When we consider the revolutions dedicated to equality—the French Revolution of Marat and Robespierre, the Russian Revolution of Lenin and Trotsky, the Chinese Revolution of Mao, the Cuban Revolution of Castro and Che Guevara—are the Durants not right? Is Dougherty not right?
The contention that men and women are equal is found in feminist ideology not human nature. Men are bigger, stronger, more aggressive. That is why men commit crimes and are imprisoned at a rate of ten to one over women.40 That is why men fight wars, lead armies, and build empires. Men’s intelligence levels range higher and lower than those of women. Men reach heights of achievement in mathematics, science, and philosophy few women attain. Men also reach greater depths of depravity. In sports, where Americans demand the best, men and women compete separately.
The first article of France’s Declaration of Human Rights echoes Jefferson and Rousseau: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” But are infants born free? And who decides what is the “general good”? As for equality of rights, yes, but children are not all born equal in the ability to learn. Half are below average. Two months into first grade, children know they are not equal. Some are bright, others slow. Some are athletic, others are not. Some can sing, others cannot. Some girls are pretty, others plain. “So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal that no two people can be half an hour together but one acquires an evident superiority over the other,” said Samuel Johnson.41
In the Old and New Testament are all people equal? Jews were the Chosen People to whom God promised the messiah. The Son of God, his mother, and the twelve apostles were Jews. Among his disciples, Christ preferred John, elevated Peter to be the rock upon which he would build his church, and condemned Judas. In the parable of the talents, the servants are unequally endowed and each is expected to produce consistent with his talents. If Christ taught that some are more gifted than others, the egalitarianism espoused at Howard is in conflict with our Christian faith. Paul affirmed it in his letter to the Romans: “We have gifts differing according to the grace that has been given us.”
THE DODO
Observing the contortions ideologues go through to ensure equality of result, one is reminded of the “Caucus-race” in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Everyone “began running when they liked, and left off when they liked,” and “when they had been running half an hour or so … the Dodo suddenly called out ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’
“At last the Dodo said, ‘everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’”42
The ideologue begins with an idea—all are equal and should have equal shares of the good things in life—then proceeds to try to force society to conform to this ideal. “The ideologue,” wrote Russell Kirk, “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature. In the march toward Utopia, the ideologue is merciless.”43
To the ideologue, adds Professor Gillis Harp, of Grove City College, “Facts don’t matter and character assassination is permissible.”44 The rampant use today in public discourse of terms of anathema and abuse such as “racist,” “sexist,” and “homophobe” testifies to how intolerant the egalitarian is toward those who disbelieve in the core doctrine of his faith.
“Utopias of equality are biologically doomed,” said the Durants.45 “You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork,” said the Roman poet Horace, “yet she will always hasten back.” Whether it be in sports, the arts, music, education, or politics, free and fair competition allows a natural aristocracy to assert and distinguish itself. Freedom produces a hierarchy based on intelligence, talent, and perseverance. The African American leader W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, in a 1903 essay, that the highest priority of his people should be to elevate and educate that natural aristocracy, “The Talented Tenth” of black America.
The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.46
A nation dedicated to the proposition that all are equal and entitled to equal rewards must end up constantly discriminating against its talented tenth, for that is the only way a free society can guarantee social and economic equality. And consider the costs incurred, the injustices done, the freedoms curtailed—all in the name of equality.
• Hundreds of thousands of children have been ordered bused out of their neighborhoods to inferior and often dangerous schools, igniting racial conflict, causing white flight, abandonment of urban schools, and the ruin of public education—a crown jewel of American civilization.
• The right of businesses to hire and promote based on ability and performance has been subjected for decades to policing by tens of thousands of government agents. If a labor force does not reflect gender equality or the racial composition of the community, the company may be prosecuted.
• Governments impose de facto race and gender quotas that add hugely to the cost of doing business. Scores of billions have been siphoned off from companies in class action law suits brought for alleged discrimination in one of the more lucrative rackets in American history.
• The top 1 percent of wage and salary earners now carries 40 percent of the entire income tax load while the bottom 50 percent carry none of it. Was it not the Communist Manifesto that called for a “heavy progressive or graduated income tax”?
• In a nation once renowned for its freedom of speech, censorship is spreading with speech codes on campuses and hate crimes laws that punish speech offensive to the egalitarian dogma that all races, all ethnic groups, and all sexual orientations are to be equally respected.
• To assure equality of all religions, Christianity, our cradle faith, has been purged from the nation’s public schools and public square and treated as just another religion.
• Universities are now required by Title IX to equalize expenditures on men’s and women’s sports, leading to the elimination of men’s sports teams and the creation of women’s teams for which there is little or no demand.
• Almost all men’s colleges have been forced to admit women.
• VMI and the Citadel were forced to admit female cadets although the schools, the alumni, and the mothers, wives, and sisters of VMI and Citadel cadets and graduates protested this judicially mandated end to their 150-year-old tradition.
• Men have been discriminated against so relentlessly that women with jobs now outnumber them, and men sustained 70 to 80 percent of all job losses in the Great Recession.47
• Southern states must still appeal to Justice Department bureaucrats for permission to make minor changes in election laws.
• Dunbar High, perhaps the finest elite black high school in America, which produced generals and senators and sent a higher share of its graduates to college than any Washington, D.C., institution, was converted in the name of equality into a neighborhood school and became one of the most troubled schools in the city.
• In Baker v. Carr (1962), the Supreme Court forbade all states from modeling their legislatures on Congress and mandated that all states be apportioned on population alone. Purpose: impose one-man, one-vote democracy, which our fathers rejected when they gave Delaware and Rhode Island the same number of senators as Massachusetts and Virginia.
• In the name of equality, the Supreme Court has declared the practice of homosexuality to be a constitutional right.
• Vaughn Walker, a gay federal judge in San Francisco, has ruled that same-sex marriage is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Can anyone believe this absurd notion of equality was intended by or written into the Constitution by the Congress that produced the 14th Amendment?
• Although gay marriage has been rejected in thirty-one states in ref
erenda, judges continue to declare that such unions be treated as marriages. An idea of equality rejected democratically by voters is being imposed dictatorially.
• In December 2010, a repudiated liberal Congress imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces by ordering homosexuals admitted to all branches of the service. Indoctrination of recruits, soldiers, and officers into an acceptance of the gay life style will transfer authority over the military, the most respected institution in America, to agents of a deeply resented and widely detested managerial state.
• To bring black and Hispanic home ownership to parity with that of whites, George W. Bush pushed banks into making millions of sub-prime mortgages, defaults on which may yet bring down our free-enterprise system. Egalitarianism may prove to be the murder weapon of American capitalism.
• In the name of equality for all the world’s peoples, the Immigration Act of 1965 threw open the nation’s doors converting America into what Theodore Roosevelt called a “polyglot boarding house” for the world.
When one considers the scores of thousands of bureaucrats in federal, state, and local government, at colleges and in corporations, all working to insure proportional representation of races, ethnic groups, and genders, we begin to see how equality and freedom are at war and why America is a failing nation.
The pursuit of race, gender, ethnic, and economic equality is utopian. Imagine that a regime committed to absolute equality confiscated all the property and wealth of the nation and redistributed it in equal portions. How long would it be before the more able and aggressive citizens would repossess that wealth? Confiscation and redistribution would have to begin anew.
“An egalitarian society,” wrote Rothbard, “can only hope to achieve its goals by totalitarian methods of coercion; and, even here, we all believe and hope the human spirit of individual man will rise up and thwart any such attempts to achieve an ant-heap world.”48
No two men were more unlike than Rothbard and George Kennan. Here they agreed. “I am anything but an egalitarian,” Kennan told Eric Sevareid. “I am very much opposed to egalitarian tendencies of all sorts.”49 Biographer Leo Congdon says that Kennan “viewed the passion for equality as the product of envy and resentment.”50
Yet even professed conservatives have succumbed to the siren’s call of egalitarianism. When Californians voted in Proposition 8 to restrict marriage to a man and a woman, former solicitor general Ted Olson said the voters had violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. “The Constitution of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln does not permit” denying homosexuals the right to marry.51
Is Olson aware that the Constitution of Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln did not contain the words “equal” or “equality” or have an equal protection clause? All three presidents were dead before the Fourteenth Amendment was added. Is Olson aware that Jefferson equated homosexuality with rape and believed homosexuals should be castrated and lesbians punished by “cutting thro’ the cartilage of her nose a hole of one half inch diameter at the least”?52
This is no endorsement of Jefferson’s proposal, but it is further proof that the egalitarian extremism of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries is rooted not in the history of this republic but in the ideology of modern man.
EQUALIZING TEST SCORES
Nowhere has the egalitarian impulse proven more costly or failed more dismally than in the drive to close the racial gap in test scores. And it is not as though we were not warned.
In 1966, a year after LBJ enacted his Elementary and Secondary Education Act, moving the federal government massively into the state and local province of public education, came the famous Coleman Report of 1966. In a review of the performance of two-thirds of a million children, writes Charles Murray, the Harvard- and MIT-trained social scientist:
To everyone’s shock, the Coleman Report … found that the quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Measures such as the credentials of the teachers, the curriculum, the extensiveness and newness of physical facilities, money spent per student—none of the things that people assumed were important in explaining educational achievement were important in fact. Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining student achievement.53
Nature and nurture, heredity and home environment, brains and motivation, the study found, these are the primary determinants of pupil performance.
In 1971, the Atlantic Monthly ran a cover article by Harvard’s Richard Herrnstein. His thesis was that even if we are able to equalize the home and school environment of all children, natural academic ability will enable some children to outperform others. No matter how much money is invested in reducing class size and enhancing teacher training, an “hereditary meritocracy” will arise in a public school system where expenditures are equal.54
Coleman and Herrnstein were teaching predestination in education. They were implying that the national effort just launched to raise the test scores of minority children to parity with the scores of white children was an experiment noble in purpose but doomed to fail. But pessimism about the ability of government to succeed in its ambitions was not in vogue when government was being hailed as architect and builder of the Great Society.
America plunged forward. U.S. and state governments and local school districts began the most massive investment in education in all of history. Expenditures per pupil doubled and tripled. Head Start, a preschool program for low-income children established in 1965, was lavishly funded. Perhaps $200 billion was poured into Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided additional funds to schools based on their population of low-income students.
What were the results? Writes Murray, “no evaluation from Title I from the 1970s onward has found credible evidence of a significant positive impact on student achievement.… A 2001 study by the Department of Education revealed that the gap widened rather than diminished.”
George W. Bush attacked the disparity between majority and minority school achievement anew with his No Child Left Behind law. The Department of Education budget doubled again. What was accomplished? Judging by test scores, writes Murray, “NCLB has done nothing to raise reading skills despite the enormous effort that has been expended.”
The notion that we know how to make more than modest improvements in [children’s] math and reading performance has no factual basis … even the best schools under the best conditions cannot overcome the limits of achievement set by the limits on academic ability.55
Heather Mac Donald, of the Manhattan Institute, provides corroborating evidence. “On the 2006 SAT, the average score in the critical-reading section was 434 for blacks, 527 for whites, and 510 for Asians; in the math section 429 for blacks, 536 for whites, and 587 for Asians.”56
In a 2005 ranking of fifty states and Washington, D.C., by how much each spent per pupil, New York ranked first, D.C. third.57 The fruits of this investment of tax dollars: in some D.C. high schools, half of all minority students drop out. Of those who graduate, half are reading and doing math at seventh-, eighth-, or ninth-grade levels. Near the top of the nation in tax dollars spent per pupil, Washington, D.C., is at the bottom in academic achievement.
In 2007, the U.S. graduation rate for high school students fell for the second straight year to 69 percent.58 Forty-six percent of blacks, 44 percent of Hispanics, and 49 percent of Native American students failed to earn a diploma in four years. Back in 1969, 77 percent of high school students earned their diplomas in four years. America is not treading water. America is sinking.
In 2009 came a report from New York that made D.C. schools look like MIT. Some two hundred students in their first math class at City University of New York were tested on basic skills. Two-thirds of these college freshmen could not convert a decimal into a fraction. Ninety percent could not do simple algebra.59
Hailing his schools chancellor Joel Klein, Mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted in 2009, �
�We are closing the shameful achievement gap faster than ever.” When the 2010 state test scores came in, however, the achievement gap was back. “Among the students in the city’s third through eighth grades,” wrote the Times, “33 percent of black students and 34 percent of Hispanic students are now proficient [in English], compared with 64 percent among whites and Asians.” School officials now acknowledge “a test score bubble.”60
When Klein stepped down, the Daily News summed up his record: “Test scores went up steadily until last year, when they plunged to abysmal levels when exams got tougher.”61 As Klein was resigning, the Council of the Great City Schools issued a report containing what it described as “jaw-dropping data.” The New York Times story began:
An achievement gap separating black from white students has long been documented—a social divide extremely vexing to policy makers and the target of one blast of school reform after another.
But a new report focusing on black males suggests that the picture is even bleaker than generally known.62
Using the highly respected National Assessment for Educational Progress tests, the council found that poor white boys eligible for free meals at school performed as well in math and reading as black boys from middle class and affluent neighborhoods. Said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard:
There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten.… They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.63
The council report naturally urged Congress to “appropriate more money for schools.”64 Yet there are people willing to have those “conversations.” One is Robert Weissberg, professor of political science emeritus at the University of Illinois and author of Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, who agrees with Charles Murray that “the ‘democratization’ of schooling—a diploma for nearly everyone—that brings those into the classroom who can barely master the material and, critically, to insist that these youngsters can be proficient is romantic foolishness.”65 The beginning of real school reform is not to babysit indolent or unruly students but to get them out of the schools.
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