The Quest for Cosmic Justice

...Since the 196o's , he maintains, "federal 'aid' to innumerable activities from highway building to university research and from urban redevelopment to hospitals and adoption agencies" has increasingly drained voluntary associations of their vitality and brought them under government control...

...He certainly stands out in a body full of the self-serving and the waffling...

...As Sowe]l writes: One of the ways in which the dogma of equal performance is a threat to freedom is in its need to find villains and sinister machinations to explain why the real world is so different from the world of its vision...

...Though Tocqueville is only infrequently cited in its pages, The Quest for Cosmic Justice is perhaps Sowell's most "Tocquevillian" book...

...All men, that is, apart from the remarkable Thomas Sowell...

...And how can liberty survive in the face of cosmic justice's ever-widening spiral of demands...

...An economist by training and a philosopher by disposition, Sowell has been preoccupied with the implications of equality throughout much of his scholarly career...

...The racism charge is both ridiculous and refutable...

...The evidence is on their side, but they lack the courage of their convictions...

...San Francisco, California A Helms Man Just a note to express my gratitude for John Corry's enlightening article on the only principled Republican remaining in the United States Senate, Jesse Helms ("Jesse's World," TAS, November 1999...

...The Democrats find it comforting...

...DAN CALABRIA South Pasadena, Florida I Could Disagree In an otherwise lucid and well-written article about the Boy President's graceful stiff-arming of GOP congressional investigations, Byron York makes one small, but key, error ("Contempt of Congress," TAS, November 1999...

...Sowell argues that late twentieth century America is in the grip of what Toequeville would have called a depraved taste for equality...

...The first of these was the prominence and prestige of lawyers and judges...

...T he second great bulwark of liberty in America, Tocqueville believed, was the prevalence of voluntary associations...

...On the plus side, the desire for equality "can act as a spur to match the achievements or rewards of others currently more fortunate...

...But besides exuding all manner of dangerous social and political toxins, the most salient feature of a depraved taste for equality is its insatiability...

...On the contrary, the closer society approaches to a universal equality of condition (and compared to Tocqueville's France, the United States has always been a classless society) the more urgent is the need to discover--and rectify-ever-new examples of glaring inequality...

...York asks, "Who could disagree, after everything that has happened...

...Someday history will acknowledge his vital importance to this country's affairs both domestic and foreign...

...What, then, is to be done...

...At a time when other Americans are busily congratulating themselves on the global triumph of democracy, it appears that Sowell is close to despair over the long-term prospects for liberty in the United States...

...As a black American, he can hardly be considered anti-egalitarian...

...Once upon a time, he concedes, magistrates may well have exhibited the judicial temperament so admired by Tocqueville, but those days are long gone...

...Well, I disagree strongly, since one major facet of the success of Team Clinton's actions must be considered: the mainstream media, which helped bury the Thompson hearings and led the public to not care about the various Clinton travails...

...It is far more likely to be eroded away, bit by bit, amid glittering promises and expressions of noble ideals...

...This reminds me of an old farmer in an Illinois barber shop prior to Nixon's second run who said, "Guess I'll vote for Gus 72 February 2 0 o o - The American Spectator...

...Like the great French thinker, Sowell distinguishes between the positive and negative aspects of egalitarianism...

...Senator Helms is always knowledgeable, honest, and ethical...

...On the other hand, he feared that a "depraved taste for equality" was likely to culminate in a "soft" form of despotism in which the majority of citizens would gradually surrender their hard-won freedoms to an "all-powerful form of government" that "provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, directs their industry" and eventually "spare[s] them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living...

...But Tocqueville never believed that a society dominated by a depraved taste for equality was necessarily doomed to lose its liberty...

...The Americans," he wrote, "make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes...

...Although Sowell urges Americans to set aside the quest for cosmic justice and rally to the defense of"the institutions and traditions which produce the enormous social and economic good fortune of Americans," one gets little sense from his book that he actually anticipates their doing so, Rather, he seems to believe that what he calls "the quiet repeal of the American revolution," already well under way, is irreversible...

...But here, too, Sowell takes issue with Tocqueville...

...But as a close student of the world-wide impact of such leveling policies as affirmative action, he has come to recognize that the single-minded pursuit of equality of condition can have the most far-reaching and disastrous economic and social consequences...

...STEVE D. McLIN Charles Schwab 6" Co...

...This gradual loss of liberty is exactly what Tocqueville feared would happen in a democratic society devoted to equality...

...Ironically," he notes, "economists have been discovering the enormous importance of the rule of law at about the same time as judges have been sacrificing the rule of law to attempts to make the law more just, compassionate, equal, or more in tune with the judges' own perceptions of social realities...

...After all, if neither Ronald Reagan's presidency, nor the fall of the Berlin Wall, nor even Bill Clinton's (spurious) assertion that "the era of Big Government is over" could undermine the ongoing quest for cosmic justice, what can...

...Why...

...As Tocqueville argued in that book's dazzlingly brilliant introduction (published in 1835), the endless search for ever-higher levels of social equality"is a Providential fact...

...On the minus side, envy of the more successful "can also engender social strife, whose consequences include the possibility that the society as a whole can end up worse off, both materially and psychically, as a result of mutually thwarting activities, including mob violence and civil war...

...The reigning assumption in this world is that all people are equal not only in the sight of God, but also in their God-given abilities...

...That judges, instead of resisting the quest for cosmic justice, have become its leading advocates, would have stunned Tocqueville, who began his career as an apprentice judge at Versailles...

...Paranoia and freedom are an unlikely and unstable combination...

...Sowell's appraisal, though exceedingly grim, is very much in the spirit of Democracy in America...

...Through their countless associations, Americans acquire a taste for public initiative which they are unlikely to surrender to an all-powerful state...

...The hearings for Carol Mosely-Braun are a ease in point...

...As many have warned in the past, freedom is unlikely to be lost all at once and openly...

...Because "someone must...

...A ccording to Sowell, the most recent (and dangerous) manifestation of this insatiable egalitarian impulse is the demand for "cosmic justice"-by which he means the desire to reverse "undeserved misfortune" (the fact that some of us, through no fault of our own, are born less able in many respects than others) through government action...

...JOSEPH SHATrAN is the author of Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War, published by the Heritage Foundation...

...In this way, federal power slowly but inexorably enters "into the nooks and crannies of local and even private activities...

...Unlike traditional justice, "cosmic justice cannot operate under general rules, the essence of law, but must create categories of people entitled to various outcomes, regardless of their own inputs...

...While discussing the ability of future presidents to follow the Clinton model, a former Bush administration official implies that future Republican presidents will be able to use the same tactics to fend off congressional inquiries, and Mr...

...To believe otherwise would be complete folly...

...It follows, therefore, that if all groups do not, in fact, perform equally well, some malign person, or group of people, must somehow be responsible for the disparities...

...Nowadays, in the name of "judicial The American Spectator _9 February 20 o o 71 activism," judges have increasingly become results-oriented rather than process-oriented...

...In Jacksonian America of the 183o's , for example, he discerned two powerful antidotes to the toxins of egalitarianism...

...All of these factors should give you some idea of why so many individual contributors have discontinued their financial support of the Republicans--simply because they don't deserve it-and that's A1 Gore's opportunity...

...It is a disgrace to the country (not to mention the host country) to send an ambassador who, were she not a Democrat and a minority, would be in jail...

...The Republicans, afraid of the charge of racism as a campaign issue, run from doing the right thing, abandoning Senator Helms and their principles in droves...

...On the one hand, he recognized that a "manly and lawful passion" for equality could elevate an entire society and benefit most of its members...

...One hundred sixty-five years after the publication of Democracy in America, Americans are fortunate to have, in Thomas Sowell, a worthy intellectual descendant of Alexis de Tocqueville in their midst...

...intervene directly to ensure that the desired social results or prospects are arranged," cosmic justice is "irreconcilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law," and a society absorbed in its quest is well-launched on what another great twentieth century Tocquevillian, Friedrich A. Hayek, famously called "the road to serfdom...

...However, it is without a doubt that the liberal press will gleefully lead the charge on any Gephardt-led investigations of Bush II Administration foibles...

...Tocquevillian Sowell The Quest for Cosmic Justice Thomas Sowell Free Press /214 pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan ~ n his classic work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville maintained that the gradual erosion of class distinetions and the emergence of a universal "equality of condition" were the great themes of modern history...

...Correspondence (Continued from page zo) Whip DeLay were "kicking in" $5o,ooo each in support of the re-election campaign of George Nethereuff, who, using his predecessor as an example, has decided to renege on his pledge to serve no more than three terms in Congress...

...He is a true statesman whose guiding principle is to do the right thing in terms of the well-being of the United States and its Constitution...

...in this manner they found hospitals, prisons and schools...

...There has now been created a world," he writes, "in which the success of others is a grievance, rather than an example...

...Thus, for example, nineteenth-century Japan mobilized all its resources in a successful, multigenerational bid to catch up with the industrialized West...

...As the proud descendant of an old Norman family, the aristocratic Tocqueville was of two minds about these trends...

...Men who have made a special study of the laws," he wrote, "derive from this occupation certain habits of order, a taste for formalities and a kind of instinctive regard for the regular connection of ideas, which naturally render them very hostile to the revolutionary spirit and the unreflecting passions of the multitude...

...Sowell, however, does not share Tocqueville's positive estimate of students of the law...

...As Sowell points out, "No conceivable redistribution of income, wealth, or other benefits will satisfy everyone, so there is no logical or political stopping-point in the process...

...It is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress...