge the common humanity of all. Lincoln never lost faith in the capacity of equality as a self-limiting moral principle to serve as the “standard maxim” for the “free society.”
The Danger of ‘Equality in Servitude’
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, too, defended the truth of human equality and common humanity, while worrying about a self-destructive zeal for equality, a passion without limits that would inevitably lead to what he called “equality in servitude.” It should be noted that Tocqueville himself fought passionately against the slave trade, and pleaded for Americans to abolish a scourge, slavery, that contradicted her noble principles and undermined her reputation in the world. He had such solicitude for America at her best that in his correspondence to American friends he regularly (and rather touchingly) called himself a “half-Yankee.” His sustained critique of debased and self-destructive egalitarianism came from a true friend of democracy, especially in its American form.
With Lincoln’s and Tocqueville’s noble examples in mind, how does one restore a vigorous and principled understanding of equality (and legitimate inequality) as a moral and civic principle at odds with every form of racism, collectivism, and debased egalitarianism? How does one expose the fallacies at the heart of the ideology of social justice, as opposed to the “giving each his due” that Cicero and so many other authoritative thinkers defended as the heart of authentic justice? How can one convince the misguided idealists among the young that “equity” would make a “mangled ruin” of the only conception of equality in accord with human nature?
As my examples and illustrations have indicated, renewed study of the great tradition of political philosophy, of the American civic tradition, of the elevating yet sober political thought of Abraham Lincoln, and of Tocqueville’s finely calibrated reflections on true and false equality would have a major place in any renewal of a public philosophy at once morally serious, civically useful, and alert to the totalitarian temptation of egalitarianism gone awry.
More contemporary authors can also help. Thomas Sowell’s always thoughtful dissections of the utopian pretensions of the “anointed,” as well as his painstaking empirical accounts of how little economic and social disparities among groups — ethnic, racial, or otherwise — owe to discrimination, provide that sturdy mix of common sense, historical perspective, and morally serious empiricism that is central to any cogent and compelling response to ideology masking as social analysis.
The hundreds of new classical schools at the elementary and secondary levels that have opened in recent years, and the “Civic Thought” institutes and programs that have arisen at the university level in red and purple states from Arizona, Utah, and Texas to Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida are beginning to draw on precisely such approaches.
Renewing the Moral Imagination Through Literature
But just as the best guides to understanding the seemingly alien world of totalitarianism are literary works (think Orwell, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn) that allow the “moral imagination,” as Edmund Burke notably called it, to penetrate into otherwise unimaginable cruelties of a surreal world based on systematic mendacity, so literary works can illumine the totalitarianism implicit in any confusion of justice with politically coerced equality.
Let me mention three great literary works that get to the heart of a frenzied utopianism that has turned against its grounding in human nature. The first is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 self-described fable “Earth’s Holocaust.” This delightfully instructive work mocks the utopian aspirations of the Transcendentalists, among others, to eliminate all the sources of evil and imperfection from the world. These secular moralists mistakenly believe that evil is located outside the human heart and that society can somehow be refigured to cleanse humanity of both evil and injustice. They build an immense fire to consume anything that can be a source of evil in this imperfect world.
Hawthorne’s brief but riveting work allows the moral imagination to discern the deranged logic that leads to the destruction of humanity in the name of “man’s agelong endeavor for perfection.” The path forward instead rests on self-knowledge and the purification of the heart, the “inward sphere” of human beings, as Hawthorne calls it. Secular utopianism only exacerbates the evils inherent in the human heart and the human condition.
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great 1871 novel Demons (sometimes called The Possessed) masterfully dissected totalitarianism and revolutionary nihilism as they were first emerging in an “educated society” inebriated by utopian dreams and ideology (wokeness avant la lêttre). Dostoevsky rightly predicted that 100 million people would perish if these unscrupulous ideologues ever gained political power. The revolutionaries aimed to destroy family, property, and classical learning. Everything would be “reduced to a common denominator, complete equality” where all would be slaves in the name of unlimited freedom and unlimited equality.
In this world of slavish equality, marked by nihilistic destruction, “higher abilities” could not be tolerated. Such men and women must be “banished or executed.” According to the revolutionary theorist Shigalyov in that book, in the egalitarian regime of the future, “Cicero’s tongue” must be “cut off,” “Copernicus’s eyes…put out, Shakespeare…stoned.” Freedom and equality so redefined demand the most thoroughgoing despotism imaginable. Necessarily, the revolutionaries have unbounded contempt for religion and customary morality. They too must go, whatever the cost to men’s souls and to decent civic life. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once remarked about Dostoevsky’s ability to anticipate the totalitarian nightmare to come, the man could “truly see.”
Let me mention one final literary work, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, that enlarges the capacity of the American mind to imagine a homegrown egalitarian despotism. I am speaking of “Harrison Bergeron,” a 1961 short story (included in the 1968 collection Welcome to the Monkey House) set in 2081 where “equality under God and the law,” as Vonnegut puts it, have been replaced by a draconian tyranny where men “are equal every which way.”
In this not-so-distant future, “Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” The Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers, saw to that. Yet one brilliant, tall, handsome fourteen-year-old boy named Harrison Bergeron briefly casts off his shackles on national television in order to display his excellence and to make himself “Emperor of the World.” He does not succeed.