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Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
Wang Huning, the court philosopher of the CCP, diagnosed the fundamental American contradiction in "America against America":
Americans believe they are free and equal, but free men will not be equal, and equal men are not free.
This caused less problems in the past, when America had a shared culture - the draft, Christianity, nuclear families, the three TV channels, etc. We could be equal because we were only pretending to be free, and so much of life was actually constrained.
Today, everyone gets to choose their life path, and divergent paths yield divergent results. There are those (broadly on the left) who would sacrifice freedom for equality, and those (broadly on the right) who would sacrifice equality for freedom. Most of the culture war comes from people not realizing that you can't have both. The left thinks the right hates equality, the right thinks the left hates freedom.
I'm not quite so inclined to let my enemies redefine my values for me. When I say that Americans should be free and equal, I do not mean to say that we need some Harrison Bergeron weights to make sure that no one can run too fast, but to say that we should all receive equal treatment before the law and be treated with some measure of égalité by our peers. I expect that the result of this will be rather unequal outcomes, I am not surprised or affronted by that outcome and I do not see any conflict of values in striving for equal justice while having unequal abilities, desires, and luck.
Problem is, it's too tough a bullet to bite that people who make bad choices get bad outcomes. There's always going to be a drumbeat to save them from their choices, both from the right (ban those choices) and from the left (take from the people who made better choices to help those who made bad ones). The first goes against freedom, the second for equality, and the argument that the wealthy can afford to support the self-destructive in their freedom without limit will never sound as mean as biting that bullet.
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But crucially, and assuming you're a Liberal, you have no possible convincing argument to someone who would propose such a thing , or going in the direction of such a thing.
We all saw what happened to Affirmative Action and other various spoils policy the US has seen fit to implement. Equality of opportunity has always and will always just be a canard. So long as we don't live in a totalitarian state where children are taken from their parents, educated the same and cloned with the same genetics, no such thing is possible, and therefore any push in that direction (such as taxing inheritance harshly or enacting redistributive policies) cannot be successfully opposed by Liberals in principle.
Rawls always comes in to use the underlying philosophy to justify unsustainable expansions beyond political liberalism.
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