Debate: Conservatives and Equality

Are conservatives against equality? Are liberals the real aristocrats?

It’s a cliché: liberals care about equality of outcome, and conservatives care about equality of opportunity.

Some liberals take this conservative attitude to be an indication that conservatives are against equality as a political ideal because, in their heart of hearts, they don’t believe in equality of persons.

Is the cliché true? Is political conservatism necessarily against equality? Do conservatives simply believe that human beings are unequal?

Or is conservatism truly about something else — human dignity, say — and conservative skepticism about egalitarianism is not a necessary part of what it means to be conservative?

We brought two sharp minds to debate this topic. Matt McManus is a political philosopher whose latest book, The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, will come out in November. Carlo Lancellotti is a professor at CUNY Staten Island — in mathematical physics, of all things — and a translator of the Italian political thinker Augusto Del Noce. Though Carlo does not consider himself a conservative, his translations have influenced many American commentators on the Right, including Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari and Rod Dreher.

Carlo will kick us off. Enjoy reading!

— SR

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Carlo opens the conversation by challenging Matt’s understanding of conservatism:

Are conservatives against equality on principle? Do they have to be? Is it part of being conservative — that you have to oppose political and economic equality? This is what I want to discuss with you.

In recent comments on Substack, you posted this quote from Friedrich Hayek, and argued that it sums up everything conservatives really, truly believe about equality. Briefly put: They’re against it.

Here’s the Hayek quote:

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others.

Although I do not consider myself “conservative,” I find Hayek’s judgment perplexing on historical grounds. I don’t agree that conservatism is intrinsically against political equality. If a lot of conservatives find themselves arguing against equality in this or that policy debate, it is not because of their conservatism, but due to some other reason.

A good way to start our discussion would be for you to tell us which conservative thinkers fit Hayek’s description. Who would you name?

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Matt lays out the evidence:

I’ll begin with Russell Kirk and Edmund Burke. In Kirk’s case, consider his ten “chief principles which have characterized American conservative thought” discussed in the Concise Guide to Conservatism. Kirk’s first canon of conservatism is “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” The second holds that “uniformity and absolute equality are the death of all real vigor and freedom in existence.” The third holds that justice “means that every man and every woman have the right to what is their own” which entails that they have “equal rights before the law, but that equality should not extend to equality of condition; that is, society is a great partnership, in which all have equal rights — but not to equal things.” The fourth insists that property and “freedom and inseparably connected; economic levelling is not economic progress.”

Burke’s fixation on inequality and hierarchical authority is omnipresent throughout Reflections on the Revolution in France. He insists the “real equality” consists in an obedient and happy citizenry who

recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove.

Burke rejects the idea that individuals have equal political rights: “As to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society.” Instead, possession of political rights is to be set by “convention” — meaning those who inherit more rights according to tradition gain more power and authority.

And we haven’t even gotten to Burke’s comments on the “swinish multitude” or Kirk’s ambivalent opinions about the Jim Crow American South.

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Carlo’s first rebuttal:

Those examples illustrate very well that conservatives like Kirk and Burke hold non-egalitarian views, which as far as I am concerned was not in doubt. The question I was raising is what is foundational or essential to conservative thought and motivates its subsequent operations.

Is anti-egalitarianism a feature or a bug of conservative thought?

It seems very clear to me that in all these authors the acknowledgment of natural differences and social hierarchies is rooted in a deep-seated skepticism of utopian thinking, and in a sense of deference towards “the given,” so to speak. I am not convinced that conservative tolerance of inequalities reflects a fundamental philosophical decision.

I would like to look at the question also from an entirely different angle. Clearly, if there really is an intrinsic, essential and timeless affinity between conservatism and belief in the social role of recognizably superior persons, it should also manifest itself today, in our own political life. Therefore let us ask ourselves: in the United States in 2024, what sort of people hold the view described by Hayek?

We can certainly find some of them in neo-racist circles on social media, or among social-Darwinian techno-libertarian types around Silicon Valley. But the real believers in social hierarchy today are found in the great liberal and meritocratic strongholds of American society. Figures like the great federal bureaucrat, the Hollywood executive, the top private university administrator, the influential New York editor, the program director at an immensely wealthy private foundation.

These are the kinds of people who regards themselves as superior, and think they deserve an elevated social status because of their extraordinary academic, intellectual and professional achievements. And now let us ask ourselves: what are their politics? There is no doubt that they are generally either left-liberals or outright progressives, deeply invested in left-wing political causes like anti-racism, transgender rights, climate change and so on and so forth.

By contrast, the right-wing, populist reaction seems to be driven precisely by a rebellion against this social hierarchy on the part of Hillary Clinton’s famous “deplorables.”

How would you explain this inversion?

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Matt responds:

Now that we’ve reached a consensus on the hierarchical and anti-egalitarian views of figures like Kirk and Burke, we can move to the more interesting question: not whether conservatives hold anti-egalitarian views, but whether a repudiation of equality and an endorsement of the view that there are “recognizably superior persons” in society constitutes the “essence” of conservatism.  

I believe that the rejection of egalitarianism, and an endorsement of the view that there are recognizably superior persons, is indeed the common “essence” of all doctrines on the “right.” This includes conservatism, but also other doctrines on the right ranging from some species of libertarianism and neoliberalism, to traditionalist authoritarianism, to the radical right and generic fascism.

In the past 40 years we have seen several American conservatives occupy the presidency. Ronald Reagan famously invoked the ultra-revolutionary Thomas Paine to declare “we have it in our power to make the world anew.” More than just words, Reagan transformed everything from the U.S. tax code to favor the rich, to the carceral system which mainly impacted the racialized poor, to the international order, to even the nature of telecommunications through abolishing the Fairness Doctrine.

George W. Bush initiated vast wars on a global scale intended to remake the world order in a way that both conformed to American interests and advanced its value systems. His senior advisor Karl Rove famously lampooned the “reality based community” insisting that as an empire the United States made its own reality now and the rest of the world had to deal with it.

And of course Donald Trump has been as transformative a president as one might expect, overturning democratic values and demonstrating contempt for the rule of law and order. All done in the name of securing for the “winners” their rights against the “losers” who have too long been defended by the left.  

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Carlo explains where he’s coming from:

To talk about politicians in place of philosophers is an example of the death of philosophy. You aptly quoted Kirk’s sentence about conservatism being based on “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.” Does that sound to you the type of thinking that drives the modern political “conservatism” you decry in your latest response? You even brought up … Donald Trump? Would you seriously say that Trump belongs to a broad philosophical tradition that includes Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk?

Times change, and if we keep trying applying the same names to very different phenomena, based on superficial common features, we will not understand them.

Speaking of Reagan, I am old enough to remember how people felt in 1979-80, when they were elected. Many people felt that “the revolution was over.” My grandparents’ generation had lived in the world shaped by the Leninist revolution and its endless “Western counterparts”: Fascism, Nazism, then in Italy Gramscism and its strange synergy with consumerism and the sexual revolution, and then the “final bourgeois revolution” of 1968.

By the 1970s the revolutionary idealism had exhausted itself in the clearly pointless violence of terrorist groupuscules, not only in Italy. That decade was the “Years of Lead” — I remember them. Thus the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher era felt like a relief.  

Except that the “end of the revolution” did not mark at all the victory of “conservatism” but rather the advent of nihilism. Revolutionary ideology had left behind a more radically individualistic and disintegrated bourgeois world, Nietzsche’s last men, “neoliberalism.” As the quip goes, there was nothing left to conserve. In that sense the old conservatism of the 19^th and 20^th centuries was, and remains, dead.

This history holds a lesson for the left: you will get the Right you deserve. For example, by ungenerously underplaying the better religious and philosophical ideals that animated many conservative thinkers, and by giving prominence to their putative embrace of “inequality,” you are objectively contributing to the process that leads to a more nihilistic right.

In a nihilistic cultural context, trying to organize politics in terms of the opposition equality-inequality has the inevitable effect of making the concept of equality purely ideological (instrumental), since it has lost its philosophical-theological roots. Anybody can say that they believe in equality, solidarity and justice, and it is a wonderful way for established economic and cultural powers to protect their interests.

Today the most conservative social forces have appropriated what used to be the egalitarian language of the left. Therefore trying to pin on “classical” conservatism the stigma of being essentially “aristocratic” is pointless. Today’s true aristocracy resides elsewhere. 

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Matt sums up his views:

I transitioned to talking about politicians since it’s important to recognizing these aren’t just abstract debates, but have real applications in practice. And of course to provide further and more contemporary examples of the core point. 

Again, my claim is that the rejection of equality is the “essence” of all doctrines on the right. It is telling that you see this as an accusation, rather than the observation that it is. This is a sentiment that many on the right have long complained about and tried to culturally diagnose and cure.

Vast swathes of thoughtful and even profound right-wing theory have been dedicated to discovering why and when the doctrine of moral equality emerged and gained such revolutionary currency that any deviation from it was considered at best unkind and at worst a form of evil. They have dedicated enormous amounts of time to discrediting what William Buckley called the “ever so busy egalitarians” and their grip on our moral sentiments. And their efforts have not been in vain; since 2016 right-wing populists and authoritarians have gained enormous ground and may yet shape the century. If that is so we will all be the poorer for it.  

Finally, a few words about the “inversion” you mention above: Equality is a hard principle to fight for since many of the most powerful and privileged find it very difficult to imagine that another’s life is indeed as worthy as their own. They rightly suspect that treating other lives as equally worthy might run counter to their interests. As Max Weber observed there has never been a ruling class which is content with being a ruling class; they always feel compelled to somehow insist that they “deserve” their station by virtue of some clear superiority. We should hope that this fiction disappears, along with our increasingly stratified class society itself.  

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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