Ah, but “equality under the law” represents a beginning of the assertion of liberal principles. It does have possible coherent interpretations in certain circumstances (e.g. “anyone who commits a crime will be prosecuted”) but those interpretations already exist under other headings (e.g. “justice - every man is accountable for his crimes”).

Making a general principle of equality is the first step toward political liberalism with all that that implies. In reality the law exists specifically to establish authoritative discrimination — between owner and tenant, duke and peasant.

Whenever we are tempted to use the word “equality” to assert a moral or political principle, we should stop ourselves and find another way to say it. If what we are saying is valid there is always a way to say it without invoking equality.

My advice is to forget about equality as any sort of general political principle. That path leads only to ruin.

“The National Socialist State recognizes no ‘classes’. But, under the political aspect, it recognizes only citizens with absolutely equal rights and equal obligations corresponding thereto.”

— Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, Vol. 2 Chap. 12

Speaking of the “momentous”, have you noticed President Bush’s response to all this? He’s taken up the momentous cause of preventing unwanted telephone calls!

While I understand Matt’s concern about the negative implications of equality as a general principle, I disagree with his attempt to banish the word altogether, especially in the current circumstances. “Equality under the law” is a concept that is central to our civilization. It does not mean that everyone is literally equal. It means that in America we do not have official classes with different rights for each class. That has always been true of America, not just under post World War II liberalism, but even at the beginning of our country. Black slavery did not contradict this, as blacks were not citizens and were not considered part of the body politic. Also, under our original federal system, there was room at the local or state level for social or religious distinctions, but this did not apply at the federal level, where citizens were treated as citizens. The 14th Amendment then extended the principle of equal protection before the law to the states (which, according to the intentions of its framers, was not equality in regard to everything, but in regard to fundamental rights.) That basic concept of a common citizenship has now been officially overturned by the Supreme Court in what is perhaps the most revolutionary official act in American history. The Court has made equal representation by racial groups—i.e., discrimination in favor of non-whites and against whites in order to achieve a socially engineered racial proportionality in all areas of life from the federal down to to the state and local level—a Constitutional principle.

If we were to follow Matt’s counsel and banish the concept of “equality under the law,” how could we even describe the fundamental principle that the Court has overturned? How could we protest what the Court has done?

In a single moment of historical time, these rulings have overturned both the substantive moral principles of America, and the procedural liberal principles of America. That the left, whose aim is to destroy America, overturned both principles in the same week underscores the idea that what makes America is both our substantive culture AND the procedural equality of citizens before the law, both the traditionalist AND the liberal.

Is it not bad enough that the left has overturned the principle of equality before the law? Does it also have to be attacked at this moment from the right as well, complete with comparisons between America and Nazi Germany?

I would add to this that the form of government itself is not really the underlying cause of the problem. Consistent with what opened this thread, the problem is the human heart and the sinfulness of man.

No people, no culture, no nation, has been able to rise above the limitations of human nature. We began as a nation acknowledging God, but the natural man is at emnity with God, and we have allowed those who despise Him to cast Him aside. “The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God.”

We are bearing the bitter fruit.

Mr. Auster writes:
“It does not mean that everyone is literally equal. It means that in America we do not have official classes with different rights for each class.”

That isn’t really true though. The property owner has different rights from the tenant or the trespasser. The attempt to banish official classes is exactly the problem, and unprincipled exceptions abound. It is true that we don’t officially acknowledge the actual-in-fact classification of society, but again that is because we are liberals.

“If we were to follow Matt’s counsel and banish the concept of “equality under the law,” how could we even describe the fundamental principle that the Court has overturned? How could we protest what the Court has done?”

It is true that if we unequivocally repent from liberalism we will not be able to invoke liberal principles in this instance to protest this particular action of the SCOTUS. If we don’t unequivocally repent from liberalism, though, we can definitively kiss Western Christendom specifically and Western civilization in general goodbye. Is a battlefield tactic that is unlikely to secure even a temporary local victory worth conceding the entire war?

Matt says, “The property owner has different rights from the tenant or the trespasser.”

But doesn’t every person have the equal right to own property? And to permit or exclude anyone he sees fit from it? Obviously not everyone has the same opportunity, from lack of wealth, to own property, but that falls under equality of result rather than rights.

I want to clarify my earlier remarks to Matt.

I’ve been saying for 10 years that if a country makes equality its central belief, and if that country then comes to consist of conspicuously different racial groups, there will be an inevitable tendency to transfer the principle of equality from the individual to the group, i.e, to institute affirmative action and proportional group equality. My practical point has been to say that mass non-European immigration, by leading to the redefinition of America as a “diverse” country, inevitably leads to group rights. The argument is directed chiefly at right-liberals, a.k.a. mainstream conservatives. I’m saying, if you want to hold on to a country based on the principle of individuality, you cannot let in all these culturally different groups.

This, as I said, is the trend that results from a massive diversification of society. But (1) that does not mean that the trend should not be opposed, and (2) it certainly doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is correct in institutionalizing that trend in the Constitution. The court in fact has done on the constitutional level just what I described above: they have taken the liberal principle in 14th amendment of equal protection of individuals under the law, and redefined it to mean group equality of results.

Now, even if we as traditionalists have reservations about the wisdom of equality in all its possible ramifications, the fact remains that the principle of equality is a part of the American system, and that for the Supreme Court to turn it into the opposite of what it really means is a political crime of the first order. The mainstream defenders of our system have a standard. The Supreme Court has now horribly violated that standard. We can hold that standard against them. If the neoconservatives surrender on this, that will show that they have never been serious about their own defense of individual equality before the law.

Matt, by contrast, would place himself outside the debate by saying that the principle of equality is no good in any case. All he can do is stand to the side and watch the American system crash. Now, that may not be an entirely irrational decision under the circumstances. In fact, as America’s leftist course keeps accelerating, we may not have any choice about standing and watching it crash. But I don’t think he should take away the concept—equality of individuals under the law—by which we can hold the establishment up to its own standards and expose the perversion of the American system that they are allowing to happen.

As another possible indication of where some neocons may come down on this, a well-known Straussian asked to be removed from my mailing list today after he had been sent the original post in this thread. He was on a list to whom I had sent my articles from time to time, some of them far more controversial or potentially offensive than this current item, or so I would have thought.

I wrote back to him:

I’ve just removed you from the list.

I’m curious to see how the Straussians and neoconservatives will respond to this unprecedented attack on our system. Will they maintain their complacent view that America is a country of individuals and that all groups can equally assimilate into America as individuals, when the Supreme Court has now made the proportional representation of underrepresented minorities a part of the Constitution? Norman Podhoretz squelched the debate about the judiciary’s perversion of our system when First Things tried to raise it in 1995. Will neoconservatives and Straussians now recognize that something has indeed gone terribly amiss, that America has now become an officially group-rights country, or will they continue in their complacency?

I heard that Bill Kristol on tv this morning said the decision is not that bad.

Lawrence Auster

“It is true that if we unequivocally repent from liberalism we will not be able to invoke liberal principles in this instance to protest this particular action of the SCOTUS.”—Matt

Matt admits that his position would make it impossible for us to take a stand against the Supreme Court’s imposition of group rights regime on America. I agree.

“If we don’t unequivocally repent from liberalism, though, we can definitively kiss Western Christendom specifically and Western civilization in general goodbye.”—Matt

Is Matt saying that in order to save the West we must “unequivocally” repent of liberalism, in ALL its aspects, and regarding ALL phases of liberalism, even going back to the American founding? Then Matt would be against the existence of the United States from the start, which I didn’t think was his position as a self-described old-fashioned patriot.

“Is a battlefield tactic that is unlikely to secure even a temporary local victory worth conceding the entire war?”—Matt

To translate what Matt has said into practical terms: The only hope for saving Western civilization is to allow the leftist system of racial socialism to take over America. I can’t believe that Matt really believes that.

Though maybe I am misunderstanding him. So, instead of our just debating my appeal to “equality under the law,” let us ask Matt what he thinks about the Grutter decision and what approach he thinks the right should take toward it.

Joel asks:
“But doesn’t every person have the equal right to own property?”

There are two modalities to the term “right” which are used in everyday language, and Joel refers to both in his comment.

One modality refers to an actual right that one can assert against another and have enforced by the government. The right an owner has to his house is an example of such a right. One characteristic of an actual right to something actual is its exclusivity — that is, it is definitively NOT shared equally by others. In other words it describes a specific discrimination between the right-holder and those who do not hold that right; a discrimination realized in some actual concrete authority exercised by the right-holder over those who do not hold the right. So any right of this sort — lets call them actual rights — cannot possibly be equal under any reasonable interpretation of the word “equal”.

The other modality refers to the possibility of having such an actual right. This modality is not itself an actual right since it can’t be asserted by anyone; it merely represents the abstract possibility of holding an actual right. We could call this a “potential right”. The fact that the abstract possibility exists for someone to have a right — a rule by which they exercise authority over others — doesn’t itself entail a right, objectively.

Therefore all actual rights ever that anyone ever asserts are intrinsically discriminatory, that is, exclusive and unequal.

Sometimes when people say “equal rights” they just mean that there exist some consistent rules that are applied universally in the enforcement of actual rights (the truly existing and intrinsically discriminatory kind). That isn’t self-contradictory, but the use of the term “equal” is superfluous when all one means is that formally the rules, whatever they are, are applied consistently. I think this is what Mr. Auster means when he uses the phrase “equality under the law” though of course I would not want to speak for him.

Other times the term “equal rights” *is* used in a self-contradictory fashion, to mean equal actual discriminations. In that situation (as any student of logic can tell you) it can mean anything at all, or its opposite, since (A AND NOT A) logically implies both everything and everything’s opposite at the same time. So we get lots of arguments that *appear* rational on their face, based in the premise of equal rights, but which are ultimately irrational because the premeses are self-contradictory.

Mr Auster asks:
“If we were to follow Matt’s counsel and banish the concept of “equality under the law,” how could we even describe the fundamental principle that the Court has overturned? How could we protest what the Court has done?”

My counsel isn’t so much to banish the concept as to recognize that it is intrinsically rationally incoherent. Once that is recognized as objectively true of course the entire liberal house of cards falls apart, not merely the most recent SCOTUS decisions.

“Matt admits that his position would make it impossible for us to take a stand against the Supreme Court’s imposition of group rights regime on America.”

No. I merely acknowledge and point out that any argument from equality is intrinsically irrational and will ultimately be turned against us. It is true that this means, as Mr. Kalb says, that it is later than we think.

“The Supreme Court has now horribly violated that standard. We can hold that standard against them.”

That presumes that the standard was rationally coherent in the first place. Now, it is either true that it was, or it is not true that it was. If I am right and it was never rationally coherent to begin with then the sort of argument Mr. Auster proposes will not work, and will almost certainly be turned against us.

“Then Matt would be against the existence of the United States from the start, which I didn’t think was his position as a self-described old-fashioned patriot.”

That would only follow if the legitimacy of the United States as an actual place filled with actual people depended upon some written propositional stuff that was done a few hundred years ago. If flaws are found in the propositional stuff then the legitimacy of America falls. If any rational errors or other problems exist in any of the justifications given by our ancestors our existence as a people is invalid.

As a traditionalist I reject all that, of course.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“To translate what Matt has said into practical terms: The only hope for saving Western civilization is to allow the leftist system of racial socialism to take over America. I can’t believe that Matt really believes that.”

And indeed I don’t.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“Though maybe I am misunderstanding him. So, instead of our just debating my appeal to “equality under the law,” let us ask Matt what he thinks about the Grutter decision and what approach he thinks the right should take toward it.”

The Grutter decision is a bunch of postmodern nonsense, of course, as is the whole right of privacy regime from Griswold. Nearly all of modern jurisprudence rests on self-contradictory premeses. The fourteenth amendment might be rational if interpreted to mean “States cannot create separate laws and procedures that apply to the former slaves alone”. (It still might degenerate into irrationality from there, in fact: I don’t rule out the possibility of a rational interpretation but I have not myself ever seen one or formulated and tested it myself). But if “equal protection” means anything more abstract than that then the 14th is itself self-contradictory because it requires abstractly nondiscriminatory (equal) discriminations (protection of the laws).

If what I say is true — and it is either objectively true or not, that isn’t a matter of choosing tactics — then we have essentially two choices. One choice is to bring this basic fundamental truth out into the light, trust in God, and see what happens. Another option is to try to turn the tools of liberalism against itself by knowingly making rational-sounding (but ultimately irrational) arguments from liberal principles.

My recommendation is to do the former. If suddenly everyone in America woke up one day and clearly saw the objective truth that liberal principles are not only against God but are fundamentally irrational, that would not make America disappear suddenly. In fact, I think such a miracle would make America’s survival as a particular place and people far more likely.

I’m going to have to print out Matt’s recent comments and read them on real paper where I can think about them properly. Maybe he has a key and original insight here, maybe not. I won’t know until I can absorb his thought, which ain’t easy to do.

A corrollary to my above discussion is this: once you’ve accepted liberal principles they can ALWAYS, without exception, be turned against you. The danger in the “turning the tools of liberalism against it” approach is (in addition to the danger to our souls from knowingly engaging in a falsehood) that once we’ve asserted that we accept liberal principles at all a (apparently) rational argument can ALWAYS be constructed against the traditionalist position _from premeses we have already accepted_. Given that we always CAN be undermined by our own premeses it isn’t unreasonable to expect that we always WILL be undermined by our own premeses.

This happens within liberalism all the time, and explains why so many liberals have gone through so much effort to kill each other in the last few centuries despite their agreement on basic principles.

Presuming that I am right, and that liberal principles (government for abstract freedom and equal rights) are self-contradictory, the only reasonable approach is to bring that truth out into the light. That does mean recognizing that some of the propositional parts of the American order are and always have been in fact irrational and self contradictory. But in the end that is either true or not true; and in any case all the concrete people, places, and things we know and love don’t suddenly lose their legitimacy based on some propositional mishmash. If America’s legitimacy as a particular people depends on it being a nation dedicated to a proposition, or a bunch of propositions, then it is already dead and indeed as Mr. Auster suggests really never lived in the first place.

There is no obvious reason why we have to accept all that though.

Mr. Auster writes:
“I’m going to have to print out Matt’s recent comments and read them on real paper …”

My apologies for the opacity! I am sure that if there is a “there” there Mr. Auster will be a great help in making it more accessible.

Matt’s theory could be run by the founder of the Website “The CounterRevolutionary” (at http://thecr.blogspot.com/) once the founder is back from summer vacation. The founder is a former philosophy professor who holds some traditional principles. Hopefully, I will remember to do so.

Even if the theory does not hold for every case, it might hold for a high number of cases and might serve as the best proposition thus far.

Getting back to Matt on his idea that we should not appeal to “equality under the law” or “equal protection of the laws” against the Supreme Court’s establishment of group racial rights, I think we may have discussed the propriety of using “equality” some months ago, so I hope we’re not re-inventing the wheel here (though I don’t remember the result of that earlier discussion).

Matt is making a good general point that whenever possible we should not use the word equality if there is a better alternative, e.g., we should say “consistent application of the law” instead of “equal rights,” or something like that. We should be cautious toward the word equality, just as we should be cautious toward the word democracy.

However, I think Matt goes too far in denying any coherence to equality in his answer to Joel regarding whether the right to own property can be an “equal” right:

“The other modality refers to the possibility of having such an actual right. This modality is not itself an actual right since it can’t be asserted by anyone; it merely represents the abstract possibility of holding an actual right. We could call this a potential right. The fact that the abstract possibility exists for someone to have a right — a rule by which they exercise authority over others — doesn’t itself entail a right, objectively.”

This seems strained to me. If people of race X can buy property in a town, but people of race Y cannot, race Y does not enjoy equal rights with race X. Equality of rights is a real thing that may be present or not present. I don’t see a problem here with the concept of equal rights or equality under the law.

But now let’s consider the problem in relation to the present issue of Grutter v. Bollinger. It is true that as traditionalists we find ourselves in a somewhat odd position when we’re upholding the individual-rights liberal regime of the 14th Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act against the post-’60s group rights regime formalized in Grutter. But on what other ground can we oppose Grutter?

In order to imagine how we might respond to Grutter without appealing to equality, let’s try to imagine a scenario that many traditionalists and paleocons would dream of. In this scenario, liberalism has never existed: there was no Civil War, no 14th Amendment, no ‘64 Civil Rights Act. In this scenario, the slaves are gradually emancipated into a Jim Crow, segregation-type situation. Or, rather, let’s say there is no segregation at all, but blacks are simply very far behind whites, not because of discrimination. Then, in the late 20th century, America goes directly from this state of profound racial inequality to a system of racial group preferences for blacks, without passing through liberalism.

So now a state university is doing what Michigan is doing, giving preferences to blacks over whites. What existing standard of treatment of individuals under the law would be available for us to use against this racially unjust practice? Without the 14th Amendment, I can’t think of any. We would have to start from scratch and say to that University, “This isn’t fair, you’re judging whites and blacks by a different standard.” Then we would have to try to get the University to change its policies, and if that was unsuccessful, get the state to pass a law requiring that all sutdents be judged by the same criteria. And what language would we use to name the principle were were fighting for? Fair treatment? Consistent application of the rules? Equity for all citizens? Equality under the law? Equal protection of the laws?

You see my point? Even if we got rid of modern liberalism and started over from scratch, we would still of necessity find ourselves speaking the language of equality, or something very close to it, to protest the racial double standard at our imaginary university.

Here was the earlier discussion, in which Matt argued, as he is doing here, that equality is an incoherent concept. We even discussed the same examples, about the right to buy property.

Letter to an Affirmative Action Hire
http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001222.html

In response to my hypothetical, some paleos would probably say that I’m missing the point. The point, they would say, is not to ask for equal treatment of blacks and whites, which is impossible in any case, but for whites to take back control of the university from the anti-white elites and run it again as they see fit.

And that fits with a theory of mine. The idea is that equality of incompatible groups within the same society and with respect to the same things is impossible. One or the other group will dominate with regard to any particular situation at any particular time. In Kosovo, either the Albanians lord it over the Serbs, or the Serbs lord it over the Albanians. In America, whites lord it over blacks (as under slavery and Jim Crow), or blacks lord it over whites (as under Reconstruction and the Race Preferences regime). Real equality is not possible. That doesn’t mean I believe in a system of formal race subordination, but, as I’ve written many times, in order to maintain a true system of individual equality under the law in this country, whites must remain in charge because they are the only ones who believe in it and can practice it. You could have white leadership, even as blacks enjoy equality of rights as persons. Given racial differences in abilities and temperement, in a truly liberal system of individual procedural equality, whites would continue to set the tone for the society. But in order to maintain such a liberal system, there must be an at least tacit recognition that this is a majority white country in which whites set the tone. It’s a balance between a traditionalist, religious, race-conscious culture, and a liberal political system operating within that culture. This is not a utopia. This is what we largely had up to the mid-20th century, at least in the Northern states.

(Of course, I recognize it may be too late for any of this now in practical terms for America, but I’m trying to get at the idea, which could still be applicable in a variety of times and places.)

How then would such a culture respond to minority racial preferences? They just wouldn’t stand for it. They wouldn’t have to use the word equality to make their point. They’d say, people get in on the basis of their qualifications, not on the basis of being black. If that means not many blacks get in, well they’ll have to find a different school. Depending on how race-conscious such a hypothetical society was, there might be different schools for whites and blacks anyway, which I would personally favor.

Getting back to the real world, we don’t have the option at the moment of defending formally race-separate institutions. Nevertheless, given our actual institutions, an approach along Matt’s lines is quite possible and simple after all. We should just say that in this country we recognize people on the basis of their abilities and accomplishments and qualifications. If we mention “equality,” it is to criticize the mandated group equality that the dominant left-liberal system is trying to force on us. But we don’t use “equality” to describe what WE believe in. We say instead that when it comes to college or law school admissions the same rules should apply to everyone, period. We don’t need to say “equality” to make that point.

I wrote:
“The other modality refers to the possibility of having such an actual right. This modality is not itself an actual right since it can’t be asserted by anyone; it merely represents the abstract possibility of holding an actual right. We could call this a potential right. The fact that the abstract possibility exists for someone to have a right — a rule by which they exercise authority over others — doesn’t itself entail a right, objectively.”

Mr. Auster replied:
“This seems strained to me. If people of race X can buy property in a town, but people of race Y cannot, race Y does not enjoy equal rights with race X. Equality of rights is a real thing that may be present or not present. I don’t see a problem here with the concept of equal rights or equality under the law.”

Mr. Auster asserts that it is coherent to interpret “equal rights” to mean “ignore the fact of race”, at least in the context of whether a property transaction is enforced by the state. It is true that formal equality is objectively a requirement to ignore (or more accurately to assertively make irrelevant, but I’ll just use the word “ignore”) certain facts in certain circumstances.

The problem of course is that “equality” is not specific as to what facts we are to ignore and in what circumstances: it is an abstraction. I mentioned this in my discussion of the fourteenth amendment. It is doubtless true that justice sometimes demands that we ignore certain facts in certain circumstances. But by nature an abstraction like equality can’t tell us which concrete specific facts are to be ignored in which concrete specific circumstances unless we list them out. The liberal solution has indeed been to make lists of attributes and circumstances: race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, former status as slave; employment, procedures faced when under criminal charges, medical procedures prohibited, admissions to public universities, admissions to private universities, who can marry in a contract sanctioned by the State, who can vote, enforcement of property rights against a private tenant, etc. Once the lists are complete then the abstraction “equality” is rationally superfluous; failing to eliminate the abstraction in favor of the more specific categories means that the abstraction is not fully satisfied by the lists.

If Mr. Auster wants to assert that equality demands that we ignore the fact of race when enforcing property transactions that is all well and good. But that isn’t sufficient to capture equality. Equality demands _more_ than that, and it is this demand for _more_ than that — this demand that we ignore an _unspecified_ list of facts in enforcing the law (or someone’s rights) in an _unspecified_ set of circumstances — that makes political equality incoherent every single time it is invoked by anyone, ever. (Technically the concept is either incoherent or empty, that is, meaningless. “Political equality” is NEVER under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES additively meaningful without self-contradiction. Mr. Kalb once objected to this by redefining equality as a _tendency_, but equality as a _tendency_ doesn’t describe the equality as an authoritative _principle_ that is invoked in politics).

Equal rights is an abstract demand to enforce rights (authoritative particular discriminations) in an equal (nondiscriminatory) manner. No amount of appeal to common sense or whatever can make political equality into a rationally coherent concept without at the same time rendering it meaningless.

I realize that the modern Western mind does not want to accept this, and that accepting it has radical implications. In the end though it is either true or false that political equality is always and everywhere either literally meaningless or assertively incoherent. That fundamental truth or falsehood doesn’t care what would have to be re-thought or re-built if significant propositional aspects of the modern West are built upon fundamentally self-contradictory premeses.

Mr. Auster wrote:
“We don’t need to say “equality” to make that point.”

Well nevermind then :-).

I was formulating and cogitating on my latest comment when Mr. Auster snuck in his latest one. I posted mine before I saw his latest. Maybe the peek inside my noggin was useful or at least entertaining to someone.

Matt’s reply to my first reply is illuminating. (Please note that I had two answers, of 11:46 p.m. and 12:18 a.m. in which, in the process of working through the problem in dialectical fashion, I came to one thought, then a different thought.)

I understand his point that real equality must always be in regard to some particular quality that is being ignored and in regard to some particular situation where it is being ignored; but that equality per se would have to take in all possible qualities that would have to be ignored and applied to all possible situations, leading to the never-ending liberal utopian agenda. So the need is to avoid abstract language and speak of specifics. For example, we could say that in a certain town there ought to be racial equality with regard to property ownership; by saying that, we’re not committing ourselves to, say, racial equality with regard to marriage, or racial or sexual equality with regard to school attendance, or sexual orientation equality with regard to apartment rentals. In fact, this sounds sort of like the Middle Ages, where specific rights or charters were granted to specific groups for specific things, for example, permission to live in a town and carry out a certain kind of business there.

But then I lose Matt in his last two and a half paragraphs when he says that “political equality” is always an incoherent concept. Isn’t political equality a PARTICULAR type of equality? For example, we could say that we will ignore race when it comes to people’s right to vote and run for office. That would be racial equality applied to politics, a formula in accordance with Matt’s demand for specificity as to the quality being ignored, and the situation in which it is ignored.

Mr. Auster asks:
“Isn’t political equality a PARTICULAR type of equality?”

The equality part demands abstractly that we have no discrimination, and the political bit demands that we discriminate with authority (that is what politics formally *is* at a fundamental level - discrimination with authority). Once we get particular enough to eliminate the contradiction the word “equal” stops making sense as a modifier (e.g. “no explicit racial discrimination with respect to voting rights”).

Just getting rid of the “explicit” modifier can begin to create rationality problems, even with that very specific requirement and without even using the word “equal” or any of its derivatives. The attempt to use politics to fix equal certain things that have no natural correlation is a dicey business even when we are being extremely explicit and specific; and of course part of the point to traditionalism is the admission that it isn’t possible to be so explicit and specific.

I haven’t the foggiest idea what Matt is saying in his last comment. However, it doesn’t matter, as I feel this has been a fruitful discussion. Matt has converted me to his view, or, at least, what I THINK his view is. :-)

Mr. Auster writes:
“I haven’t the foggiest idea what Matt is saying in his last comment. However, it doesn’t matter, …”

Fair enough! Maybe one more try at clarification using the voting/race example will help; if not that is OK too.

If we say that race cannot be explicitly mentioned anywhere in the voting laws that is one kind of requirement (that would be a requirement not to use race as an *explicit* discriminand). If on the other hand we say that race must not be a discriminand at all - that voting must be abstractly race-blind - then we have included de-facto or non-explicit discrimination as a part of what must be actively banned in the context of voting. That already introduces the practical and rational problems summarized in the term “disparate impact”, without even invoking equality per se.

Our habits of thought when it comes to political equality are so deeply ingrained that indeed they have to be *purged* from our system if we are to avoid the basic rationality problems that they create. Top on the list is that over time literally ANYTHING can be justified when we start from self-contradictory premeses.

Matt seems to be saying that an affirmation of “political equality” with regard to race, even if meant only in a procedural sense, will tend to be changed into an expectation that blacks will have equal political outcomes and equal political power with whites (just as the idea of procedural equality in employment tends to become an expectation of equality of result). So, if we have a situation, say, where blacks have political rights along with whites (i.e., they have the right to vote and hold office), we should not describe that as “political equality” because that would imply that blacks should end up with the same power as whites. Instead, we should say very precisely that blacks have a “right to vote and right to run for office.”

Have I understood Matt?

I made a similar point to Norman Podhoretz once (it was the only in-person exchange I ever had with him, at a small luncheon where he was the speaker). He had said something about equality of opportunity being what America is all about, and I said: Equality of opportunity is this elastic phrase that tends to turn into equality of result, i.e., into the notion that people must be in an equivalent situation in life (having graduated from a good college, for example) in order to have an equal opportunity. Of course that’s not the intended meaning of the word (the intended meaning is simply an absence of arbitrary obstacles in one’s path in life), but the meaning has certainly changed in that direction. I concluded, “Equality of opportunity is not a good cry for conservatives.” Naturally he disagreed.

Mr. Auster:
“Matt seems to be saying that an affirmation of “political equality” with regard to race, even if meant only in a procedural sense, will tend to be changed…”

And indeed that procedures always come from somewhere, go through changes, and are not substantively value-neutral. So there is really no such thing as purely procedural equality except in a highly limited instantaneous sense. In this (and in little else) I agree with the Marxists and the postmoderns. I disagree with the Marxists that this means that unequal politics (the only actually existing or even conceivably possible kind) is inherently evil and tyrannical. That is because I reject the Lockean/Jeffersonian requirement for equal freedom as prerequisite for legitimacy in politics at the very outset, whereas the Marxist does not reject it.

I think Mr. Auster and I are certainly close in our understanding of political equality at this point. In one of his comments above he says:

“Real equality is not possible.”

My position is slightly more “extreme” (though I believe it to correspond with the objective truth). My position is that political equality is indeed not practically possible, but the reason it is not is because it is rationally inconceivable. It cannot be asserted as a political requirement without self-contradiction.

Maybe this will assist Matt. Mr. Black and Mr. White are neighbors, and they are equal. The second clause is meaningless without the particulars in, it appears, every case.
It seems Mr. Auster is needlessly introducing the word arbitrary, which is a way of saying “that’s no reason.”
This discussion is important because it touches the heart of American constitutional law and of American politics today, not that the main commentators don’t deserve a break.

An idea that Mr. Auster and Matt seem to agree on is one should use the word equality rarely if ever when discussing politics. This is similar to the approach taken by cognitive psychologists who contend, to one degree or the other, that some mental illnesses can be cured or diminished by identifying and changing thinking distortions. For example, these psychologists warn against words such as should, which is a dysfunctional, self-scolding word. The word equality carries the word should: we “should” treat one another “equally” or reasonably. Matt contends, however, we are not equal in flesh or deed and reason varies. For example, some reason that dying for the Fatherland is an honor while others reason dying to protect private property is more important.

Mr. Murgos writes:
“The second clause is meaningless without the particulars in, it appears, every case.”

It is even more cognitively impossible than creating the infinite list of all possible particulars, though, because “equal” is asserted with respect to this thing called a “right”; and a “right” is always a particular authority to a particular thing in a particular circumstance that one person can assert over another, and is thus intrinsically unequal. (There are other senses of “right”, but there are no other senses of “right” that can be _asserted_).

Mr. Murgos wrote:
“Matt contends, however, we are not equal in flesh or deed and reason varies.”

My claim isn’t nearly as sweeping as this, by the way. I neither deny nor assert that there may be such a thing as equality in some metaphysical sense that cannot touch any actual act of politics. I simply claim that every conceivable particular political act, including every particular assertion of a right, sets up a discrimination and restricts someone’s freedom based on that discrimination. Therefore to claim that such acts/assertions are in any sense abstractly equal is self-contradictory.

Government for freedom and equal rights (either on a group basis or an individual basis) is self-contradictory in every single case in which it actually exercises authority. Every single exercise of government authority is an unprincipled exception to liberalism.

So why should we buy into the Lie?