WHICH Equality do you mean?
We've got better things to do. When I say "we", I'm not talking about neoconservatives or neoliberals. Both neoncons and neolibs support crony global capitalism. A pox on both their houses. Both real Conservatives on the right and real Progressives on the left by contrast oppose the occupation of our country and world by global corporations owning our media, distorting our economy, buying our politicians. On that issue, we're allies.
Yet when Conservatives and Progressives try to talk, almost immediately the Conservative argues that there is “no such thing as equality". The Progressive hotly retorts, "Well, there damned well ought to be!"And they're off to the races, in a screaming fight in no time.
Thing is, they're using the word "equality" differently.
The Conservative means, “I support equality under the law. In real life, though, there can no such thing as equality of outcome.”
The Progressive means, "I support equality under the law and of course you can't have equality of outcome but there must be a basic equality of opportunity."
Not that "equality under the law," is a principle which any Conservative or Progressive supports in a heartbeat. The banksters whose deliberate fraud crashed the world economy were jailed only in Finland. In the US, they got a trillion dollar taxpayer bail-out. No one below the One Percent and the politicians they own thinks that anyone should be Too Big to Jail. We are a united citizenry on that.
Equality of outcome? No one Right or Left sees that as possible. No amount of training will give Usain Bolt the gifts with computer code that Mark Zuckerberg has. On the other hand, racing beside or rather far behind Bolt, Zuck would look like a penguin trying to run. As Conservatives and Progressives both stress, individuals are born with differing levels and types of intelligence, talent and motivation, some will dream higher, try longer, deal with more illness, prove tougher and so on. We all agree there too. So we ought to dispense with the bogus questions of whether any amount of social intervention could, forget should, provide equal outcomes (No. It can'r.), and agree immediately that adults ought to be equal under the law. Then and only then, we can get to the meat of genuine disagreements.....
Equality of basic opportunity is where all the legitimate arguments lie.
We can usefully discuss for example what constitutes a level playing field in business ("Do we need to restore anti-trust enforcement?" "Should we abolish all subsidies to global corporations?"), and we can tackle what constitutes a basically fair start (Should the children of poor parents be left to starve, have a shot at education?" "Is affirmative action fair?" "Should a D student be admitted to Harvard because daddy owns a bank?"), and what it takes to insure equality within the judicial system (Does jailing people for smoking a plant or for being too poor to afford bail make sense, especially when crime in the suites goes unpunished?).
Those are real and needed conversations. Therefore when one of those gibberish fights about ill-defined "equality" starts, consider asking, “Which type of equality?” Nonsense out of the way, we can begin at last to honestly talk about how to bring down this increasingly totalitarian world oligarchy....
{Illustration by drewsmarketingminute.com ]