Posted on 06/29/2023 11:32:12 PM PDT by definitelynotaliberal
On Thursday, the US Supreme Court restricted the use of race as a factor in college admissions, holding that such “affirmative action” violates the equal-protection clause of the Constitution. Conservatives are celebrating the restoration of the all-American ideal of “meritocracy.” The right has long upheld merit and “equality of opportunity” as the true American ideals, as opposed to newfangled progressive efforts to achieve “equality of outcomes,” not least through affirmative action.
The conservatives are wrong on the history. The original US ideal was, in fact, much closer to equality of outcomes than proponents of opportunity, merit, and social mobility would have you believe. But the demise of the current regime of diversocracy is worth celebrating, all the same.
A classic articulation of the right’s “equality-of-opportunity” ideal came in a 2011 speech at the Heritage Foundation by Paul Ryan, then a rising congressman. Those who believe in equality of opportunity, Ryan said, “follow the American Idea that justice is done when we level the playing field at the starting line and rewards are proportionate to merit and effort.” By contrast, those who promote equality of outcome blame “most differences in wealth and rewards” on “luck or exploitation” and believe “that few really deserve what they have”—“a false morality that confuses fairness with redistribution and promotes class envy instead of social mobility.”
Ryan’s polemical targets were mainly the economic redistributionists of the traditional left, though the logic of his argument could easily extend to the racial redistributionists and defenders of racial affirmative action. The problem is that the American tradition—the real tradition, not the airbrushed one promoted by right-wing think tanks and at retreats for GOP congressional interns—is far more complicated. And it cuts against attempts to reduce the “American Idea” to mere meritocracy and social mobility.
Rather, many of the early protagonists of the American story were anxious about the ramifications of inequality for self-rule. Could Americans encounter each other as political equals if many millions of them lacked enough property and material security to be invested in the system?
The earliest statesmen thought a virtuous, self-governing republic required a modestly propertied and competent citizenry. They fretted about an industrial, urban economy that would breed “men without property and principle,” as the Founding Father John Dickinson put it. James Madison fearfully prophesied “future times” when “a great majority of the people will not only be without landed but any other means of property,” an oppressed rabble that would either destroy liberty or “become the tools of opulence and ambition.” Thomas Jefferson considered it an urgent task of government to ensure “that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.”
It is true that “equality of opportunity” ran through the early tradition. Yet as the heterodox historian Christopher Lasch showed, this wasn’t a rags-to-riches ideal. The mere possibility that a few of the poorest could attain grand wealth, including through education, wasn’t what bound Americans to their newborn nation. Rather, equality of opportunity, Lasch argued, meant that most Americans “owned a little property and worked for a living.”
It wasn’t until after the Industrial Revolution that something resembling the Paul Ryan ideal of social mobility began to edge out the older account of equality. By the late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had placed “a little ownership and equality” out of reach for the masses. Indeed, as the historian Charles Sellers has shown, “social mobility” had begun to grind to a halt by the dawn of the Jacksonian era.
It was only after the Jeffersonian ideal of equality had been utterly buried that a new idea of “social mobility” took off. As Lasch noted, the phrase itself entered common parlance just “when the hierarchical structure of American society could no longer be ignored.” As far as some intellectuals were concerned, though, it no longer mattered whether workers as a class could enjoy the older mode of equality—that is, as long as the gifted among them could be recruited to the top, reinvigorating the elite class with fresh blood and lending legitimacy to the whole order.
This was the vision of men like Harvard President James Conant, who as early as the 1930s argued that higher education’s chief mission was to ensure the circulation of elites. As Lasch noted, left unspoken was the loss of Jeffersonian equality. Going forward, it sufficed to legitimate the system as a whole for white Protestants to periodically elevate the children of other groups, even if this meant a relatively diminished status for the scions of the WASP regency. As a bonus, the fresh blood (and brains) would actually redound to the benefit of the power structure, which was already beginning to glimpse a globalized marketplace and a more diverse home market following the massive immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It was against this backdrop that affirmative action emerged in the 1960s, in the wake of the civil-rights movement. What became affirmative action as we know it was partly a response to historic disenfranchisement (and not an unreasonable one at the time). But it also jibed with, and was an outgrowth of, the concerns of men like Conant over the need for elite circulation. The collapse of apartheid in the South added the need for racial legitimation to existing worries about class-based social mobility. Thus, today’s diversocracy supplanted the meritocratic, equal-opportunity model—which was itself a poor substitute for the original Jeffersonian equality of outcomes.
When it comes to a choice between the meritocratic regime that took hold beginning in the late 19th century and the weird diversocracy of more recent vintage, meritocracy is preferable, because it has some semblance of rational, non-racialized competition and is less prone to political gaming by hucksters of various stripes. But right-wingers who are cheering the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action decision must still reckon with the reality that in today’s United States, it takes an average of six generations for the advantages associated with inherited family wealth to disappear. Yes, the libs are angry today. But the nation’s Jeffersonian ghosts are angrier still.
The conservatives are wrong on the history. The original US ideal was, in fact, much closer to equality of outcomes than proponents of opportunity, merit, and social mobility would have you believe. …Funny how you cannot cite any proof of this, Sohrab.
What on earth is a Sohrab Ahmari? Sounds like a virus, leading to a lockdown. 😀😁😅
What?
Sohrab Ahmari is, like the rest of us, a person made in the image of God. He was born Iranian, came to this country at age 17, mastered English (among other things), left Islam to follow the Christ and is a conservative.
Worth checking out this publication’s “about” page to see where they’re coming from:
They have an interesting and unusual perspective. This Ahmari guy is one of their founding senior editors. His previous work was with the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal but he seems to have parted ways with the modern conservative mainstream to some degree and is exploring a new path.
They seem to be social conservatives who believe in a redistributive social-democratic model that is egalitarian but not leftist. My guess is they would mostly approve of, say, the way that Denmark does things. IOW they would align fairly well with European conservatives and especially Scandinavian conservatives. But they would consider themselves rooted in American political tradition, especially the egalitarianism expressed in Thomas Jefferson as pointed to in this piece.
The writer explains that meritocracy is not how the nation was founded but then seems to go on to invalidate his own point barring the tenuous claim that higher education circulates elites. I would argue this is true in “elite” schools such as the Ivies, but QUALITY educational availability lends to much better social outcomes when we grade on actual ability, not some virtue signaling Bell curve where you can be as illiterate as a mountain goat but still walk across the stage to receive a piece of paper comparable in assumed worth as someone who eschewed partying and skirt chasing for a degree in a hard science.
The writer’s premise, that Americans are better invested in meritocratic ends when they have “skin in the game” has been a stalking horse for generations now. We stripped away the need to be a landowner to vote, for instance, in the interest of fairness. Now millions of people vote with no interest or need to be concerned about a political platform, because raising taxes doesn’t impact them. They just vote a party line or for the individual who promises them the most stuff. Alexander Fraser Tytler warned us about this:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t amount to much of anything, if we’re being honest. Universities are going to continue to figure out ways to admit students based on virtue vs. ability. They are promised largesse from our government and its agents in the interest of maintaining “social equity,” and so that Indian boy with a 1600 SAT and perfect extracurriculars still won’t be admitted to Harvard, Yale, or even MIT, because let’s face it: liberals are racist, and if you aren’t part of the current protected social order, you’re a pariah. It’s never about equality. It’s about how you can benefit a government agent in the long term. Virtue signaling uber alles.
Equality of outcome? That depends on the choices you make. Affirmative Action is all about punishing good choices and rewarding bad ones.
This yob cites a lefty prof to boost his nonsense
That’s what one gets for going to Harvard
Justifying the “race to the bottom” social model with a lot of fancy language.
None of his writing sounds conservative
I believe it. I wonder if we are living on borrowed time, since the people figured out LONG ago, how to steal money from the public treasury?
That’s kind of what I was thinking, and I actually thought it sounded like a word salad to me. I hesitated to say what you did. I was a pretty good air traffic controller, but not very good at deciphering stuff like this. 😀😁😃😆😄
Maybe Amish culture, or a Muslim 5-wives version, would suit them. A survival skill humans were gifted with is: anyone can get used to *anything*. If they keep it within the confines of their property lines, no freedom-loving conservative will bother them. The minute they try to impose their social experimentation on their neighbors, or redistribute other people's wealth, it's point-and-click time.
This writer presents himself as a conservative pundit, but publishes avowed Marxists in his online pub. And he betrays his true agenda with phrases such as “equality of outcome” as an attempted rewriting of America’s founding.
Of course, this ideology serves the globalist agenda of essentially re-feudalizing the world.
That isn't what social mobility is about, except in rare cases, and the author is dishonest to assume that INLY movement from poverty to wealth counts.
Social mobility more commonly means that the children of working class people can advance to the middle class, and smart and ambitious children of middle class can attain wealth.
6 generations???Where did this stat come from? Why must I reckon with a made up statistic?
Escaping feudalism was all America’s founding was about; that we all have a fair and equal shot at achieving our dreams despite the class we were born into. It’s not about looking at how much your neighbor has achieved and demanding the system do something to equalize the difference. That sort of “social justice” has never benefitted any society.
Agreed, but “fair and equal shot” even goes beyond what a government can support without being oppressive. Our rights were to be equally enforced.
How can one be redistributionist without being leftist?
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