As Aristotle reminds us, it’s easy to make mistakes about equality. The simplest mistake is to believe that we deserve not only more than we have but also more than can be justified by any rational principle of distribution. This insight provides us with a concise explanation for political conflict: in any community, citizens will believe that they are entitled to more power than they have, based on their superiority in some area or another—any area will do, if it can form the core of a successful political appeal. The poor are superior in numbers, and therefore should have the most votes in the assembly; the rich pay all the taxes, and therefore should write all the laws; those whose superiority consists of their aristocratic breeding think that they should have the lion’s share of powerful offices.
We have a second great teacher of equality: Alexis de Tocqueville, who saw in the French and American revolutions the two faces of modern equality: the desire to tear down, and the desire to raise up. Both desires could be found in both countries, but the French were afflicted with the first, while the Americans were blessed with the second. If Americans were wise enough, Tocqueville believed, they could parlay this blessing into the foundation of the first successful modern democracy, one that could tame the contest for office and influence through the promise of equal citizenship and equal rights under law. By contrast, the desire to tear everyone down to the same level while raising the government to ever greater heights is the cornerstone of modern collectivism, in both its fascist and Communist varieties, and has been the source of much misery and destruction.
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