Equality in the US has been a fraught proposition all along

Equality has always been a fraught concept. In the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had the temerity to declare that “all men are created equal,” which the slave owner from Virginia neither believed nor pretended to, at least not beyond rhetoric. Stanford historian Jack Rakove holds that Jefferson meant colonists “as a people” had a right to self-government that was equal to the right of other peoples. But given the scarcity of self-government in 1776, even that’s a curiously expansive framework. In the run-up to that revolt, ‘equality’, however hedged, was a useful rallying cry for Americans seeking to jettison a king, who ruled over them from divinely inspired heights, and his troops, who exercised proximate controls. A decade later, with freedom won and British Raj tossed, the statement’s utility seemed to have expired; it found no purchase in the slavery-drenched US Constitution.

Much US history that followed can be viewed as a contest between rising demands for equality and entrenched defences of hierarchy, racial included. Much politics today follows suit. ‘Make America Great Again’ frequently casts itself as a populist movement against elites: academics, scientists, culture leaders and the kind of condescending educated affluent liberals who occupy cosmopolitan cities and conservative imaginations. But the quotidian reality of MAGA politics is not an assault on hierarchy, but a defence of it. Its fiercest commitments are to a veritable sprawl of privilege, elevating Caucasians over others, male over female, straight over LGBTQ+, native over migrant, rich over poor, rural over urban, Christian over other, and conservative over all.

Across the US, policies that reinforce hierarchy are Republican signatures: work requirements for poor parents combined with tax cuts for the wealthy; abortion prohibitions that undermine female autonomy; and a frenzied assault on other gender and sexual identities, which is an effort to deny the pursuit of happiness to a marginalized class. It’s telling that the long conservative war on affirmative action that ended at the Supreme Court targeted race-conscious admissions facilitating the entry of minorities into elite institutions. Legacy and donor-driven admissions, which reinforce the hold of a permanent elite, rarely animated conservatives in the same way.

In his 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Garry Wills documents what he calls the “giant (if benign) swindle” that Abraham Lincoln accomplished in November 1863 with 272 words. It began with the very first sentence of his Gettysburg address, when he called the US a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Reverence for the founders, the wealthy Caucasian men who set the Constitutional machine in motion, has always offered a convenient guise in which to perpetuate the brutally hierarchical and racist world in which they thrived. Lincoln, Wills writes, had to “sneak around the frontal defenses of prejudice and find a back way into agreement with bigots.” This explains, at the level of tactics, the usefulness of the 1776 Declaration for Lincoln. That revered document was anti-monarchical in common perception and thus unchallengeable. But because it indicted King George III in terms of equality, “it committed Americans to claims even more at odds with slavery than with kingship….” At Gettysburg, Lincoln laid the foundation for a war after the Civil War, when ideals of freedom would challenge long-held prejudices. That project failed. Instead, a vicious reaction delayed the dawn of equality for a century.

Lincoln mostly succeeded, however, in changing the meaning of ‘equality’ in the Declaration, setting off a moral battle that continues. Many Americans now understand “all men are created equal” as a quintessentially American fact.

But if all are created equal, why are some born into stifling deprivation while others enjoy boundless privilege? Who should surrender privilege in service to equality, and who should get it? That’s what affirmative action was all about, and what the court’s ruling was about, too. Indeed, the portioning of privilege remains the stuff of American politics in 2023. The dead hand of reaction hasn’t lifted. The demand for equality isn’t met. Yet, the slave-holder’s 1776 Declaration, repurposed by the Great Emancipator, still offers escape from the straitjacket of the past. 

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. 

Updated: 03 Jul 2023, 11:28 PM IST