Free And Equal: Thoughts For The Fourth Of July
By Margaret Snyder (07/03/03)
“…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty…” – Declaration of Independence, 1776
“…a … nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…” – Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863
The emphasis has been added to point out how inseparable the two concepts of liberty and equality are in our whole notion of political legitimacy, nationhood and citizenship.
Aside from the Constitution, the documents cited above, separated by a period of 87 years, are two of the most treasured expressions of our national identity. The first laid the foundation for our independence and the institution of a new form of government. In the second the President articulated, on the occasion of consecrating the final resting place of the soldiers who died at Gettysburg, his belief in the imperatives of preserving the nation his generation had been bequeathed and righting its most egregious and tragic flaw.
As understood by the founders of our nation, these concepts, liberty and equality, were not at odds. Equality was understood to mean equality before God. Of equal intrinsic worth. Equal before the law.
In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx introduced a different meaning of equality. To him equality was not intrinsic, but understood in a material sense. Marx explained all history in terms of oppressors and oppressed. History was moving inexorably toward an end, at which time everyone would be equal in material terms. Each would contribute according to his means and receive according to his need and no one would have more than anyone else. There is no room in Marx for the idea that oppression can be spiritual as well as material.
The spontaneous, inexorable progress of history failed to develop as advertised but in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution, in an attempt to help history along, proposed to bring about a worker’s paradise, where everyone would be equal. Unfortunately, this concept of equality is not compatible with liberty.
Having to choose between liberty and equality, the communists chose equality and got neither. The tens of millions dead, the slave labor camps, the spirit-deadening repression and widespread want were the collateral damage of the quest for equality.
But they managed to keep most of the world in the dark about the actual nature of their regime for a long while. It sounded so nice; you know, everybody sharing everything, nobody acting selfishly, no poverty.
Under Roosevelt the Democratic Party decided that it was possible, therefore imperative, for the government to ameliorate poverty. Their idea was different in degree but not substantially in kind from the supposed ideal of the Soviet Union. And so the Democratic Party drifted away from the traditional understanding of equality into something more akin to Marx’s idea of equality.
They began to see equality, understood in its material sense, as a greater good than freedom.
I think Democrats felt somewhat ashamed of our country, where freedom led to people accumulating wealth for themselves, when they compared it to a country founded on what seemed to them noble ideals of selfless equality. Willfully or not, they refused to contemplate the actual results of trying to achieve those “noble ideals”.
The foregoing ramblings are by way of searching for an explanation for the phenomenon described in Treason by Ann Coulter. Ms. Coulter shows in page-turning, breath-taking, prose (I laughed, I cried, I didn’t even read the Sunday funnies until I finished) that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, elements of the Democratic Party were consistently more supportive of the Soviet Union than of the United States of America, from the end of World War II until the demise of the USSR, but she doesn’t tell us why.
I think it was their natural affinity with an ideal of material equality and a tendency to see that equality as superior to freedom. The USSR is dead, but this ideal of equality is not.
Liberty and equality. They do belong together. We have lost a lot of the former in a quest for the latter, wrongly understood.
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