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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.
I'm going to say that the United States as originally instantiated had an elegant theoretical solution to most of the issues facing liberalism.
There was a document which prescribed those few natural/inalienable/fundamental rights that everyone was assumed to have 'from birth.' This document also provided for the creation of a unified entity which would assist in ensuring the 'commons' was preserved and ameliorating disputes between the states without violence.
This setup was based on the 'state' as the basic unit of political authority. The 'states' which ultimately all threw their influence together to form a supervisory entity are kind of arbitrarily defined in terms of population, size of territory, and the actual rights granted to those they exercised control over (the big one being whether slavery was abolished or not), but at least they could say they were the generally accepted sovereign that the people in their governed territory had more-or-less consented to.
So the aforementioned document laying out the basic inalienable rights everyone was entitled to invoke which helped define the baseline expectations for each citizen so they wouldn't accidentally cross a given state border and find all their property confiscated without warning and themselves thrown into jail without getting due process.
Outside of that, each state was given substantial leeway in how it conducted affairs, raised money, punished crimes, and facilitated the so-called 'common good.' You could call it 'laboratories of Democracy' but I think it just made sense to allow people to sort themselves according to their own preferences and people who found themselves governed by a body that was hostile to their interests could uproot to somewhere more favorable rather than having to attempt a coup, bloodless or otherwise, of their state's governing body.
Federalism made it difficult (and continues to make it difficult, to be fair) for any wannabe fascists or communists to bring the entire country under their thumb because the necessary authority to rule everything was dispersed and decentralized such that you couldn't just win one election and then seize control, sweeping your enemies away in one fell swoop.
Of course, Lysander Spooner took the theoretical foundation of Constitutional Law to task shortly after the Civil War.
There was no point, admittedly, where the whole U.S. was operating as a harmonious whole sans internal strife and pockets of violence. Still, the structure proved resilient.
What really makes the Federalist project crumble was the elision of 'civil rights' with 'natural rights' and the elevation of the former to higher status than the latter.
In my utopia, I can imagine a Federal Government that maintains an army and navy solely for the defense of the actual borders of the United States, and has a stable cadre of agents tasked with intervening in disputes between states and directly protecting the enumerated rights of citizens when infringed. The states have control of economic affairs in their borders and can establish legal regimes that pursue goals other than the pure protection of natural rights, so long as those basic enumerated rights took precedence when invoked, and citizens were ensured the basic 'freedom' to uproot and move as needed.
But as soon as the world of rights which are to be protected gets away from the basic "Life, Liberty, Property" core concept and starts invoking protection of 'equality' or vaguely defined 'justice' or, worse, the right to 'FEEL safe,' the mandate can grow almost unfettered.
To be clear, what I'm saying is that in my utopia if an individual state decided to, e.g. engage in widespread wealth redistribution, or slavery reparations, or wanted to provide 'free' healthcare to all citizens then this would be fine! Or if it wanted to become a draconian police state when it comes to enforcing 'law and order,' that would also be permissible. Hell, if they decided to grant full personhood rights to Corporations and turn over control of most governmental functions to private entities controlled by international mega-corporations, that could probably be done as well. Federal Government need not intervene unless there was pending conflict with another state.
But if the Federal government suddenly decides to pursue 'equality' as a goal, it would find endless justifications to intervene in state's affairs and overrule almost any action that a state might take that didn't adhere strictly to that goal, with an increasingly aggressive set of agencies tasked with overseeing and enforcing the rules.
...which is effectively what has happened over the past 100 years or so.
Still, I see a lot of merit to the experiment as it was originally designed, and rather wish we hadn't run out of frontier space with which to create new polities to test different approaches to governance.
I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.
But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.
Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.
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