Article by Philip Carl Salzman in "PJMedia":
One
of the great values of modern Western culture is equality. “Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity,” and “all men are created equal” are historically
important statements of the basic importance of equality. For 500 years
in the West, especially in England, activists such as the Levelers
strove to have special legal provisions for aristocrats nullified, and
to institute instead equality before the law. Early in the 19th century,
slavery was abolished, and the Atlantic slave trade interdicted by the Royal Navy. Later in 19th-century England, the restrictions on Catholics and Jews voting and holding office were eliminated. In 1918, women were given
the right to run for office, and all women were given the right to vote
in 1928. America and many others followed these leads shortly
thereafter. The civil rights movement in America led to protections for racial minorities, particularly African Americans.
In
the 21st century in America and elsewhere, self-described progressives
strove to display virtue and gain power through advocating a maximalist
position on equality. Equality of opportunity, still imperfectly
implemented, was jettisoned in favor of equality of result
or outcome. Any inequality, from whatever source, was deemed by
progressive to be evil and requiring correction. This has led to the
attempt by progressives to treat inequalities among parties as
illegitimate, and imposed equality as obligatory. As a result, many new
proposed equalities were specious. Here are some examples.
Progressives,
including most Democrats and most candidates for the Democratic
nomination for president, now claim equality and equivalence between
criminal illegal aliens who have entered the country by stealth, and
legal immigrants who have been admitted by government procedures, and
citizens. Progressives advocate open borders,
allowing anyone who arrives to enter the country, and providing for
them the same medical and welfare benefits given to legal immigrants and
native-born citizens. One reason
for supporting open borders is that progressives see America as an
oppressive race hierarchy, and open borders would allow the intake of
multitudes of people of color, thus displacing the evil American whites.
Progressives
do not think that illegal aliens, even criminals, should be expelled,
and demand that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) be
restricted or disbanded. Many Democrat-controlled jurisdictions have
declared themselves sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, flouting laws
passed by Congress. In those jurisdictions, police are forbidden from
alerting ICE when illegal-immigrant criminals are freed before trial.
Montgomery County, Maryland, enjoyed a spate of rapes
of children by the illegal immigrants its sanctuary was protecting. As
well as jurisdictions, most colleges and universities, all captives to
progressive administrators and staffs, have also declared themselves sanctuary institutions,
providing many special services to assist students who are illegal
immigrants. Illegal immigrants, as opposed to American citizens, are
regarded as especially deserving of consideration and benefits.
Progressive
jurisdictions have taken it a step further in equating criminals with
law-abiding citizens, by simply canceling laws and decriminalizing what
used to be felonies, in the name of “justice reform.” So, for example,
in California, the laws against theft have been removed for goods of
less than $950, which has resulted in widespread property theft,
the highest level in the country. As well, the mentally ill and
drug-addicted homeless have been allowed to occupy public sidewalks and
parks, using them for sleeping, shooting up, begging, and urinating and
defecating, spreading disease along with their filth. In New York State,
90% of the people arrested for serious felonies, pretty much anything
short of murder and robbery with firearms, no longer
have to post bail in order to be released, but are immediately sent out
into the law-abiding public to carry on what they were doing before,
such as the bank-robbing releasee
who, once released, robbed five more banks. The rationale is twofold:
first, poor people are disadvantaged compared to richer people in paying
bail, so let everyone out without bail, and let the public deal with
them; second, because more African Americans commit crimes and end up in
jail, the justice system is RACIST! so we are obliged to abolish the
justice system. In New York State, public safety is, by law, not considered in justice-system legislation or decisions.
In
economic terms, equality means equal amounts of wealth and income.
Progressives are very agitated about “income inequality,” and rant
against the One Percent who are much wealthier than they are. Financial
equality of outcome is the philosophical version of envy, a normal but
unfortunate human reaction (and one of the Seven Deadly Sins). It is
also the attempt to make equal what can never be equal, because human
beings are unequal in intelligence, talent, and motivation, and so
outcomes will never be equal unless coercive force is used to make them
so.
The
favorite economic policy of progressives is redistribution: taking
wealth from those who have earned it, to give to those who have not
earned it. As is always the case, the production of wealth is ignored in
favor of distribution, so that eventually wealth runs out and everyone
shares in poverty. Here too, displaying virtue and gaining power are the
benefits of advocating redistribution, as those in the bottom half of
the wealth and income profile are likely to vote for those who promise
them other people’s money. That the people in the top half of the wealth
and income profile pay
most all of the taxes, and those in the bottom half pay almost none,
and receive many welfare benefits, does not satisfy progressive equality
absolutists. Progressives love to hate the evil rich, and to profit
from their hate.
Progressive
believe that they must champion “marginalized” and “racialized”
populations in order to advance “social justice.” Poor victimized
females are a high-priority “marginalized” population that requires
special consideration and benefits. That females have a higher level of
employment than males in the U.S., entirely dominate the educational
sector, including all colleges and universities, and make up a large
majority of government employees, does not appear to influence their
alleged “marginal” status. One red herring that constantly swims back
into progressive discourse is the gender “wage gap,” the difference in
pay between males and females. The progressive assertion is that this is
due to unfair gender discrimination. The reality is that it reflects
the many more hours, days, weeks, and years that males work in
comparison to females. The false equivalence of male and female work
ignores these basic facts. But facts never kept progressives from
demanding more for females.
The
assumption of discrimination is applied by progressives to any
statistical discrepancy between different sectors of the population. The
lack of any population’s presence at the same level as their percentage
of the general population is taken as a sign of discrimination. For
example, if African Americans, at 13% of the population, are not
admitted to elite colleges and universities at 13% or more, that must be
due to discrimination. So too with members of any business, government
office, political office, and so on. The problem is that representation
is different from a group’s share of the general population is not
a sign of discrimination. We know that African Americans numerically
dominate, i.e. are highly “overrepresented,” in some professional
sports, such as the NFL and NBA, but no case could be made that this is
due to discrimination against whites and Asians. Similarly, East Asians
and Jews are highly overrepresented in professions and academia, but
there is no evidence that this is due to discrimination against people
of European ancestry or Christians.
The
low numbers of African Americans and Hispanics in elite colleges and
universities has been a great concern of progressives. Progressives have
favored “affirmative action” to enforce admission of African Americans and Hispanics, although Americans in general do not
approve. Progressives continue to argue that low admissions of racial
minorities is due to racial discrimination. But the reality is that the
academic performance of African Americans and Hispanics, in both schools
and in national tests, is relatively poor, compared to whites and
high-flying East Asians. This is clearly not a matter of racial
discrimination: Caribbean and West African blacks in America perform at a
high academic level, and are highly successful in education and employment. What differentiates the different racial groups is their cultures. There are different attitudes in different groups toward education. There are also different social arrangements in different groups that have an impact
on education. For example, 70% of African American children are brought
up in single-parent homes, and are disadvantaged by that. African
American children brought up in two-parent homes are much more successful academically.
In
the name of “diversity” and “inclusion,” progressives insist on the
admission of academically weak racial minorities into colleges and
universities. Progressives reject ideas of “merit” and “achievement” as
“white-supremacist talking points.” They prefer to force the issue. And
the results are exactly what you would expect: African American students
with good academic records do fine; African American students with weak
academic records admitted on a racial basis do poorly, for example, drop out
of science programs and end up in black studies or other identity
programs of little merit. But we might note here that inclusion of
people means exclusion of others: applicants with weak credentials are
given places, while others with much stronger credentials are rejected.
So affirmative action “diversity” does not just mean “inclusion,” it
means exclusion of disfavored racial groups. Progressives demand that
African American and Hispanic students be treated as academically equal
to other students, when in many cases they are not. The results are poor
for everyone, with academia degraded, with some individuals being punished
with exclusion for their non-preferred race, and with subpar students
graduated and passed off as legitimate to the wider society.
The new “marginalized population” du jour is the transsexuals.
Progressives now not only give individuals, from five years old up, the
right to change their gender without parental permission, but they
require taxpayers to pay for the hormonal treatment and plastic surgery
constructing fake sex organs, and for everyone else, under force of law,
to abide by the fantasy that people can change their sex. Physically
male “transfemales” and physically female “transmales” can change their
surface appearance, but it is impossible to “transition” male xy genes
and female xx genes into their opposite. Progressive claims that
transfemales can menstruate and have babies, and transfemales can seed
babies, is laughable rubbish. Progressives demand the public recognition
of “gender identity,” although transracial identities and transtemporal
age identities have been rejected. We are supposed to accept that
physical male “transfemales” are genuine females, and transmales genuine
males, a false equivalence, the absurdity of which even surpasses
previous false progressive equivalences. The damage done by the trans
movement and its supporters—physical males invading female spaces, the
destruction of female sports as “transfemales” dominate—is incalculable.
The progressive program to advance women at the expense of men, is here
stood on its head, and physical males given leave to abuse females at
will. When will the me-too movement wake up to trans abuse?
But what progressives are most enthusiastic about is abortion. For 2014, the Guttmacher Institute reported
926,200 abortions in the U.S. What kind of society encourages its women
to kill their babies? Progressives promised that legalized abortion
would be “rare,” but they are now lobbying to legalize late term
abortions and infanticide. However more frontiers remain; why not have
the option to terminate children up to the age of majority? Progressives
label abortion “reproductive rights,” but that label is not equal to
honest transparency; would it not be more accurate to call it “the
wholesale slaughter of babies”?
Progressives
have raised the value of equality above all others. Liberty,
prosperity, order, beauty, and others are disregarded in the quest to
make equality the overriding value. But by championing many equivalences
that are not in fact equal, progressive have betrayed not only the
other values, but equality also.