An excerpt from an exchange I had with a European writer, who was very critical of American equalitarianism and was in favor of a return to a more (old school) European, hierarchical, class-based system of government. In his opinion the American experiment was corrupted from the beginning by an insistence on the equality of all men and a failure to recognize innate differences, that some are, by virtue of being smarter and better, etc, more fit to rule. Our disagreement eventually got fairly heated, in part because he was very contemptuous of American ideas. But I had a good time trying to help him understand us better.
Have you read De Toqueville? If you haven’t, you should. I actually do agree that there is a love of egalitarianism baked into the structure of the American constitution, by design. And there is a deep belief in all men being created equal, which isn’t an observation or a fact at all, it’s a foundational premise. But previously it was held in tension within a certain legal system and with other opposing but complimentary beliefs that allowed us to extract the good and the truth from that idea without it allowing to grow unchecked beyond the bounds of its own proper areas of influence.
De Toqueville is very explicit that the love of equality is just as much a fundamental part of the character of Americans, especially in contrast to other peoples, as the love of freedom. Freedom necessarily breeds inequality. Because if everyone can freely in peace pursue the proper ends of their own unique capacities, the natural inequalities of both nature and circumstance will compound to produce differing outcomes.
Strengths in a culture or a system are also vulnerabilities. If you have a large and powerful engine on one side of a plane, it will help you get where you’re going. As long as there is another engine to balance it on the other side. But the moment that other engine starts to fail, all that power, instead of directing you toward your course, begins to turn you powerfully and inexorably away. If the other engine fails altogether, then you may be turned round in circles until you run out of fuel and crash.
In this way our greatest strengths are also the most dangerous features of our society. What made America work could also sink it. And De Toqueville spells out a number of different scenarios where he imagines this could happen, including some that are essentially exactly what actually is happening. And he was able to figure all that out just by looking at us a hundred and fifty years ago.
I think one reason you might want to read him is because although he sees the danger of the love of equality, he also see what good work it is doing in the American context and how great it is. It’s easy to disparage an institution if you don’t understand its value and therefore seek to dispose of it because of the harm it is causing. But that’s a bit like turning off the engine that works. You do need to reduce power to balance the forces. Or you need to fix the broken engine to balance them. Not break things that are really very powerful.
In a way you’re making the same sort of arguments about equality that the DEI crowd is making about liberty. That it was fundamentally corrupt and broken from the start, that the outcomes prove that, and therefore it should be disposed of in favor of the hegemony of equality. I don’t think either side is wrong in pointing out devastating dangers and problems, but I think it’s the wrong way to view what makes or has made American society work. It’s not a single theory or a single value, it’s a relationship. It’s checks and balances. It’s a system of interacting and counterbalancing values.
That kind of dynamic system has absolutely enormous productive and adaptive power. But it also means that it’s more unstable and more dependent upon the various parts that work together to continue working together, or all that power will come unhinged and wreck havoc. America was and is a dangerous and radical wager, an experiment. It’s ambitious and unprecedented. And half the problem now is that people take it for granted and no longer value, understand, or respect the nature of that power and that danger and where it comes from. They take it for granted. And that means they will probably break it.
You clearly have a concern about and fear of communism, very rightly so. That is a danger. But other people, including the founding fathers who were coming out of Europe, had a fear of elitism, and very rightly so. Both fears are justified. But the solution isn’t necessarily defeating one or the other. It’s teaching people how to love the counterbalances to both.
Communism is a danger because people have lost the love of freedom, and that makes equality into a dangerous ideology (because ideology is always about reducing the world to a single overwhelming value matrix). A people who value only freedom need to learn to love equality, lest freedom itself become an abusive and unthinking mechanism, a monster.
Communism didn’t fall just because people learned how scary and bad it was, they were motivated by the desire for something else, something worth pursuing and seeking and sacrificing for. People often stay in situations that are objectively terrible, simply because they’re even more afraid of what might lie beyond, that things could be even worse outside the system, and they’re entirely justified in thinking that. Even oppression, in its predictability, is generally favorable to chaos. But when you see that there is something good that you could love and move toward, you will take that risk and walk into the wilderness.
People in America have not gone wrong in fearing freedom, or in loving equality, they’ve gone wrong in losing their love of freedom (and yes, in losing their fear of equality also, but fear alone can’t save them).
Making Nobody Happy 