Posted by
KWG on Monday, May 19, 2008 12:41:23 PM
Liberte, fraternite, et egalite: this was the rallying cry of the French Revolution. Translated, of course, to liberty, brotherhood, and equality. Mighty interesting, as the forces of liberty and equality are always tugging against each other in the modern day.
John Gerring, political scientist at Boston University, argued that the one ideology that has consistently prevailed in the Democratic party throughout its history has been the yearn for equality. Earlier, they nobly strove to achieve equal rights and an equality of opportunity for Americans. Unfortunately, in the sixties and seventies, the Democrats turned away from an equality of opportunity and have tried to bring about an equality of outcome through a redistributive welfare state.
Lefties have changed their point of view from equality under the law. Now, because inequality still exists despite the widespread equal treatment laws, they assert that the system itself must be corrupt in some way. We no longer hear about individual racism and sexism, it’s racism and sexism on an institutional level. And how does one fix that? Change the institutions, change “the system,” and redistribute, redistribute, redistribute.
Indeed, the solution that progressives propose is to change the laws so that there’s no longer equality, there is inequality. Witness, for example, affirmative action laws, title IX laws, and sexual harassment laws.
The French must be thanked for creating such a catchy slogan. One Frenchman, in particular, warned us long ago against this inevitability, even though we didn’t heed his warning. Alexis de Tocqueville, someone who had seen the devastation wrought by the French revolution and the incredible success brought on by the American one, wrote about the dangers that a desire for equality would ignite in the souls of free men.
“For the principle of equality begets two tendencies: the one leads men straight to independence and may suddenly drive them into anarchy; the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but more certain road to servitude.
“As the conditions of men become equal among a people, individuals seem of less and society of greater importance; or rather every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd.
“When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity… This never dying, ever kindling hatred which sets a democratic people against the smallest privileges is peculiarly favorable to the gradual concentration of all political rights in the hands of the representative of the state alone.”
De Tocqueville is absolutely not an advocate of inequality, but his master work serves to warn us of the constant, unabated, and unrestrained lust for equality. Equality is a natural instinct of free men, yet can be a destructive and degrading influence if left unchecked.