A Culture War Worth the Fight

“The predictable consequence is that instead of striving together toward the ethereal glow at the top of the highest peak, we are coming apart and stomping each other and ourselves further down into the abyss…”

One of the foremost goals of any democracy is—or should be—the satisfaction of its citizens. The goal can be fulfilled in one of two fundamental ways: economic policy and social policy. Save for hardcore Marxists who view all social politics as pure projections of underlying economic substructures and hardcore libertarians who see hardly any role for government at all, we would generally agree that some combination of economic and social approaches is desirable. But that consensus still leaves nearly all the interesting questions undecided as to how much and what variety of each of these two overarching schemas to deploy. The right balance, I contend, requires only a modicum of economic redistribution coupled with robust efforts to achieve social unity on a national scale. Today, however, we are moving in the exact opposite direction, putting ourselves on a surefire path toward a second civil war.

Extreme economic inequality is a problem. Among its many consequences are all manner of adverse health outcomes (both physical and psychological, including those adverse health outcomes precipitated by higher rates of violence) and lower levels of trust and social cohesion. But here is the thing about inequality: Once we have addressed its most extreme manifestations, there remains a vast chasm between where we are and the utopian or dystopian ideal of total equity. While Jesus was all for compassion and alms for the poor, he also wisely counseled that “the poor will be with [us] always.” The economist Friedrich Hayek elaborated on the theme:

“[A]ny policy aiming directly at a substantive ideal of distributive justice must lead to the destruction of the Rule of Law. To produce the same result for different people, it is necessary to treat them differently. To give different people the same objective opportunities is not to give them the same subjective chance. It cannot be denied that the Rule of Law produces economic inequality — all that can be claimed for it is that this inequality is not designed to affect particular people in a particular way. It is very significant and characteristic that socialists (and Nazis) have always protested against ‘merely’ formal justice, that they have always objected to a law which had no views on how well off particular people ought to be.”