AGAINST THE NEOCONSERVATIVES NEOCONSERVATIVES AND THE FEAR OF EQUALITY
Steinfels, Peter
0ne of the more perplexing aspects of neoconservatism is its apparent belief that America is in the grip of implacable egalitarianism. Nathan Glazer gloomily contemplates the "awesome potency"...
...I thirst for accusation," which also happened to be the lines quoted at the head of Bauer's article...
...Nor need there be a single distribution of all social goods...
...Equality may challenge the legitimacy of American institutions—but that largely depends on the capacity of those institutions to respond to the challenge...
...Daniel Bell and Charles Frankel add to the chorus making Rawls a monument of the "new" egalitarianism (it is worth pointing out that the nugget of Rawls's book was published in 1958, which means that not only can we say, with Wildaysky and Kristol, that Rawls is the after-the-fact rationalization of the new equality, he is also the before-the-fact anticipation of it...
...Nor has Frankel adequately responded to the point Rawls makes, and which most people know from their everyday observation—that capacities for hard work and discipline, initiative and ambition, are often enough either natural traits or the outcome of favorable family circumstances and early experiences...
...But they are not the same thing...
...distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve...
...Or it may not—it may be due to blocked chances, inherited privilege, and so on...
...otherwise not...
...Later he merged the Communist and socialist challenge, and evoked "the superior capacity of Marxist argument to induce guilt...
...There is no point at which the equality revolution can come to an end...
...Or at least this is true once the foundations of the argument are constructed and allowed...
...The thing has been exaggerated,' he said, `after all, I survived...
...it also represents a demand for equality in economic power, in social status, in authority in every sphere...
...the most powerful social force in the modern world...
...The Securities and Exchange Commission, in calling numerous politicans and bankers on the carpet for their roles in New York's crises, somehow overlooked the Harvard philsopher...
...By and large, liberty has been the ideal with the higher social prestige in America...
...But Walzer is not simply campaigning against the rich: It would not be any better if we gave men money in direct proportion to their intelligence, their 178 strength, or their moral rectitude...
...nor yet are they always compatible, one with the other...
...Against such views, Walzer is maintaining that if there be stratification, there should not be one but many...
...The United States and Western multinational corporations are faced with Third World claims drawing on our own rhetoric of equality...
...Neoconservatism has in fact been vague about the liberty it views itself defending against the onslaught of equality...
...I have no objection to a properly conducted assault on poverty," says Nisbet, and almost all neoconservatives say something similar...
...in the flood of books and classes and self-help groups promising the possibility of becoming one's own doctor, lawyer, architect, auto mechanic, and (perhaps for native Americans) Indian chief...
...Daniel Patrick Moynihan replied, why not call it "pluck...
...Mill, of course, was a great admirer of Democracy in America...
...Equality, in this view, is an aspiration that can never be assuaged...
...nor to the more subtle but equally radical analyses of Ivan Illich...
...For neoconservatives generally, equality is relentless in its demands because, in Nathan Glazer's words, "as it proceeds we become ever more sensitive to smaller and smaller degrees of inequality" as well as to new kinds of inequality...
...insists Kristol...
...Is the problem, then, the intellectuals...
...Envy and ressentiment are the hidden fuels of egalitarianism, although less so for the ordinary man than for the ambitious and factious "new class...
...At the end of the decade furious debates broke out over compensatory education programs like Head Start, over community control of inner-city schools, and over theories linking IQ differences and race...
...This does, as Rawls says and Bell correctly emphasizes, represent an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of the distribution whatever it turns out to be...
...Of all From the forthcoming book The Neoconservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics, by Peter Steinfels...
...Not that an earlier liberalism denied the tension that could exist between equality and liberty, but it refused to harden this tension into an irreducible opposition and then place it at the center of political analysis...
...In this regard, Rawls's "difference principle" appears to be a respectable solution...
...Just as a considerable degree of equality—of condition as well as of opportunity—is the prerequisite for a flourishing liberty, it is also a prerequisite for the assumption of personal responsibility and the general recognition and reward of individual gifts...
...In fact, there is no single talent or combination of talents which plausibly entitles a man to every available good...
...Yet the problem for now, writes Daniel Bell, is "the contrast and not the conjunction" between liberty and equality...
...Equality "in the highly limited sense Jefferson intended" is one thing, writes Nisbet, It is an entirely different matter when equality of economic and social condition becomes a god for the intellectual or politician...
...This runs the risk of a new Calvinism in which the fact of success becomes itself the evidence that it was morally deserved...
...Jencks called for a straightforward attempt to equalize income by government redistribution...
...The principle challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow...
...Equality threatens meritocracy...
...180 Envy...
...Moss admits that this hectoring has not thus far accomplished very much, but "in the long run, can we ignore either the moral appeal or the threat...
...Kristol had argued that (1) "human talents and abilities...
...It is increasingly demanded that the distribution of success and failure within one group be roughly comparable to that within other groups...
...and scarcely anyone addressed the apprehension that welfare-state measures were stifling American liberties— was this not the hoary complaint of antiRoosevelt diehards...
...WHATEVER THE TRUTH behind these suspicions of motive and intention, there are at least three points of principled difference between the defenders of meritocracy and those who would increase equality of condition...
...obtain in business and government as well...
...This, says Frankel, is the "fundamental premise" of the new egaliatarianism...
...Nisbet, Kristol, Aaron Wildaysky, and Seymour Martin Lipset all take from Rawls not Rawls's theory in its complexity but what they assume that liberal egalitarians will make of him...
...Not only liberty but "authority" is declining, writes Nisbet, and equality is the culprit...
...It would be difficult to imagine today's neoconservatives assenting in 1955, as they apparently did in 1975, to Daniel Moynihan's identification of the United States with the "liberty party" as against the "equality party...
...Moynihan recognized that equality could both conflict with liberty and support it...
...With liberal interest in equality focused on problems of poverty, it would seem that, practically, a large field exists for common action...
...Bauer and Moss were enlarging the front opened up by Daniel Moynihan...
...They cannot insure the outcome...
...But the difference principle would allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-term expectation of the least favored...
...But even assuming what is manifestly not the case, that this extreme passion for equality fires the hearts of the intellectuals, why, with a citizenry so unreceptive and an economy so unbudging, should this be threatening...
...Are not meritocratic theories, insofar as they suggest that present society is or is becoming stratified by merit, simply the croaking of the successful Tadpoles in celebration of their own frogginess...
...But at the start one doesn't really know and presumably would 175 not be led to investigate whether the connection really exists unless the inequalities were egregious...
...Most social systems need a lightning-conductor," wrote R. H. Tawney...
...Among other neoconservatives perhaps only Kristol would go so far...
...But whether it was the smart, the strong, or the righteous who enjoyed all the things that money can buy, the oddity would remain: Why they...
...It is not surprising that for Nisbet equality and redistribution are "code words" for revolution...
...Liberty does, of course, demand that everyone be free to try his luck, or test his skill in such matters...
...Here Moynihan urged, and urged with a reference to "no social peace" that many neoconservatives would now denounce as an implicit threat, both the shifts in the meaning of equality that neoconservativism now finds so menacing: (1) the shift from equality of opportunity to equality of results...
...preservation of the environment and protection of workers are natural expressions of government's concern for health, safety, and general welfare...
...Equality versus Legitimacy EQUALITY threatens liberty...
...First, much of the hostility to professional authority and expertise does not express a rejection of "superior competence...
...that, after all, is the "-cracy" (-kratia, rule, power) in "meritocracy...
...The kind of liberal egalitarianism so casually popular today will, if it is permitted to gather momentum, surely destroy the liberal society...
...Like the American liberal tradition generally, it values negative liberty as an absolute prerequisite, but it further advocates a reflective and self-disciplined personality that implies the ideal of positive liberty...
...Perhaps their critics, then, had partially determined the ground for future debate...
...To be free of others' power means, in some crucial respect, to be equal to them...
...For New York's poor, on the other hand, "it is not at all implausible to think that, had we been less generous in our welfare programs, these people would now be better off...
...Positively, it is a warning against the excesses of affirmative action...
...He hopes so...
...undoubtedly represents the greatest single threat to liberty and social initiative...
...There are several ways in which this neoconservative explanation misses the mark...
...When not appearing in Commentary, that is the sort of thing that provokes neoconservatives to quote de Tocqueville on envy and Max Scheler on ressentiment...
...According to Mill, "Nearly all those moral and social influences" that de Tocqueville's second volume found operating in democratic, egalitarian America "are shown to be in full operation in aristocratic England...
...The problem, of course, is money...
...he had already written that in his version of the meritocracy "the question of justice arises when those at the top [Walzer would question the necessity of the top] can convert their argument positions into large, discrepant material and social advantages over others...
...Now isn't it odd, and morally implausible and unsatisfying, that all these things should be distributed to people with a talent for making money...
...Equality, writes Kristol, is only the latest expression of that subversive discontent with which intellectuals have gnawed at the legitimacy of government for two millennia...
...Yet this was not a phenomenon limited to angry students in the '60s or dropouts in the '70s...
...For one thing, even if it works to perfection in eliminating the influence of social contingencies, it still permits the distribution of wealth and income to be determined by the natural distribution of abilities and talents...
...Nathan Glazer gloomily contemplates the "awesome potency" of "the revolution of equality...
...At this point Bell and Frankel, though they are among the most careful of Rawls's neoconservative critics, misrepresent him slightly...
...There is a rote return to the existence of poverty, the concentration of wealth in America, the vast disparity between American and Third World consumption of food, energy, and nonrenewable materials, as though these inequalities, sometimes disputed, sometimes shockingly clear, of themselves resolved a host of economic, political, legal, and diplomatic issues...
...They would have squirmed at the opposition, confident that the United States was both...
...In short, concludes Walzer, "What egalitarianism requires is that many bells should ring...
...What the populists resent is not power...
...Perhaps Aaron Wildaysky states the neoconservative fear most clearly: America is being attacked at its most vulnerable point, its long-standing promise of equality...
...Frankel's critique, published in Commentary, is temperate and engaging...
...in concentrating on the cruder dangers of Communism, we had failed to develop the ideological antibodies to this subtler threat...
...The point of semantics is that equality of opportunity now has a different meaning for Negroes than it has for whites...
...One may wish to qualify the single-minded stress on "nature" and "good fortune" but 177 nevertheless find here a reasonable compromise that allows special treatment for special abilities and yet, in view of the impossibility of sorting out the effects of the "natural lottery" from those of personal responsibility, conditions such inequality on the benefit it does the least favored...
...Nor, most importantly, are they equally attractive to all groups at any given time...
...The next years were marked by an intense reexamination of the relationship between education and equality, a particularly tangled topic because the "result" of education, especially early education, is believed to determine "opportunity" for the rest of life, especially in a credential-conscious society...
...And in 1972, the book Inequality by Christopher Jencks et al...
...Irving Kristol warns against those who "prize equality more than liberty," a point of view "especially popular in some circles—mainly academic ones—in the United States today...
...What developments made neoconservatives look upon the ambiguities of these formulations no longer as the inevitable concomitants of a difficult problem but as the intolerable basis of future disasters...
...The ideal of equality does not ordain that all persons end up, as well as start out equal...
...It is a special kind of freedom that appears threatened by equality, and it is less equality than the modern web of interdependence that expands government action and regulation...
...The list is as endless as human desire and social invention...
...For Kristol, Nisbet, and to some degree Frankel, equality is but a surrogate issue for intellectuals, whose real aim is to solve the problem of evil, compensate for the loss of religious meaning, or destroy bourgeois society and extend their power through the state...
...There are many ways in which this could be done, of which but one is "a radical redistribution of wealth...
...It was reflected in the impatience of ordinary citizens with the medical profession and the consequent demand for patients' rights...
...The fascinating sociological puzzle is why as inequality decreases, ressentiment increases...
...It was the knowledge that the rich and powerful, not necessarily through malice but simply as a reflex of who they were and what they had, would have a natural tendency to try to form a closed club and keep others out...
...It "not only expresses a demand for equality in political rights and in political power...
...The revolution of rising expectations is also the revolution of rising ressentiment...
...The reason was the spirit of commerce and industry as carried by the English middle class...
...only as a prima facie principle, one that is to be weighed in the balance with others...
...Tawney also outlined what he called the "Tadpole Philosophy": It is possible that intelligent tadpoles reconcile themselves to the inconveniences of their position, by reflecting that, though most of them will live and die as tadpoles and nothing more, the more fortunate of the species will one day shed their tails, distend their mouths and stomachs, hop nimbly on to dry land, and croak addresses to their former friends on the virtue by means of which tadpoles of character and capacity can rise to be frogs...
...for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit...
...169 the "taking-off points of the new despotism in our time," what Nisbet calls the New Equality "has widest possible appeal, and...
...As successful products of existing educational systems, as teachers and scholars within them, and as defenders, during the same years, of the liberal university's legitimacy against the criticism and 171 sometimes disruption of the New Left, neoconservatives might easily have felt that "equality" was a key that had opened the door to the tiger and not to the beautiful lady...
...His passage left a number of points ambiguous and unsettled, but it attempted to pay heed to different conceptions of American social ideals, rendering them neither starkly opposed nor perfectly harmonious...
...But the alternative, apparently, is intolerable to neoconservatism: that inequalities, first, bear the burden of being justified and, second, be justified by reference to their impact on the disadvantaged...
...Moynihan then helped conduct a Harvard faculty seminar reanalyzing the data...
...It is freedom from government intervention in the university...
...Copyright © 1979 by Peter Steinfels...
...Neoconservatives are pessimistic and resis181 tant on the latter point, and that is why their fears have a significance for the long run...
...Printed here by permission...
...Neoconservatives also exaggerate the attitude of those interested in greater equality of condition...
...Neoconservatism declares that it favors the relief of poverty, international as well as domestic...
...In the populist sociology, for example, the authority of doctors should be subject to the decisions of a community council, and that of professors to the entire collegiate body (which in the extreme versions includes the janitors...
...Each faction in this debate entertains suspicions about the other...
...An antimeritocratic victory would relax the pressure for quality and blur the criteria by which quality is recognized...
...As though the noblest use of exceptional powers were to scramble to shore, undeterred by the thought of drowning companions...
...It does not require society to try to even out handicaps as if all were expected to compete on a fair basis in the same race...
...Irving Kristol managed to link Rawls with New York City's financial problems...
...Equality, on the other hand, has enjoyed tolerance more than acceptance...
...it expresses a disbelief, often backed with evidence, that the claimed competence is actually superior—or even competent...
...Certainly it is the freedom from the racial categorization seen operating in affirmative action...
...Which of these curves is actually echoed by the income bell...
...it was, though Mill did not use the term, the spirit of burgeoning capitalism...
...Discrimination between races and sexes has certainly diminished, though the degree of change and its durability are matters of considerable debate...
...2) the shift from equality between individuals to equality between groups...
...Following a long and detailed discussion of "Meritocracy and Equality," Daniel Bell suddenly lets loose at something called "contemporary populism...
...nor do critics of meritocracy object to any and all distinctions flowing from different talents or exertions—they object to the range of distinctions that currently flow from these things, and that, as we shall see, is a different matter...
...It is especially skeptical when the claim is based on some system of official credentials...
...A current condition of inequality may be due to the natural operation of equal opportunities in different ways...
...For those who would retain their commitment to greater equality, and even conceive of forms of socialism that respect and enhance liberty, responsibility, and individual merit, the neoconservative critique of egalitarianism nonetheless can be useful...
...He makes a number of points that are common to the philosophical criticism of Rawls's work: the problem of the abstract and detached character of its "pure theory...
...Furthermore, in 1972 leading neoconservatives were accused, along with the proponents of race-IQ links, of directing a "new assault on equality...
...The objection is directed toward this or that supposed instance of superiority are the services provided by physicians or auto mechanics really ones most people couldn't provide for themselves or one another?—or toward the validity of the offical tests of such claims—does a medical degree indicate a genuine skill at caring for the ill...
...They excoriate the courts for extending the reach of government in busing and other questions of discrimination...
...Yet it has roots deep in Western civilization and "is at least coeval with, if not prior to, liberty in the history of Western political thought...
...he recognized that the emphasis on equality of results was both continuous with equality of opportunity and a divergence from it...
...Negatively, it is a useful rhetorical gambit that portrays the advocates of equality as the enemies of freedom...
...Central to the "democratic surge," which is rendering the United States ungovernable, according to Samuel P. Huntington's report for the Trilateral Commission, is "a reassertion of the primacy of equality...
...the difficulty of identifying the "least well-off," whose condition is a touchstone in his scheme for judging the morality of inequalities...
...Ivan Illich popularized "de-schooling...
...Robert Moss, a British journalist favored by Commentary, made much the same argument in the New York Times Magazine under the title "Let's Look Out for No...
...And even odder and more unsatisfying that they should be distributed (as they are) to people who have money, whether or not they made it, whether or not they possess any talent at all...
...These are all active terms implying personal responsibility and moral worth...
...S. Coleman and his collaborators completed their massive study Equality of Educational Opportunity in 1966...
...Once again, Daniel Bell accedes to much of Walzer's argument...
...but that is not Walzer's concern...
...Though socialism is hardly a short-run contender for power in America, are neoconservatives, in effect, admitting that our ability to tinker with the present system has reached its limits, and that the real choice is between a massive restructuring of society or the renunciation of egalitarianism altogether...
...Kristol, to be sure, is wrong about income distribution...
...First, it is inequality of condition, not equality, that must be justified, that sits, so to speak, in the defendant's seat...
...Or some concept of "positive" 172 liberty—a capacity for self-determination, the ability to share actively in political life and to exercise one's natural gifts...
...Nor is it clear that the inner discipline required by MIT and Harvard Business School is any more than that required to fulfill one's duties as parent and provider while working on an assembly line or at a supermarket...
...Furthermore, the difference principle is not of course the principle of redress...
...In 1967, Paul Goodman attempted to teach a graduate course on "Professionalism" at the New School for Social Research: his students utterly rejected the concept and the distinctions it implied...
...Martin Diamond writes of "a vast inflation of the idea of equality, a conversion of the idea of equal political liberty into an ideology of equality...
...It must be kept in a tight harness...
...This is what ethnic politics are all about in America, and in the main the Negro American 170 demands are being put forth in this now traditional and established framework...
...a demand for equality in every aspect of human life...
...But the evolution of American politics, with the distinct persistence of ethnic and religious groups, has added a profoundly significant new dimension to that egalitarian ideal...
...The extent to which natural capacities develop and reach fruition is affected by all kinds of social conditions and class attitudes...
...But why seek to bring it within the rhetoric of the new equality...
...are to be spent for "mutual advantage," . . the principle of meritocracy should...
...it would be hard to find anyone in this country who believes, or at least professes to believe, in equality of condition as a desirable social goal...
...What is the nature of those fears...
...When discussing the failure of the Chinese prerevolutionary regime, I happened to remark upon its unconscionably high infant mortality rate...
...The opposition between liberty and equality, then, can be translated into several specifics...
...But an uncharacteristic false note in Frankel's language points to a problem: he writes of the twenty-year-old's "lacerating 176 struggle with his soul," and this touch of romantic agony alerts us to the possibility that Frankel protests too much...
...but the conclusion obtains, not that we should deny the truth in one or another characterization, but that we simply remain unable to determine the admixture of natural gifts and personal responsibility that constitutes individual differences, and we must shape a social system in light of this unalterable limitation...
...With few exceptions, the neoconservatives follow de Tocqueville's lead: they focus on the "passion for equality" and ascribe to it a host of dangers that a more comprehensive examination might find rooted in the very "tendencies of commercial civilization...
...In neoconservatism's estimate, the result has been nothing less than "appeasement" on our part...
...Odder yet is that the supposedly perilous deviation in this march of equality can be traced to the neoconservatives themselves...
...The neoconservative attitude toward inequality and "merit" is even more vulnerable to charges of self-interest and no less concerned about finding justification for an order of things they feel will always be unequal and hierarchical...
...Most view equality as a serious threat, something this side of revolution...
...Neoconservatism sees in this mood a populist leveling, a resentment against "the authority represented in the superior competence of individuals...
...It is unlikely that neoconservatives will recognize that liberal intellectuals, like liberals generally and indeed the populace as a whole, have been concerned about poverty rather than equality, while even most radicals have extended this concern only to what they see as a necessary step for relieving poverty, the reduction of the political power of wealth...
...The acceptance of the allegation that the West was responsible for this poverty had provoked such guilt as to have "paralyzed Western diplomacy, both toward the Soviet bloc and toward the Third World, where the West has abased itself before groups of countries which have negligible resources and no real power...
...In the short run, they seem vastly inflated...
...Hasn't New York's high level of welfare benefits actually made things worse...
...By equality Rustin means a distribution of achievements among Negroes roughly comparable to that among whites...
...The banner of equality does fly over these campaigns, though remaining largely undefined, and drawing loosely upon both the American attachment to equality of opportunity and an elementary sense that it is not healthy for the bottom of a society to be deprived and the top to be overbearing...
...But the force is simultaneously assumed to be more or less irrational— "passion," "obsession," and "impulse" come naturally to neoconservatives as descriptions of the egalitarian tendency...
...Doubts about the credentialed expert—about "book-larnin" and "know-it-alls"—have long coexisted in America with a respect for what was conceded to be "genuine," demonstrated talent...
...The resulting distributions would each, no doubt, reflect what Kristol calls "the tyranny of the bell-shaped curve," thought it is worth noticing again that the populations in the lower, middle, and upper regions of each graph would be radically different...
...Within the limits allowed by the background arrangements, distributive shares are decided by the outcome of the natural lottery...
...Here the 173 principle that superiority deserves special consideration is not at stake...
...It rejects the meritocracy...
...The formula which supplies it to our own is equality of opportunity...
...Great inequalities of wealth are a danger to free government...
...The end of this process, for Nisbet, will be nothing less than a "new despotism...
...but they have been lukewarm or negative toward legal efforts that limit government power, in areas like abortion, freedom of the press, school discipline, and the rights of prisoners, mental patients, and welfare recipients...
...Society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into less favorable social position...
...In sum, because we must abide what cannot be helped and because government intervention is often worse than letting the economy take its course, it is all the more important that efforts to relieve poverty do not establish principles or practices likely to get out of hand...
...Neoconservatism indicates they are...
...To hold strictly to equality of opportunity as a value virtually assumes that inequality of condition results...
...Robert Nisbet reviewed it in the Public Interest, comparing Rawls to Rousseau and the 18thcentury philosophes inhabiting Parisian salons (the consummate case of wickedness in Nisbet's mental world...
...Are the differences between individuals that a meritocracy would reward to be ascribed to individual responsibility or not...
...Equality of opportunity allows and encourages "every individual to better himself by means of his own exertions" and honors the distinctions based on those exertions...
...It is by now tantamount to religion, carrying with it...
...In the 1950s it was the political right in America that had inherited these discordant postures...
...The concern of egalitarians with great riches has been far less with the excessive consumption than with the excessive power they afford...
...But finally he writes: While the liberal conception seems clearly preferable to the system of natural liberty, intuitively it still appears defective...
...Every human talent should be developed and expressed...
...Neoconservatives have manifested small concern for the rights of dissent this side of the Iron Curtain...
...Nor again need all the distributions follow this or that talent curve, for in the sharing of some social goods, talent does not seem a relevant consideration at all...
...Aaron Wildaysky wonders whether the society can withstand "the forces in favor of pushing public policy over the egalitarian precipice...
...Willingness to believe the evidence advanced against the competence of "experts" is no doubt affected by resentment at the special prerogatives that often accompany expert status...
...The relationship between equality of condition and liberty is also affected by the definition of liberty one has in mind...
...and (3) "the political structure—the distribution of political power—follows along the same way...
...It is an attractive and, in America, honored ideal, all the more dangerous for that very reason...
...James...
...With the exception of the intellectuals, writes Norman Podhoretz, "very little resentment exists anywhere else in this country over discrepancies of wealth and condition...
...Why do neoconservatives expend so much energy attacking socialism as the embodiment of equality and state control, when in fact socialism is profoundly ambivalent on both these points ("from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" is, in many respects, an inegalitarian formula), at least as much so as welfare-state liberalism...
...It was therefore possible in the century that followed to deprive their descendants of much of their liberty as well...
...Bell cites Rawls's belief that his theory covers the considerations stated by others under a "principle of redress": This is the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress...
...seemed to tie all the debates together as it simultaneously rejected hereditarian theories of intelligence and liberal confidence in schooling as a remedy for inequality...
...other nurture their talents with all the ease of breathing...
...When Christopher Jencks found that variations in income between individuals could not be highly attributable to differences in family background, schooling, IQ, or some a priori notion of competence, he called the residual factor explaining success "luck...
...the potential of Rawls's theory for justifying any degree of inequality as long as some benefit, no matter how little, trickles down to the poor...
...Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances...
...Greater resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life...
...Nor is this in contradiction with the fairness principle...
...Again, the shift from equality of opportunity to equality of condition is said to be at fault...
...Different goods should be distributed to different people for different reasons...
...Political power, celebrity, admiration, leisure, works of art, baseball teams, legal advice, sexual pleasure, travel, education, medical care, rare books, sailboats—all these (and much more) are up for sale...
...Indeed Rawls resembles them insofar as he largely casts his theory in terms of a single axis of advantage/disadvantage...
...For the stability of the meritocracy, the latter, "neutral" starting point is obviously preferable...
...The power of money in areas like medical care, the legal system, and politics must be restricted...
...By and large, the programs that have been enacted in the first phase of the Negro revolution—Manpower Retraining, the Job Corps, Community Action, et al.—only make opportunities available...
...But clearly neoconservatives do not like the change in climate this starting point implies: it threatens the meritocracy by constantly putting it on the defense...
...As Nathan Glazer has put it, "the demand for economic equality is now not the demand for equal opportunities for the equally qualified: it is now the demand for equality of economic results...
...in the complaints against the law profession and demands for greater access to legal assistance...
...Equality before the law, forbidding rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges, and equality of opportunity, offering every individual the equal chance at becoming unequal, must be sharply distinguished from equality of condition...
...the same kind of moral fervor and zeal, much the same sense of crusade against evil, and much the same measure of promise of redemption that have historically gone with religious movements...
...But money, alas, is not its own reward: In a capitalist world, money is the universal medium of exchange...
...If this end is attained by giving more attention to the better endowed, it is permissible...
...To be sure, with the neoconservatives the problem is always the intellectuals...
...The reason is the alleged transformation of equality of opportunity into equality of result or condition...
...and this outcome is arbitrary from a moral perspective...
...Neoconservatism, so far, has straddled this issue...
...The defenders of a "just meritocracy" are not absolutely forced to brook at this point, for they allege to possess a principle, namely merit, that can in fact justify inequalities...
...How justified are neoconservative fears of equality...
...a phenomenon now commonly known as the "Tocqueville effect...
...WHEN DANIEL BELL took up the topic of equality in The End of Ideology it was to refute the antiegalitarian and "aristocratic" criticism of mass society...
...but the ground of the dispute is still the quality of the evidence rather than the principle of equality...
...They themselves observe with pleasure what radicals observe with distress, that a markedly greater equality of condition is by no means a popularly held ideal...
...No one has exercised himself more energetically on the topic than Robert Nisbet: Equality has become more than a time-honored value...
...The first two points can be illustrated by turning to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice...
...It was the suspicion that there is nothing like being on top to make a man a windbag, and that it does everybody a world of good to see him slip on a banana peel...
...The neoconservatives suspect that the antimeritocrats undervalue excellence and high cultural standards...
...The antimeritocrats, for their part, feel that talk of equality of opportunity and meritocracy is used to justify inequalities that have nothing to do with merit...
...But what appears worst of all is the effect of equality upon those in power and authority: it riddles them with guilt, it saps their determination to defend their patrimony...
...Equality versus Meritocracy NEOCONSERVATIVES are entirely correct in identifying one current of our time: the attack on professional authority and technical enterprise...
...The conception of justice he seeks would not nullify the "contingencies of social circumstance"—here the neoconservatives might agree, at least in theory—but also "the accidents of natural endowment...
...The critical document is the Moynihan Report, where the "demand for equality" received a rather extended discussion...
...In this, it resembled most of the later cases for greater equality...
...But again neoconservativism in general has ignored the point...
...It is not easy, not at first glance anyway, to discern what has brought neoconservatives to this boil...
...There is no more reason to permit the distribution of income and wealth to be settled by the distribution of natural assets than by historical and social fortune...
...but to the degree that one is concerned about positive as well as negative liberty, one will also be concerned about equality of condition...
...A purely "negative" liberty—the "right to be left alone," the absence of coercion by other people...
...Argument and evidence will not affect conduct and measures which are rooted in emotion...
...Behind most of the talk of the "revolution of equality," the "egalitarian precipice," "complete leveling," and the despotic "New Equality," one discovers two much more mundane issues: neoconservatism's disenchantment with the Great Society and its opposition to affirmative action...
...Let's assume that with respect to all these, most people (but different people in each case) cluster around the middle of whatever scale we can construct, with smaller numbers at the lower and higher ends...
...I would suggest that a liberal 179 culture does indeed succeed in breeding aggression out of its privileged classes," pronounced Moynihan to Harvard alumni in 1976, "and that after a period in which this enriches the culture, it begins to deplete it...
...American democracy has not always been successful in maintaining a balance between these two ideals, and notably so where the Negro American is concerned...
...the middle class aspiration, par excellence...
...It is the flickering light of neoconservative fears that has cast the Great Society and affirmative action and the rather moderate egaliatarian impulse of recent years into outsized and ominous shadows...
...The Great Society and affirmative action are complex realities, not easily evaluated...
...Furthermore, neoconservatives (a) emphasize data leading to the conclusion that poverty in the United States or overseas is being steadily abolished, and (b) simultaneously stress the costs, human as well as economic, of doing this through planned redistribution...
...but authority—the authority represented in the superior competence of individuals...
...but Bell and Frankel are considerably more scrupulous and generous in their rendition of A Theory of Justice...
...THERE is yet another reason why neoconservatism views equality as dangerous...
...One wants entrepreneurs and innovators who can expand the amount of productive wealth for society...
...Who has not encountered the argument that there is an educational "ladder" up which talent can climb...
...But these opportunities do not necessarily produce equality: on the contrary, to the extent that winners imply losers, equality of opportunity almost insures inequality of results...
...The neoconservatives assume that society must be stratified...
...Here a point of semantics must be grasped...
...Liberty and Equality," wrote Moynihan, are the twin ideals of American democracy...
...It is not enough that all individuals start out on even terms, if the members of one group almost invariably end up well to the fore, and those of another far to the rear...
...It is not (or at least no longer) a demand for liberty alone, but also for equality—in terms of groups results...
...and even short of such grave danger, the man who can wield a thousand times the political influence of another because he has made (or inherited) a fortune can reasonably be said to have limited the latter's liberty...
...Which, if any, ought to be...
...The demand for Equality of Opportunity has been generally perceived by white Americans as a demand for liberty, a demand not to be excluded from the competitions of life—at the polling place, in the scholarship examinations, at the personnel office, on the housing market...
...Liberal society was "torn by doubts" about its possibly insufficient generosity...
...De Tocqueville had "bound up in one abstract idea the whole of the tendencies of modern commercial society" and given the impression of ascribing "to equality of conditions" the range of effects—mobility, "want of deference," shallow culture, disregard of tradition, "habitual dissatisfaction," "the decay of authority," and "diminution of respect for traditional opinons"—that rather arise from modern economic progress itself...
...Yet this movement toward equality fits easily into the standing notions of equality of opportunity: minorities and women should have an equal chance of achieving the patterns of inequality existing among whites and males...
...Frankel indirectly suggests that Rawls holds that "it is morally wrong for a society to notice, approve, or reward outstanding gifts, particularly when the individuals who have these gifts have played some part in developing them...
...Has there been no hard work, inner discipline, lacerating struggle with his soul...
...Nor can it be said that equality of condition, insofar as income statistics measure it, has encroached noticeably in recent decades, if at all, upon our traditional disparities...
...Frankel also cites Rousseau favorably, quotes Spinoza's statement that "if equality of conditions be once laid aside, liberty perishes," and entertains a most direct conception of the egalitarian ethic: It was a conviction that there are people of power and feeling hidden away in all sectors of society, and that life would be richer if they were found...
...Neoconservatives are quick to point out the traditional nature of this development and to attribute as little of it as possible to devices like affirmative action, reputed to depart from the old norms...
...It is possible to take to heart the neoconservative warning that indignation about inequality, as distinguished from stark poverty, may be a deflection from other issues, without accepting the implications, typically reductionist, that this is always the case, that the problems of inequality would no longer be posed once these other issues were openly confronted, and that the groping of egalitarians with more ultimate issues of social meaning or universal justice are immature or unworthy...
...and the demand that well-established institutions, particularly those envisioned as providing social cohesion, be free to keep their own houses in order without government interference on the side of dissatisfied minorities...
...If the economic growth following World War II turns out to be the exception, and the straitened circumstance of recent years the rule, then the neoconservatives may well be right...
...Why anybody...
...First, Rawls has been a curious presence in 174 this conflict...
...Rawls drives the point home later: "The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic...
...There is little evidence to suggest that students passing from elite colleges to Harvard or Yale medical school have been lacerating their souls in struggle any more, and quite possibly less, than the inner-city youth who resists hustling on the street for an honest job at a gas station...
...It may hold true in some thoroughly abstract and ultimate sense but it is irrelevant to the real problems of human justice: If we look at matters from a less remote perspective, the man of twenty, in possession of a superior character that enables him to cultivate his abilities, can usually be shown to have done something to produce this character...
...A visitor to the Greek islands, or to an Italian village, is impressed first of all not by the poverty of the people there—which is acute— but by their cheerfulness, their determination to make the best of things, their extraordinary ability to do so...
...The expections of citizens must be curtailed and the confidence of elites maintained —or government will be overwhelmed and implode into tyranny...
...One can have equality without liberty but not liberty without equality...
...In the midst of the neoconservatives' flap over Rawls, two points emerge where his work clearly joins issue with the defenders of meritocracy...
...On both counts the moral claims of egalitarianism are baneful...
...but "so long as money is convertible outside its sphere, it must be widely and more or less equally held so as to minimize its distorting effects upon legitimate distributive processes...
...In response, P. T. Bauer, a British economist, assured Commentan's readers that twinges of guilt in regard to Third World poverty were groundless and— certainly for the sake of the impoverished as well as of ourselves—to be resisted...
...That the two cannot be so precisely distinguished and that a healthy degree of the second as well as of the first is necessary for the flourishing of liberty are truths that the neoconservatives know because they are commonplaces of political philosophy...
...the expectations of equality have increased even faster, and people now make more invidious comparisons...
...in some instances, like welfare reform, this may be the case...
...It, too, is distributed according to the curve of the talent for making it (considerably modified by inheritance and luck), and this, says Walzer, "might be morally plausible"—"People who are able to make money ought to make money, in the same way that people who are able to write books ought to write books...
...Kristol has some difficulty fitting the Soviet Union into this pattern, but no matter: as Walzer sums up the argument, "in the United States, nature is triumphant: we are perfectly bell-shaped...
...It is doubtful that the critics of meritocracy even drew upon his work for their criticism, or even looked to it much for reinforcement after A Theory of Justice finally appeared in 1971...
...The premise of that opposition was either that liberty could be nurtured and protected only by an aristocracy or an establishment of independent wealth—this was the conservative belief—or that liberty was nothing but free and individual contract and therefore threatened by any exertion of government aimed at relieving the condition of those in need—this was the laissez-faire liberal or the Spencerian belief...
...Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out...
...But isn't this the false triumph of "notoriously compassionate" politicians...
...Neoconservatives use language like "exertions," "efforts," and "achievements" in describing these differences...
...We will be able to maintain the status quo only by keeping a tight cap on the claims of equality...
...The neoconservatives are not unaware that liberty in some measure assumes equality...
...2) "in all modern bourgeois societies, the distribution of income is also along a bell-shaped curve...
...he recognized that the emphasis on equality between groups was both a "new dimension" to the egalitarian ideal and a "now traditional" expression of American ethnic politics...
...Rawls, on the other hand, speaks of the individual differences that are differentially rewarded by a meritocracy as "natural assets," "endowments," even the "natural lottery"—passive terms implying arbitrariness and moral neutrality...
...By elimination, what neoconservatism would welcome as a "proper/v conducted assault on poverty" appears to be an effort that is tightly managed from the top down, by an elite acting out of charity and something akin to noblesse oblige...
...He further describes a "liberal interpretion" of distributive justice that would not only require formal equality of opportunity but insist that class disadvantages should be mitigated so that the talented poor could in actuality take advantage of these open opportunities...
...But otherwise, is it primarily freedom from government regulation for large and small businesses...
...and since the inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for...
...Poverty, after all, is destabilizing as well as inherently degrading...
...Frankel's concern, and it is an underlying theme of neoconservatism, is easily appreciated: "a theory of justice which treats the individual as not an active participant in the determination of his fate, and which is guided by the model of life as a lottery, is unlikely to strengthen people's sense of personal responsibility...
...Internationally, where the degree of inequality is so much greater and so much more visible, it follows that the situation is still more perilous...
...the championing of entrepreneurial freedom against government regulation...
...Everywhere, equality is the cry," declares Daniel Moynihan, meaning by "everywhere" the world outside our borders but soon indicating that the insidious enemy (British socialist notions) is within as well...
...The slogan of `equality' in any society at all will continue to arouse passions and lead to discontent...
...Equality propels the populace to what it cannot practicably do...
...A sentimental refusal to admit differences in talent and character would squander resources on those that can benefit little from them and deprive those who can benefit greatly...
...Very few advocates of income redistribution have anything like leveling in mind...
...And one way of achieving such a situation is to limit the power of wealth and the sphere of money in society...
...As though opportunities for talent to rise could be equalized in a society where the circumstances surrounding it from birth are themselves unequal...
...Equality of condition, on the other hand, rejects all such distinctions, in terms both of authority and of rewards...
...There was too much guilt engendered by the rhetoric of equality," Wildaysky concludes, to permit resistance to the obviously foodhardly Great Society programs...
...Of course, Bauer held it a "delusion" to believe that his arguments against Western responsibility "could substantially influence the attitudes of those afflicted by a feeling of guilt...
...If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations...
...Expectations cannot do other than increase exponentially...
...To be published in June by Simon & Schuster...
...My emphasis.] In other words, it is not at all wrong for society to reward outstanding gifts, as long as such unequal rewards promise to work for the eventual benefit of the less fortunate...
...Consider the range and variety of human capacities: intelligence, physical strength, agility and grace, artistic creativity, mechanical skill, leadership, endurance, memory, psychological insight, the capacity for hard work—even moral strength, sensitivity, the ability to express compassion...
...Most neoconservatives seem unware that such aspects of Rawls's argument have left many politically active egalitarians quite chary of embracing it...
...Though Daniel Bell elaborates the difficulties of Rawls's position, his appeals for "a just meritocracy" finally seek justification in a very similar position: a university has to be a meritocracy if the resources of the society...
...Moynihan quoted Yeats, "Come fix upon me that accusing eye...
...This conception of society may be described, perhaps, as the Tadpole Philosophy, since the consolation which it offers for social evils consists in the statement that exceptional individuals can succeed in evading them...
...Of neoconservative fears about equality, it can also be said what John Stuart Mill wrote of de Tocqueville...
...It was most elegantly stated by Michael Walzer in a response in this journal to Irving Kristol...
...One wellknown sociologist expressed his irritation at the neoconservatives' apparent satisfaction with the social order by saying that they "bring to mind an encounter with an old-time Chinese gentleman many years ago...
...There does exist a vulgar materialism among reformers that is too willing to reduce all questions to a statistical sharing of the pie, that does throw up the facts of material inequalities as a screen before the murkier and perhaps more trying questions of culture and spirit...
...quickly takes command, and the lust for power with which to allay every fresh discontent, to assuage every social pain, and to gratify every fresh expectation soon becomes boundless...
...182...
...He points to another flaw: It is a neat argument, but also a peculiar one, for there is no reason to think that "human talents and abilities" in fact distribute themselves along a single curve, although income necessarily does...
...Some individuals struggle and work mightily...
...And, finally, equality threatens American governmental power itself...
...THE SECOND POINT is far more crucial...
...Incidentally, it takes a stretch of terminology to attribute much of this regulation to egalitarian passion...
...In Bayard Rustin's terms, "It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality...
...Contemporary populism, in its desire for wholesale egalitarianism, insists in the end on complete levelling...
...Starting in 1975, Moynihan argued that the United States was besieged internationally by a new form of redistributionist socialism...
...Is it all the throw of the dice...
...His emphasis...
...But Bell does not cite the qualifications in Rawls's following paragraph: Now the principle of redress has not to my knowledge been proposed as the sole criterion of justice...
...For different goods might well be distributed differently...
...To begin with, there is little to be done about much poverty—about the underclass at home and a good part of the developing world...
...Daniel Bell agrees: As disparities have decreased...
...But neoconservatism's desire to abolish poverty is carefully hedged, and not to be confused with achieving equality...
...The compatibility or incompatibility of these notions is, of course, the subject of much political thought...
...Rawls's insistence, for example, on "the priority of liberty" is ignored or set aside, perhaps because it would be inconvenient to discover such sentiments in the egalitarian enemy...
...1!" On every side, complained Moss, "we are hectored" by those who "appeal to the guilty conscience of the well-fed with images of starving millions" and "lecture us on our moral obligation for the supposed crimes of colonialism and capitalist exploitation...
...Its impulse is not justice but resentment...
...Despite the acknowledged ability of America to honor equality in principle while denying it in practice, the force of the ideal strikes neoconservatives as almost irresistible—it is usually necessary (and apparently sufficient) to quote de Tocqueville on this point...
...But the book was received among some neoconservatives with something approaching hysteria...
...We have abolished poverty in New York City...
...Lincoln freed the slaves," but they were given liberty, not equality...
...My emphasis.] In general, however, neoconservatism distrusts the Rawlsian compromise, prefering to encourage personal effort and responsibility by carrying on "as if' these were the essential elements of individual differences...
...The version of meritocracy it defends promises the fullest range of income, power, and privilege for those deemed talented, disciplined, and full of "pluck...
...But it is not hard work, discipline, and lacerating struggles with one's soul that the meritocracy singles out and rewards—except where these happen to coincide with natural talent, economic demand, and other factors having little to do with individual moral merit...
...They sense a loss of room for maneuvering, a constriction of opportunities, a diminishment of flexibility, that will render even moderate abatements of inequality possible only on condition that we risk a major alteration in the social and economic structures...
...but surely little in the still shifting debate over affirmative action and less in the record of the Great Society suggests we are approaching the egalitarian precipice...
...There is something in the cosmic viewpoint of a "natural lottery" and the passive image of "endowment" rather than "achievement" to which Frankel rightly objects...
...It is plausible...
...THERE IS A THIRD POINT at which the issue is joined between defenders of meritocracy and their critics...
...To this thoroughly inept parallel, he added an almost willful misreading of Rawls's argument...
...but reviewing de Tocqueville's volumes long before they had become, as they have for neoconservatism, a kind of sacred scripture, he offered a major criticism...
...Rawls describes, first, a "system of natural liberty" that would accept as just whatever distribution followed from a formal equality of opportunity in which legal barriers to talent are absent...
...The hedges are several...
...Antipoverty measures must be carefully calculated so as not to tax our resources nor breed dissatisfaction nor hatch political turmoil...
...Equality versus Liberty A CONSPICUOUS SIGN of the passage from liberalism to neoconservatism has been the revival of the notion that preoccupied the 19th century, the conflict between equality and liberty...
Vol. 26 • April 1979 • No. 2
