In a liberal society, equity is a false idol

The Hill

10 hours ago

Over the last two decades, progressive activists have introduced lots of sententious words and euphemisms into the U.S. political lexicon.
Examples include microaggression, intersectionality, cisgender, BIPOC, Latinx, 'the unhoused' (that is, the homeless), returning citizens (ex-convicts) and 'pregnant persons' (formerly 'women').
For those not up to speed on the latest academic conceits and ideological fads, including non-college voters streaming out of the Democratic Party, progressives might as well be speaking Esperanto.
They have also infused old words with new meanings. Take 'equity.' Specifically, it means ownership in a house or stocks. But in its new meaning, it is used more generally as a synonym for fairness.
Now, it has become a pillar of DEI — the hallowed trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion that defines today's 'social justice' ethos. In this context, 'equity' conveys a demand for something stronger than mere equality.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers, an enthusiastic advocate of DEI, parses the difference by defining equity as 'fairness and justice' that is 'distinguished from equality.'
'Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances.'
After the George Floyd-Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, bureaucracies set up to inculcate DEI spread like kudzu throughout government, colleges and public schools, philanthropies and private companies.
Job applicants were taxed with describing how they would endeavor to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their daily work.
Democrats duly clambered aboard the equity express. On his first day in office in 2021, President Biden ordered federal agencies to develop Equity Action Plans to advance 'racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government.'
But DEI's reign was brief. Working class voters, across racial lines, saw it at best as a distraction from their struggles with high living costs and worries about immigration and crime, and at worst as a coercive regime set up by self-righteous elites to correct their thoughts and speech.
Their antipathy toward progressive moralizing played a significant role in sinking Kamala Harris and the Democrats last year and returning the failed coup plotter, President Trump, to the White House.
The president believes he won a mandate to stamp out all vestiges of DEI in America. His minions are firing anyone in the federal government associated with diversity and affirmative action programs.
In yet example of executive overreach, Trump also is threatening private colleges, businesses and civic institutions with political retribution if they don't fall in line.
How should Democrats respond to this MAGA version of cancel culture? The same way they should have responded to the left-wing original — by standing up unequivocally for liberty of conscience and free speech.
But they should also reflect on the ferocity of the public backlash against a sectarian identity politics that subordinates the general welfare to the pursuit of 'equity' for favored groups.
Maybe it wasn't such a bright idea for progressives to abandon Martin Luther King's dream of a colorblind society in favor of group preferences, DEI, critical race theory, and related ideas that fragment Americans along lines of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality.
Fixating on the differences between groups makes it impossible to build a broad, center-left alliance, especially when non-college Americans, a majority of the electorate, are either left out of the left's hierarchy of victimized groups or assigned the oppressor role.
Democrats, however, should reject race essentialism and equity not because they're unpopular, but because they are illiberal.
In America's liberal tradition, individuals have inalienable rights and liberties, not groups. That many originally were excluded from equal citizenship is reason to apply these principles universally, not discard them.
Liberals from Jefferson to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama also have drawn a clear line between the aspirational goal of equal opportunity and utopian guarantees of equal outcomes.
Show me a country that claims to have achieved the latter, and I'll show you a totalitarian society that oppresses its subjects and relies on a privileged class of apparatchiks to rule them.
The late sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (a mentor and friend) identified our native strain of liberal anti-statism as the reason European socialism never took deep root here.
Americans, he noted, invested heavily in universal public education to give everyone an even start, while Europeans built welfare states to 'correct' markets' failure to distribute wealth evenly.
The Mandarin left deems Europe's social democracy as morally superior to America's liberal democracy. But U.S. working families don't rank reducing inequality as a top economic priority.
They're more interested in pro-growth economic policies that generate abundant opportunities for upward mobility, keep inflation and debt down, lower the cost of life's essentials, curb illegal immigration and help them acquire the skills necessary to get ahead in a fast-changing economy.
To them, equity connotes elite attempts to rectify past injustices at their expense. Social reform movements in this country succeed when they invoke the liberal universalism of the American creed rather than imported political doctrines like democratic socialism.
That's why liberals and Democrats should depose the false idol of equity and rededicate themselves to fighting discrimination in all forms, promoting equal opportunity and advancing the common good.
The old rallying cry of Jacksonian democracy still illuminates the way forward: 'Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.'