NPR’s Morning Edition hosted a debate (of sorts) today on the question of “inequality” in American society. Like other mainstream media outlets, it is faithfully following the line laid down by President Obama, the Democrats, and the Occupy Wall Street mob, who insist that “the rich” are the central problem in our society. The debate is an attempt to distract from the failure of big government to create growth, opportunity, or shared prosperity.
Of course, inequality is a perennial topic of inquiry for philosophers, economists, and policy wonks–though it is rarely the urgent priority the left makes it out to be. It is also a topic on which American thinkers, both liberal and conservative, had achieved a degree of consensus, until recently. That consensus declined to treat inequality as a problem in itself, but rather as a condition that only became a problem if associated with injustice. What remained up for debate was the definition of injustice and its remedies.
Liberals such as John Rawls defined justice as “fairness,” by which he meant that those inequalities that did exist in society would have to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. That might require redistribution to make up for inheritance, luck, and talent. However, inequality due to different levels of effort was socially useful, especially to the poor, because it could create growth and innovation that led to opportunity.
Conservatives in the libertarian mold of Robert Nozick argued instead that justice was fundamentally about an individual’s right to possess the fruits of his or her labor, as well as what he or she had obtained in voluntary transactions with others. “Fairness,” in the conservative view, imposed an arbitrary pattern of distribution that inevitably resulted in depriving some who had done no wrong to reward others who had done no right.
The debate between these two philosophies was rich and vibrant, encompassing a variety of perspectives and prescriptions. It flourished because it excluded extreme and destructive views–such as the radical “leveling” view that everyone should be forced to be equal, and the totalitarian view that one person or group should dominate all others. While American conservatives accepted these conditions, liberals began to resent them.
For example, Barack Obama–just a few years before running for president–complained that the civil rights-era Supreme Court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth” and “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution.”
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The liberal critique of President Bill Clinton’s market-friendly policies in the 1990s–which Clinton is now abandoning–was the same.
The reason liberals began to reject the American consensus on inequality was because of sustained pressure from the far left, which sought to commandeer liberal politics after communism became politically unviable. Thus, Obama lamented that the civil rights movement failed to build “coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributed change.” His career, and his presidency, focused on redressing that failure.
To the extent that Obama has succeeded, he has been assisted by the media, whose pre-existing liberal bias makes them more susceptible to far-left ideas. Thus NPR can host a debate on inequality in which both participants–left-wing blogger Matthew Yglesias and economist Tyler Cowen–are expected to agree that inequality is a problem per se–a crude idea outside the traditional mainstream of both liberal and conservative thought in America.
Liberal pundits proclaim that the Republican party has “shifted right.” As the NPR debate suggests, the opposite is true: conservatives have ceded ground by accepting that inequality is a problem requiring government as the solution. That is not only a political problem but a moral crisis within the conservative movement–perhaps more urgent than the dilemma posed by conventional moral issues like abortion and gay marriage.
Whatever happens in Congress, NPR’s Steve Inskeep claims, the real issues are those raised by Occupy Wall Street around inequality. The contrast between Occupy and the Tea Party–and media coverage of each–is a reminder that while conservatives long ago jettisoned their extremists, among liberals the extreme is ascendant, and applauded.
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