Equality is the chief faux virtue of our time.

Selwyn Duke writes in The American Thinker,

Our obsession with it brings to mind the great G.K. Chesterton’s observation, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

...the equality lie is best illustrated by its proponents. Consider: despite sanctimonious talk about “glass ceilings” disadvantaging females, within "the feminist grievance narrative, there is no whining about women being ‘excluded’ from working-class male-dominated professions,” American Thinker’s Katie El-Diwany wrote last month. “There is more than plenty of talk about the dearth of women in science, in engineering, in upper management positions, and as CEOs. But there is no one asking: where are all the female garbage-collectors, the female elevator technicians, the female landscape laborers, the female oil rig workers?”

...That their rarity approaches unicorn status is why men constitute 92 percent of workplace deaths, another unequal outcome seldom addressed. There’s also the intersex wage-gap controversy, which persists despite conclusive evidence that women earn less because of their different career choices, not discrimination. Nonetheless, while we hear incessant complaints about women’s lower pay in sports, acting, or elsewhere -- a market-forces-driven phenomenon -- there’s nary a word regarding how female fashion models greatly outearn their male counterparts.

As El-Diwany concludes, “All of this reveals that feminist clamoring for ‘equal representation’ is not about equality at all. It is about power and prestige.”

In truth, “equality'” today has the same kind of meaning “peace,” “freedom” and “strength” did in Orwell’s 1984 dystopia. It’s ploy not principle, self-righteously deployed as rallying cry to gain advantage and further a politically correct brand of inequality.

Equality dogma has also invited statist hell. For if all groups are equal in worldly capacities, as the dogma holds, then inter-group performance differences must result from discrimination. This justifies social engineering as “remedy”; ergo, quotas, affirmative action, set-asides and disparate-impact rulings that destroy relevant merit-based standards.

Thus, equality-obsessed movements are contrary to nature -- they fight and must try to defeat it (e.g., Lysenkoism). Imagine the intrusive, perverted control required to (vainly) try to achieve equality in a lion pride or gorilla troop. In man’s civilization such schemes beget bizarre social engineering, meritocracy’s destruction, suppression of the successful, oppression and, when applied zealously enough, the Khmer Rouge killing fields.

...Our Founding Fathers also emphasized equality; of course, they’d recoil at its current perverse manifestations. Yet they nonetheless erred, a result of a (very human) overreaction to European classism. Far better, and truer, than “All men are created equal…” would be “All men are created sacred.” Then, subsequently, the 19th-century socialists picked up and ran with the equality ball -- and the rest is dark history.

Read more here.

The talk about equality is a smokescreen

At the Chicago Boyz blog David Foster writes,

There was a bit of media coverage of Hillary Clinton choosing to wear a $12K Armani jacket while delivering a speech lamenting Inequality. The price of this jacket, of course, represents an utterly trivial proportion of the wealth the Clintons have amassed from their lifetimes of Public Service.

This little incident serves to emphasize a point I made several years ago in my post Jousting With a Phantom: leading ‘progressives’ for the most part don’t really believe in anything resembling equality – indeed, quite the contrary.

Consider, for example: Many people in “progressive” leadership positions are graduates of the Harvard Law School. Do you think these people want to see a society in which the career, status, and income prospects for an HLS grad are no better than those for a graduate of a lesser-known, lower-status (but still very good) law school? C’mon.

Quite a few “progressive” leaders are members of prominent families. Do you think Teddy Kennedy would have liked to see an environment in which he and certain other members of his family would have had to answer for their actions in the criminal courts in the same way that ordinary individuals would, without benefit from connections, media influence, and expensive lawyers?

The prevalence of “progressivism” among tenured professors is quite high. How many of these professors would be eager to agree to employment conditions in which their job security and employee benefits were no better than those enjoyed by average Americans? How many of them would take a salary cut in order to provide higher incomes for the poorly-paid adjunct professors at their universities? How many would like to see PhD requirements eliminated so that a wider pool of talented and knowledgeable individuals can participate in university teaching?

There are a lot of “progressives” among the graduates of Ivy League universities. How many of them would be in favor of legally eliminating alumni preferences and the influence of “contributions” and have their children considered for admission–or not–on the same basis as everyone else’s kids? Yet an alumni preference is an intergenerational asset in the same way that a small businessman’s store or factory is such an asset.

The reality is that “progressivism” is not in any way about equality, it is rather about shifting the distribution of power and wealth in a way that benefits those with certain kinds of educational credentials and certain kinds of connections. And remember, power and connections are always transmutable into wealth. Sometimes that wealth is directly dollar-denominated, as in the millions of dollars that former president Bill Clinton was paid in speaking fees last year, or the money made by a former government official who leverages his contacts into an executive job with a “green” energy company–even though he may have minimal knowledge of either energy or business. And sometimes the wealth takes the form of in-kind benefits, like a university president’s mansion. (Those who lived in the old Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can tell you all about in-kind benefits for nominally low-paid officials.) And, almost always, today’s “progressivism” is about the transfer of power from individuals to credentialed “experts” who will coerce or “nudge” people to do what those experts have decided would be best.

To a very substantial extent, the talk about “equality” is a smokescreen, conscious or unconscious, behind which “progressives” pursue their own economic, status, and ego agendas.

Read more here.

Give me liberty!

Is it possible to have both liberty and equality? The Atheist Conservative says it is not. Why?

Equality – other than in the eyes of the law – can only be created and maintained by force, so there goes liberty. Leave people free and they will not match each other in accomplishment or anything else.

Where the people are free they are not equal, and where they are equal they are not free.

The Left wants equality. We want liberty.

Read more here.

Abraham Lincoln would have excelled at writing tweets

Diana Schaub notes the great irony in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address:

Everyone knows the irony of that line where Lincoln says "the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here" — ironic because his brief dedicatory remarks have become the most famous American speech.

The Gettysburg Address contains three paragraphs, ten sentences, and 272 words.

Astonishingly, since many words are used more than once, the speech is comprised of only 130 distinct words. Lincoln would have excelled at writing sonnets or maybe even sound bites and tweets.

The three-day battle of Gettysburg took place at the beginning of July 1863. It was a Union victory (with the Confederates fleeing the field on July 4th), and in retrospect we know that it was a turning point of the war, though that was not so evident at the time.

The casualties were like those of so many Civil War battles: staggering belief. Those three days left behind 51,000 American dead, wounded, or missing. To gain a sense of the scale of the carnage, we might contrast it with numbers we are more familiar with: During our 20-year involvement in Vietnam, 58,000 Americans died. Since 9/11, 6,700 American troops have died in the war on terror, now in its 13th year. Remember that the population in 1863 was one-tenth of what it is now. If one were to translate the death toll from the Civil War into today's population figures, it would not be in the thousands, or the tens of thousands, or the hundreds of thousands. It would be 7.5 million men dead.

Schaub analyzes Lincoln's speech word-by-word. She goes into great length to try to understand the concepts of liberty and equality.

After liberty, the other feature of the founding that is highlighted is equality. Lincoln says the nation is "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Whereas liberty is linked backwards to the nation's conception, equality is more prospective; it involves dedication. As in the moment of christening or baptism, the infant nation is placed on a certain path.

As early as the Lyceum Address, Lincoln described the founders as experimental scientists or mathematicians drawn to an unproven proposition. "Their ambition," he said, "aspired to display before an admiring world, a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition, which had hitherto been considered, at best no better, than problematical; namely, the capability of a people to govern themselves." In that formulation, it was self-government — the corollary of equality — that needed to be proved. The current crisis, however, was more severe. At the time of the founding, there was general agreement that all were created equal, even if there was no political ability on the part of the very weak federal government to do much about the domestic institution of slavery in the states. Nonetheless, all then understood that slavery was an evil; even those who argued that slavery was necessary (and there were many of those) at least called it "a necessary evil." But subsequent generations had fallen away from this view. Led by John C. Calhoun, Southerners had taken to openly repudiating the truths of the Declaration, calling equality a "self-evident lie" and slavery a "positive good."

What is at stake is the survival of that new nation that sought to combine liberty and equality. And more than that: At stake is the very possibility of political life based on such premises. Lincoln enlarges the stakes beyond national survival. The failure of the American experiment would constitute the failure of popular government altogether.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln calls upon the living to resolve three things: one, "that these dead shall not have died in vain"; two, "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom"; and three, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Although all three resolutions are, as they must be, in the future tense, the first and third are also formulated in the negative. We have two "shall nots" and a "shall" (again suggestive of a balance between the conserving and progressing tendencies).

During his presidency, Lincoln issued three proclamations calling on citizens to observe a Day of National Humiliation, Prayer, and Fasting, in addition to his four Thanksgiving proclamations. "This nation" — this rededicated and reborn nation — is "under God." Lincoln's hint of a politically active, justice-seeking, providential order, setting certain limits upon human action, will come to fruition in his Second Inaugural.

That speech, Lincoln knew, was his greatest, outvying even the extraordinary Gettysburg Address.

Read more here.