A couple of days back, right-wing radio nut Dennis Prager had this to say at a Republican rally to help Michele Bachmann, Erik Paulsen, and Norm Coleman:
Equality, which is the primary value of the left, is a European value, not an American value.
Some folks I was talking to were saying "wow, that's really crazy, what an extremist." And they are right, of course, in one way. But the fact is that this kind of philosophy, while rarely these days stated quite so bluntly, is actually very much in keeping with traditional American conservatism, dating back to country's founding.
More on the flip.
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| I have a book coming out in January, entitled The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, that is about the historic debate in America between progressives and conservatives and how that debate relates directly to today's political battles. The fight over equality, along with those over trickle-down vs. bottom-up economic policy and elites running things, vs. a government of by and for the people, have been big battles ever since the country was founded.
When Thomas Jefferson convinced his fellow delegates to add to the rather long list of complaints about Great Britain that made up the Declaration of Independence an opening with that rhetorical flourish about all men being created equal, he started the debate that has continued on every since. The conservatives who opposed the Revolution hated the whole equality idea- one of them wrote that he would rather be "enslaved... by a king at least, and not by a parcel of upstart lawless Committeemen." A little later on, a leader of the conservative delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Gouveneur Morris, said:
There never was, and never will be, a civilized society without an aristocracy.
In the 1820s, a leading conservative Senator from Virginia, John Randolph, made frontal attacks on Jefferson's idea of equality:
Sir, my only objection is that these principles, pushed to their extreme consequences- that all men are born free and equal- I can never assent to, for the best of all reasons, because it is not true.
And the leader of the Southern states' rights' movement, John C. Calhoun, took things a step further:
... the will of the majority is the will of a rabble. Progressive democracy is incompatible with liberty.
A generation later, in the midst of the American Civil War, conservatives attacked Lincoln's promotion of equality as central to the American idea. The Chicago Times stated in response to the Gettysburg Address that the Constitution said nothing of equality:
How dare he, then, standing on their graves, mistake the cause for which they died..?
But it wasn't just 18th and 19th century conservatives who attacked equality. The founder of modern-day conservativsm's intellectual wing, Russell Kirk, in his highly influential book The Conservative Mind, attacked Jefferson's notion of equality, and highly praised Randolph and Calhoun. And National Review writer Wilmore Kendall wrote such nuggets as "Abraham Lincoln attempted a new act of founding, involving concretely a startling new interpretation of the Founders which declared that 'all men are created equal'" and "We should not allow [Lincoln]... to steal the game, that is to accept his interpretation of the Declaration, its place in history, and its meaning as 'true', 'correct', or 'binding'. Kendall's boss, William Buckley, wrote many columns where he was dismissive of equality as anything important.
Conservatives have never liked equality, or democracy, or giving economic or political power to regular people rather than elites. When John McCain rails against progressive taxation or universal health care as socialism, and warns against the plague of ACORN registering people of color to vote, his rhetoric is as old as the rhetoric of conservatives from the beginning of American history. And when Obama embraces equality of opportunity and investing in the middle class and progressive taxation and health care for all, he is harking back to progressive thinkers and activists throughout that same historical period.
It is a great thing to see this debate engaged so openly in this election. |
