“Inequality As a Left-Wing Principle”
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.
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Glenn Ellmers is the Claremont Institute’s Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, and the author, most recently, of The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy (Encounter Books).
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