The End of Equality

WILL the real conservatives and liberals please stand up? One can read reams of conservative rhetoric without ever hearing the H word, "hierarchy," without which classic conservative thought would be unrecognizable. Liberals meanwhile run from their egalitarian beliefs, protesting that no sane person believes everyone is or should be the same. What the liberals want is just ever-greater equality of condition, especially of political power. How then to explain the rise of movements devoted to diminishing differences between rich and poor, black and white, women and men, gay and straight, animals and people?

In by far the best of contemporary books about the travail of contemporary American egalitarian liberalism, the best argued and the most illuminating, Mickey Kaus sets his fellow liberals straight: they do want "a good deal more equality than what we now have." "Welfare may not have been a sufficient condition for the growth of the underclass, but it's hard to see how contemporary liberals can deny that it was a necessary condition," Kaus tells us.

But in arguing that "liberals tell themselves they are for 'more equality' of income and wealth when... there actually after social equality," Kaus underestimates the basic conflict in the Democratic Party between radical egalitarians, who want to diminish differences in resources across the board, and the part's remaining hierarchists, who see welfare programs as what the community owes to its less fortunate members. Unwilling to accept that everything is permissible or to reject standards of behavior--that is, moral hierarchy--Kaus seeks social integration on the basis of a shared work ethic. Knowing that all cannot be rewarded equally for unequal contributions, he seeks an equality of respect among social classes. Welcome, Mr. Kaus, to social conservatism, wetter perhaps than drier, but welcome nevertheless to community-enhancing, self-sacrificing, morally differentiating (dare I say it?) hierarchy.

Just as hierarchy is integral to conservatism, so it is the belief in equality of condition that distinguishes activist liberal Democrats from community-oriented, inclusively hierarchical people like Kaus. For radical egalitarians will refuse to legitimate the political system and hence to give Kaus' program managers the authority they require to do such things as mandate work for all who receive welfare payments and therapy for the homeless mentally ill and for drug and alcohol abusers.

In his learned and careful polemic, Kaus is weak on one point he makes central to his argument--the alleged recent growth in social snobbery. Once, Kaus claims, we Americans were socially more equal, in that we mixed in the parks and the streets and married our social inferiors. Now, he says, we don't. Mickey, it ain't so. The hidden hierarchies of the egalitarian imagination must be well hidden indeed, because this is the only part of his argument for which Kaus can present no real evidence. Books by other intellectuals, who imagine the same things about the American past and present that Kaus does, are evidence about those intellectuals but not about these United States.

In fact, it did not use to be "in" to be ethnic; now it is. A lot of namechanging took place earlier in this century in order to avoid discrimination; it doesn't now. Rates of intermarriage among religions and races and regions and social and economic classes, never very high, are much higher now than they were in earlier times. My point is not that mixing of social classes is the norm but that nostalgia for a past that never was is unwarranted.

Why, then, do intelligent observers like Mickey Kaus believe that social condescension is on the rise in America? Kaus clearly sees the fear of violent crime that keeps people apart. But he is not aware of how much our picture of what America is like is structured by egalitarian activistscure-publicists, people who write and talk and transmit our common understanding of who and what we are. Because these activists are largely and disproportionately egalitarian

(as Rothman and Lichter demonstrated in Media Elites), their standard of morality being greater equality of condition, American society falls far short of their ideal. Thus it is quite possible that America was far more stratified in the past; but that now--as social inequalities have diminished, while the ideal of equality of condition has been urged on us by movies, television, and the news media--actual inequalities of power stand out more painfully than they would once have done.

Kaus wishes America to be composed of people who, though they are of unequal accomplishment and income, respect each other because they share a common work ethic. Good for him. He hopes to achieve greater equality in the social sphere by compelling the underclass to work and then subsidizing them up at least to the poverty line. He would make personal income matter less by spending $150 billion in tax receipts on medical care, universal day care, and compulsory national service. Like the hierarchists, Kaus is prepared to use coercion in service of what he considers to be the collective good.