‘Equality’ Isn’t What It Used to Be

I t might be the most famous statement in American political history: the idea, as expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration’s second sentence, “that all men are created equal.” But how to interpret it has been a debated question among conservatives for decades.

Paleoconservatives and representatives of the “Old Right” were skeptical of the categorical emphasis on equality, while neoconservatives and the West Coast subgroup of Straussians, to varying degrees, embraced Jeffersonian equality. The former, represented by scholars and writers such as Willmoore Kendall, M. E. Bradford, and George Carey, quibbled relentlessly with the latter, represented by Jack Kemp’s “Democratic Equality: A Conservative Idea?” and Harry Jaffa’s seminal Equality as a Conservative Principle.

The characteristic feature of these debates was the question of whether equality, properly understood, was consistent with conservatism in formal, philosophical, and legal terms. Jaffa argued that “the idea of Equality, as expressed in the Declaration, is the key to the morality of ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God.’ It is this natural law which the Constitution — and the regime of which the Constitution is a feature — is designed to implement.” In The Heresy of Equality, Bradford replied that “equality as a moral or political imperative . . . is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.” All, however, agreed that the progressive reconceptualization of equality as an imperative for egalitarian social reconstruction was a mistake. In the same essay defending equality’s place in conservative thought, Jaffa contrasted the “Old Liberalism,” which “saw life as a race, in which justice demanded for everyone only a fair or equal chance in the competition,” with a “New Liberalism,” which “sees the race itself as wrong.” Rather than demanding “the removal of artificial or merely conventional inequalities,” the New Liberalism “denies natural no less than conventional inequalities.” This utopian equality envisioned a future in which “the joys of victory will belong to all.”

Today, the New Liberalism vision of equality that Jaffa criticized has been replaced once again. To see its successor in action, look no further than today’s report from the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium, writing on the San Francisco Bay Area’s recent foray into explicitly identity-based government provisions:

The initiatives include the Black Economic Equity Movement, which provides $500 a month exclusively to “Black young adults,” the Abundant Birth Project, which provides $1,000 a month to “Black and Pacific Islander mothers,” and the Guaranteed Income for Transgender People program, which will dole out $1,200 a month and “prioritize enrollment” of transgender “Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC).” They are financed by the National Institutes of Health, the California Department of Social Services, and the city of San Francisco, respectively.

The publicly funded programs, Sibarium notes, “openly discriminate against white residents, limiting or entirely preventing their participation in programs that dole out no-strings-attached cash.” This is clearly not the restrained, legalistic equality of the Old Liberalism — which, as Jaffa wrote, “demanded the removal of artificial or merely conventional inequalities” but “recognized and demanded the fullest scope for natural inequalities” — but neither is it the lofty egalitarianism of the New Liberalism.

In Jaffa’s era, progressive egalitarians at least had the common decency to frame their project in the language of the traditional American understanding of equality: Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous defense of affirmative action — “you do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair” — may have been an argument for racial preferencing, but it was premised upon the notion of equality under the law. Johnson was, at least rhetorically, concerned with the “starting line,” not the “finish line.” Rather than social, cosmic, and generational justice, progressives of his day spoke the language of fairness and opportunity.

Today’s progressives have abandoned equality altogether in pursuit of a more explicitly radical, and openly discriminatory, “equity.” The result is a White House that bars “white male restaurant owners from applying to a multi-billion dollar restaurant stimulus fund for three weeks, by which time the money may run out,” as the Daily Wire reported, and states that implement treatment protocols in which “racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions,” as Sibarium noted in a different story. Wealthy philanthropists, foundations, and corporations direct hundreds of billions of dollars toward businesses owned by those who can claim a specific “marginalized” identity, prestigious fellowships explicitly exclude white applicants, racial and gender quotas are written into credit agreements, and the nation’s most profitable corporations explicitly cap the number of white and Asian applicants for specific positions.

Meanwhile, it is conservatives who have adopted Johnson’s language of “equality of opportunity” to distinguish their agenda from “equality of outcome.” Whereas “the older, libertarian-flecked strain of American economic conservatism appreciates liberty as an end in itself,” Avik Roy wrote in 2013, “for many of today’s conservative reformers, equality of opportunity — especially for the poor — is the highest moral and political priority.” As a descriptive matter, Roy wasn’t wrong: “Fighting poverty,” Paul Ryan declared in 2016, “should begin with equality of opportunity.”

But the Left’s past use of this concept as a waypoint on the journey to “equity” should give conservatives pause. The question, really, is what equality of opportunity means. If it is simply “equal laws protecting equal rights,” as James Madison put it, then that should be unobjectionable to conservatives, at least in principle. But why not simply use the language employed by Madison and the other Framers — that of simple, basic, equal legal rights?

In reality, equality of opportunity is a departure from the kind envisioned by the Founders. We should at least be honest about this, and about what it would take to truly implement this new interpretation. Equal opportunity implies some amount of equality of condition; and equality of condition requires significant intervention by the state. (As Theodore Dalrymple argued, “true equality of opportunity is unachievable — or could only be achieved through a level of social engineering that would make North Korea look like a paradise of laissez-faire.”) As David Azerrad noted in a 2016 essay on the topic for National Affairs, “if discrimination by the state is wrong, many ask, shouldn’t discrimination by private actors also be outlawed? When it comes to some of the most important areas of life — like college admissions, employment, and housing — should the government not forbid private discrimination to ensure that people are allowed to compete solely on the basis of merit?” How could opportunity truly be equal in the face of an uneven civil society in which private institutions, by necessity, erect barriers to some and open doorways to others?

The irrefutable fact, then, is that equality of opportunity is an invitation to a far more radical project of social engineering than many of the conservatives who employ the term suspect. The Right should defend the formal legal equality guaranteed by the Constitution as the fundamental moral and political principle that it is — but resist the temptation to follow progressives down a path that spurns the Founders’ concept of a self-evident truth.