Posted on 09/02/2014 4:21:07 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Americans pride themselves on an egalitarian society open to all. But some equality and inequality exist uneasily side by side. And the U.S. has never resolved this contradiction.
If the world is lucky enough to produce historians of the early 21st century, one question seems certain to grab their attention. How did so much equality coexist with so much inequality?
Economic inequality—the difference between the richest and the poorest, or between the rich and everyone else —has reached some of its highest levels ever, both in the U.S. and at around the world. Yet our time is also marked by a historically unique conviction that everyone matters equally.
Consider the evidence for equality. Here in the U.S., constitutional law is speeding to declare everyone’s marriage, and more deeply everyone’s love, equally valid and important. Gender equality and racial equality are untouchable constitutional principles—even though there is sharp disagreement over just what they mean. From the president’s Cabinet and the Supreme Court to entering classes at top universities, we judge institutions by their representativeness; everyone must be there, even if only in token numbers. Mandatory accommodations for the disabled make room for people who were unthinkingly excluded from social and economic life for centuries. Campaigns against bullying make a political issue of the casual cruelty of the strong against the weak, the cool against the uncool, that used to be part of the Hobbesian jungle of growing up. Instead of statues of generals, we put up monuments to ordinary soldiers, lists of names rather than men on horseback.
And inequality? It isn’t just Thomas Piketty’s now-famous findings on wealth and income, which show a new Gilded Age emerging. It’s the way that growing inequality affects every area of life: college applicants and students, for instance, are much more strategic than they once were, more focused on the “return on investment” from their classes and other involvements, because the economic game of life has become more lavish toward its winners, harsher on its losers. Applications to top schools are much more competitive because everyone is aware that the society is sorting itself into the successful and everyone else.
A certain callousness toward everyone else seems to be part of the package. Mass incarceration sets aside a big chunk of the male population, especially black men, as more or less unemployable and often unable to vote—sometimes for terrible crimes, but often for nothing worse than what many of the “winners” will do in their college dorms. Illegal immigration has produced a caste of legally vulnerable workers who do much of the manual labor in large parts of the country, meaning the workforce is stratified by race and language, with much of the essential work done by people not “like you.” Black family wealth remains between one-ninth and one-twelfth the level of white family wealth, a shocking disparity. Militarized policing means that, while privileged citizens can assume that the peacekeepers are more or less on their side, some communities feel they are living under occupation.
So much equality and so much inequality. What is this era when they coexist in such strong forms? How do they relate to each other?
There’s no easy answer, but here are three takes on how our equality and inequality are connected, each with some claim to be right.
ONE: They’re consistent. On this take, our inequality is just the flip side of our equality. Americans are individualists and capitalists. We treat everyone alike, right up to the starting line of life, and then let the chips fall where they may. On this theory, equality just means equal opportunity—to succeed or fail.
There’s something to this. U.S. politics, culture, and constitutional law all have long histories of treating equality of opportunity as the only equality that matters. Still, this take doesn’t explain racial disparities in a satisfactory way. It can’t show why so few Harvard students come from non-wealthy families. Its most basic problem is that it can’t justify where we put “the starting line of life”: Why do we tolerate massive inequalities in family resources, educational opportunities, neighborhood safety and policing practices, etc? Yes, we have a foreground of market and meritocratic competition that runs against a background of unequal resources; but to call this equality of opportunity is more a slogan, or a joke, than an explanation.
This leads to TWO: Equality and inequality are consistent, but in a bad way. Inequality is compensatory. It’s precisely because there’s so much inequality that we make such a show of treating everyone alike. This take has undertones of the Marxian theory of false consciousness—we’re suckered into thinking we’re egalitarian when really we’re the opposite—but one of its loudest exponents is Justice Clarence Thomas, the arch-conservative who denounces affirmative action as an aesthetic Band-Aid on a deeply elitist and exclusionary education system. Justice Thomas said this most famously in a case involving affirmative action at the University of Michigan, where former justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that affirmative action enables the country’s elite institutions to appear open to all, and hence legitimate, without taking on the awkward question of how open they really are.
But this cynical take is too glib and sweeping to explain everything. Equal access for disabled people, anti-bullying campaigns, and—front and center these days—meaningful equality for all kinds of sexual identities really do make the country more humane. They aren’t just compensating for something else. Whatever the ironies of affirmative action, the people who implement it are anything but cynical: They are trying to maintain decently open and diverse institutions in a deeply unequal society. Equality and inequality are all mixed up together, but it isn’t because gains in equality are covering up inequality.
Maybe, then, a THIRD take is right. It’s all contingent, as historians like to say—one damned thing after another. Maybe it just turned out this way. From the 1970s forward, struggles for multiculturalism, gender equality and diverse sexuality won decisively in certain spheres—education, especially the universities, and the culture industry, especially television—and have become touchstones of right-thinking people. At the same time, in contests over material inequality—whether it was universal day care, unionization, or school funding—people seeking greater equality were losing. American capitalism was becoming more brass-knuckled, profits were up—especially for the deregulated financial industry—and wages were stagnating. On this take, two contests over inequality have been happening for 40 years or so. The left won the cultural contest, and the right won the economic one. It just happened that way.
There’s a lot to this, but even if it “just happened,” it wasn’t random. It suggests a way that the changes are consistent, after all. The country has become more libertarian across the board. In cultural matters, this change tilts left because it protects people’s identities and private decisions. In economics, it tilts right because it cuts back regulation and accepts unequal market outcomes.
The origins of this libertarianism are not in philosophical consistency, but in political power: It turns out that Big Money can fight a lot more effectively for its interests than Old Bigotry can—at least in this hyper-mobile, media-savvy, and economically unequal world.
It’s ironic that we are so equal and so unequal at the same time; but the bigger irony is elsewhere: it’s the effect of our libertarianism on the political imagination. In our ever-more-equal culture, we are happy to imagine dozens of ways that people can live, together or apart. For a couple of decades now, racial and cultural identities have been outrunning the Census, while sexual identities keep proliferating. Again, all of this is good; it makes the world more humane and open, avoids unnecessary suffering and shame, and puts bigotry to bed, maybe for good.
But at the same time, our massive economic inequality has spurred very little serious and visible thinking about alternatives. In the last Gilded Age, you could find socialists, communists, various kinds of Christian reformers, populists and neo-Jeffersonians all clamoring to put the economy on a fairer basis.
By contrast, our economic libertarianism seems to have shut down the capacity for real political imagination about inequality of wealth. Most of us act as if we really believe Margaret Thatcher’s famous line, “There is no alternative” to the way we live now, so complaining is useless. If we don’t overcome that inhibition and find ways of imagining a fairer economy—as a democratic problem—the internal contradictions of our oh-so-equal and oh-so-unequal society will keep proliferating.
He was home schooled in West Virginia until high school and is a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College (where he was a Truman Scholar and a member of the Class of 1997), and Yale Law School (Class of 2001). After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York. He also serves on the editorial advisory board of the Ethics & International Affairs. He has been a fellow at the New America Foundation, a think tank that has been described as radical centrist in orientation.
Our “POOR” are better off than most other nations middle classes.
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal."
~Aristotle
One of the worst forms of stupidity is believing equal opportunity means equal results.
The worst form of stupidity is voting to make equal results mandated by law.
Teaching these things as truth takes stupidity deep into the danger zone.
Chelsea Clinton, check your privilege.
He lost me on the first sentence. "Egalitarian" is a term applied to socialist societies, not the United States of America. Liberals are always missing the distinction between equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcomes.
Jedediah, you ignorant slut, the conflict is not between equality and inequality, it’s between liberty and equality. Nowhere in our founding principles can collectivism be found. That’s Marx’s Das Capital your thinking of.
BS, what made America great is that hard work was rewarded. So people that busted their asses and had the smarts to make good decisions got ahead. Survival of the fittest. There is no such thing as equality.
The elites have a “get out of jail free” card and always have & always will.
He's right.
Black people are more equal than me. Their leaders can commit felonies and treason and suffer no consequences. Those that are inclined to riot receive little pushback. They can make martyrs of brazen thugs like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
Latin people are more equal than me. They can cross the border with impunity, receiving housing, medical care, and education for free.
Indeed, some Americans are more equal than others.
I think I am going to convert to being a libtard. Then nothing will ever be my fault ever again.
The libs think we have inequality, yet they insist on importing Mexico’s dregs, it can only get worse.
Yes. For example, they pay great sums to avoid that “diversity” they’re always so eager to force the rest of us to live with.
So true! Why, once upon a time, not too long ago, people who sat around engaging in mental masturbation instead of critical thinking leading to productive action would have starved.
some of us are more equal because we are old and wise
There are cultures that make sure the progeny are educated and can produce value that people will pay top dollar for at any cost. There are also cultures who do not value education, and their progeny fail to graduate even from high school in numbers greater than 50%. It is quite possible to earn a great living and contribute great value to society through trades such as plumbers and electricians, and many other things that can totally be done without even a high school diploma, even some high tech can be had for those dedicated enough, but the anti education cultures do not embrace these paths either. So yes, there is inequality, as some cultures contribute value to society in many different ways while other at most contribute no value, but contribute negative value. Of course there is a tiny minority who do get ridiculous perks for no contributed value (ie Chelsea Clinton), but their numbers are tiny compares to the masses, and presumably the person who pays the Chelsea believes they are getting a value from the arrangement (access to Billary).
(Sorry my command of the english language seems to die whenever I try to type on this godforsaken iphone keyboard)
You forgot the biggest one that came to my mind when talking about inequality under the law and that is politicians, liberal politicians for sure. Bill Clinton should have been fired for sexual abuse. Obama, Holder, and Hillary should be tried for treason for Fast and Furious, IRS targeting, and Bengazi, but they wont be.
There exists in our country right now one set of laws for we the people, and no set of laws for the connected political types.
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