The Conservative Myth Doesn’t Track with Reality
A common talking point that unfortunately remains lodged in the modern conservative mind is the following: “We are for equality of opportunity; the Marxist Left is for equality of results.” These conservatives say they want to make sure everyone has an equal start in the “race of life,” as the usual analogy goes. (The “race of life” phrase is originally from Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 Message to Congress, and has been subsequently used by Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ, and President Obama, among others). By contrast, the Left wants to guarantee equal results, just like the communist regimes that have brought untold suffering to millions of people around the world.
But consider elites on the Left today. Do the Obamas, whose net worth is now estimated to be around $70 million, think what they’re doing is unjust? Barack and Michelle own a $10 million house in the tony D.C. neighborhood of Kalorama and a Martha’s Vineyard estate they bought for nearly $12 million in 2019. Even Bernie Sanders’s net worth is reportedly around $3 million, which puts him in the dastardly “1%.” The richest suburbs and zip codes voted enthusiastically for Joe Biden in 2020. The billionaires who boosted Kamala Harris’s campaign and the financial power of George Soros, among other leftist billionaires in Democratic Party politics, cut starkly against the fanciful idea that the Left wants equal results.
Like the claim that godliness is sexiness, the tired “equality of opportunity/equality of result” dichotomy is a false notion that deserves to be thrown in the dustbin of history. It’s prevented conservatives from being able to see the true character of the Left, which is fundamentally not about equality but an allegiance to an alternate morality (yes, this also means that the conservative oldie that the Left is relativistic is untrue).
But the equality line has possibly done even more damage than simply obscuring conservatives’ view of the Left. What if this false dichotomy actually helped smuggle in wokeness? What if, contrary to the modern conservative mind, wokeness was instead about trying to achieve equality of opportunity?
David Azerrad has perceptively argued the Rawlsian gloss on equality of opportunity that’s popular today—that everyone should have an equality of life chances—entails a massive redistribution of resources. To overcome natural differences in talent, skill, and one’s upbringing, not to mention a host of other factors, would take a monumental—and tyrannical—effort by the government to fix every perceived wrong. This would look far more like Ibram X. Kendi’s proposed Department of Anti-racism than a conservative venture. According to Azerrad,
To fully equalize opportunities and ensure all a fair shot in the race of life would require not only removing any limits upon the role of government but also actively intruding upon the autonomy of the family. It would lead to calls to curtail the opportunities of others and strip away their inherited advantages. No one would want to live in a society in which the liberal logic of equality of opportunity had worked itself out fully.
We need to add to this analysis the regime’s focus on rewarding its friends and punishing its enemies. Practically speaking, achieving equality of opportunity under our DEI regime would end in a reversal of the current paradigm in the liberal mind—the oppressors would become the oppressed. Whites would be financially disposessed while minorities would be given their funds under the guise of reparations and other government policies. A smattering of liberal rich whites would be allowed to keep some of their wealth—but only if they regularly prostrated themselves at the feet of their captors.
Though Azerrad mused about the problem of equal opportunity mutating into an equality of life chances before the rise of wokeness as we know it today, we can easily apply his framework to our current situation.
Erik Torenberg, a tech entrepreneur and investor, recently argued that equality of opportunity thinking has bred wokeness, because wokeness itself is about eradicating “differences between groups by way of the government.” Unlike some triumphalists on the Right, he rightly says that wokeness has not been defeated when a corporation shutters a DEI office or stops giving money to Black Lives Matter. Instead, wokeness is dead when “the government stops trying to socially engineer economic outcomes based on biological characteristics.”
Torenberg adopts an argument that the only type of equality we should strive for today is equality under the law. This is the proper rhetorical route that the Right should promote today when referencing equality, a word the Right shouldn’t automatically see as being from Satan.
The Declaration of Independence’s invocation of “all men are created equal” in its second paragraph rightly recognizes the equality between human beings as a species and the natural privileges and duties that flow from such recognition. Equality under the law is, of course, a corollary of that axiom. If all human beings are not equal in any fundamental sense, then being equal under the law is left without a principled foundation.
In our age, where the rhetoric of radical egalitarianism conceals a strong preference for in-group solidarity among most minorities, equality under the law is a more useful formulation. It’s less prone to misunderstanding because it spells out exactly how we are equal. The phrase “equality under the law” avoids the possible excesses of a more open-ended formulation of equality, like the one in the Declaration, by cabining itself in the very term. There’s no need to search speeches, writings, or state constitutions to discover precisely what the American founders meant by “all men are created equal,” which is hotly debated even to this day on the Right (As an aside, blaming the Declaration’s single reference to equality for unleashing 1960s radicalism is about as accurate as Catholics and Orthodox blaming Martin Luther for pastrixes who deny Jesus’ divinity.)
Even better, this understanding of equality permeates the American political tradition. The equal protection of individuals who are unequal in countless ways is how the founding generation often wrote and talked about equality. In Federalist 10, James Madison argued that the “protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results.” Equally protecting unequal faculties that God has bestowed on us for His own purposes will necessarily yield difference outcomes. This is just and coheres with the natural order that God fashioned.
Elevating equality under the law rightly recognizes that the equal application of the law, no matter status, political connections, or wealth, is a chief characteristic of just government. This has the added benefit of highlighting the lawfare that the regime has been waging against Donald Trump and his supporters ever since the 2020 election. The idea that radical leftist prosecutors are simply about impartial justice is one of the most absurd lies in politics today. It’s obvious that the regime and its sycophants like Alvin Bragg want to destroy Trump by any means available—even if the country is shattered in the process.
It’s clear that the Right must reject the equal opportunity/equal results dichotomy that is woefully out of step with reality.
But why exactly did conservatives never seem to notice the problems with being champions of equal opportunity in the first place? American Reformer founder Nate Fischer supplies a likely answer: it reflects “a general lack of confidence in the good of hierarchy and authority—especially a lack of moral confidence in any sort of alternative to egalitarian liberalism.”
Many conservative Christians have been blind to the effects of a leveling type of equality that’s been smuggled into their churches and evangelical institutions more broadly. Christian presses publish works by functionally egalitarian women who reject the truth that authority and submission are grounded in creation itself and twist the teaching of the Reformers for their own purposes. Reformed pastors are seen more as nice professors who give weekly theological lectures from the pulpit than those commissioned by God to tend to His sheep, exhorting them to see their sin, repent, and live godly lives. The idea that pastors have authority over families in any sense is seen as authoritarian and a violation of one’s freedom.
Hierarchy and authority—these concepts rightly understood are not the enemy. The question is not if hierarchy and authority are present but whether they’re rightly ordered. Do they direct men and women to salvation and godly living or to the Valley of Gehenna? That’s the standard of judgment we should be using.
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That’s an awful lot of words to say ‘women and Black people deserve to live miserable lives and white males should be in charge of everything.’ In fact, you could simply have written “I am a bigot” and it would say the same thing.
There is nothing like presenting liberals as being the left and the left as being monolithic and represented by the Soviet Union. That is all part of demonizing a group. And history teaches us that when those with power demonize a group, what eventually follows are gross injustices and atrocities. In addition, such a portrayal ignores the history within the left of resisting the totalitarian rule that was part of the formation and continuance of the Soviet Union. Even Lenin criticized the left among the Marxists by calling them ‘infantile.’ On the other hand, though with sympathy for the struggles and the accomplishments, socialist and contemporary of Lenin ,Rosa Luxemburg, stated that the structure of Lenin’s government was that of a bourgeoisie dictatorship.
Kimberlé Crenshaw showed one of the major flaws in Thomas Sowell’s objection to in using results to test for equality. That major flaw was that if results are not a part of the testing, then any institution can claim that it employs equality in its treatment of its people without having to prove their claim. In fact, in a 1967 interview with Xander Vanocur, Martin Luther King Jr stated that his previous efforts was a struggle for dignity. That now he was involved in a true struggle for true equality and that true equality was, at least in part, to be measured financially.
There might be a Marxist reason why Sabo opposes equality in wealth, it is because, as Marx so well described it, private has social and political power. In fact, it was that social and political power that Marx target when he promoted the abolition of private property.
It’s not that Marx was infallible, he certainly wasn’t, but look at everything that Sabo wants to describe monolithically and then demonize: Liberal Democrats, Soviet Union Communists, and promoters of DEI. One possible reason for Sabo doing that is because, like many religiously conservative Christians, Sabo favors authoritarianism with hierarchy to democracy with equality. And throughout American history that authoritarianism with hierarchy has been promoted diverse ways from the mere belief that one race is superior to another, dependence on race-based slavery, the employment of Jim Crow laws and culture, genocides and imperialism, ethnic cleansing in the Western Hemisphere, colonialism, and sexism. That is not to say that, historically speaking, that all conservatives have favored all of those practices and isms. Like any other group, conservatives are not a monolithic group. But the tendency to favor authoritarianism with hierarchy as practiced in America is more closely tied to conservatism than liberalism or the left.
Is hierarchy and authority the enemy? One only needs to use history to examine its fruits in terms of social, economic, and political contexts.