Discussing “Obama and Income Inequality,” Mickey Kaus, one of the last of the orthodoxy-bucking liberals, writes:
There are two big questions to ask liberal opponents of income inequality. 1) What, exactly, is it about greater economic inequality that’s so bad? and 2) What you gonna do about it?
You should read his entire post, but, briefly, he argues regarding Question 1 that income inequality is not bad in itself; it’s bad “because it corrodes social equality—i.e., whether we respect each other as equals.” And if that is the case, he says, moving on to regarding Question 2, “there are other methods (e.g., national service, a national health care system, safe and popular public spaces) that can directly give us more social equality than longshot liberal efforts to indirectly affect social equality” with taxes and programs designed to redistribute wealth.
Now let me ask liberals opposed to racial inequality a parallel pair of questions, similar to Mickey’s not only in form but, to a perhaps surprising degree, in the answers they elicit: 1) What, exactly, is it about racial inequality that’s so bad? and 2) What you gonna do about it?
In the old days liberals could have answered Question 1 straightforwardly, but that is no longer true for today’s liberals, who have elevated group rights over individual rights and who now believe that imposing burdens based on race on some individuals is both necessary and proper in order to bestow benefits based on race on others. They believe that because what they now mean by racial inequality is not treating people differently based on their race (which liberals used to, and conservatives still do, believe) but rather any measurable differences between blacks and whites, whether or not those differences are the result of discrimination.
The liberal answer to “what you gonna do” about racial inequality thus turns out to look very much like the liberal solution to income inequality: redistribute! Just as poor people don’t have enough wealth, black people don’t have enough “privileges.” Liberals believe, in short, that racial inequality — whether caused by ancient discrimination, current discrimination, or no discrimination — amounts to a caste system that must be broken up by the redistribution of privilege. As I argued a number of years ago in Regulating The Racial Market, “[w]ith the abandonment of an individual right to be free from racial discrimination, race, in short, becomes a commodity to be regulated like any other commodity.” Racial privilege becomes, in short, just another example of wealth to be redistributed.
In Caste Benefit Analysis, back in 2003, I quoted Owen Fiss, an influential Yale law professor who has always defended preferences, who argued that the eradication of caste is the only compelling justification for the discrimination inherent in preferences. “Rather than thinking of affirmative action in terms of diversity or compensation,” he wrote,
we should see it as a structural remedy for a structural problem: as a means of eradicating the caste structure that now mars our society and that has its roots in slavery and the segregation of Jim Crow. By giving blacks a greater share of the privileged positions of society, affirmative action improves the relative position of the group that lies at the bottom of the heap. It aims to end the racial ordering of American society. (Owen Fiss, “Affirmative Action: Beyond Diversity,” Washington Post OpEd, May 27, 1997)
But asserting that what’s wrong with racial inequality is that it results in “the racial ordering of American society” doesn’t really answer the question, for it doesn’t explain what exactly is bad about a racial ordering of society. And in failing to confront that question, the liberal effort to redistribute racial privilege exposes a contradiction at the core of contemporary liberal principle and practice.
Let me put it this way: since any society that has not been leveled by centralized totalitarian authority must be “ordered” in some way or other — inherited status, wealth, talent, intelligence, where your parents went to school, etc. — liberals need to explain why exactly racial ordering is worse than other possible ways. Most Americans almost instinctively know that such ordering is wrong because we have internalized the very principle that today’s liberals have discarded: that every individual has and should have a right to be treated “without regard” to race, a principle, a core value (Gunnar Myrdal called it “The American Creed”) that we believe is taught by our history and embodied in our Constitution.
If it were not wrong for an individual’s opportunities in life to be inhibited on the basis of race, there would be nothing wrong with society being ordered on racial lines. In short, as is frequently the case these days, the liberals’ solution to the problem of racial inequality — regulating the racial market by redistributing racial privilege — violates the principle that justifies their opposition to racial ordering in the first place and actually compounds the problem.
Insofar as our goal is, as it should be, to promote the sort of equality that leads us to “respect each other as equals,” it is essential to prohibit the state from treating us unequally based on race.
