Equality, Natural and Unnatural
Previous editions of the daily republican have considered the confusion that accompanies contemporary citations of the Declaration of Independence’s central proposition: that “all men are created equal.” Assaults on the Founders’ meaning and sincerity come from all sides. Were they radical levelers on the order of their French revolutionary contemporaries? Were they racist, sexist, propertyist (?) bigots committed only to equality among their wealthy, white, male counterparts? Or were they simple Englishmen asserting their common law rights in grandiose language? The answer is: none of the above.
While they were able to appeal to much within the English legal tradition to vindicate their cause, the Declaration was built upon a foundation of natural, not chartered, rights. Though they were no more free from prejudice than any of the rest of us, the principles they declared (and, in many cases, acted upon) were universal. Lastly, while they insisted upon the responsibility of all governments to protect the equal rights of those they served, they understood that social and economic inequalities were as natural as political inequality was not.
Following a tradition in America as old as the colonies themselves, the Founders argued that while government must be founded in the consent of the governed to protect universal inalienable rights, differences in effort, ability, character, and personality would lead to a social and economic differentiation among the American people. This, of course, did not mean that the actual distribution of wealth or social status among men had been justly derived – force and fraud had, no doubt, played their part. Nor did it mean that there was no role for government in preventing or punishing that force or fraud. What it did mean, however, was that it was unreasonable to make the attainment of social or economic equality, as opposed to the enjoyment of equal natural rights, an end, much less the end, of government.
And yet, at least since the time of the New Deal, this has been the principal goal of American domestic policy – with roots that can be traced to the Andrew Jackson administrations of the early 19th century. Overcoming its innumerable failures and outlasting its strongest critics, the “War on Inequality” plods on, from one generation to the next. Alexis de Tocqueville worried in the 1830s that the hold that this idea had on Americans was so strong that they might prefer the social and economic equality of slaves to the inequality of free men. Whether this was a true assessment of the American public at the time, the alternatives that he placed before his readers are indicative of the danger associated with the quest. The house of equality is not expanded by the addition of social and economic equality to the existing edifice of equal rights, as if one might make a cozy New Englander fit for a more prosperous family. Rather, it is razed – its pieces pulverized or twisted into unrecognizable shapes.
A government that modestly pursues the defense of equal natural rights places itself in proper submission to the human beings it exists to protect and the order of nature given by its divine Author. A government that proudly crusades for social and economic equality must reduce men to mere means to its revolutionary ends. One might do well to consider these alternatives as one reflects upon President Obama’s speech before the joint session of Congress tonight.
No related posts.
