Thomas Brewton on "social justice," "equality," "diversity," and other code words of the Left.

As we move toward the battle over appointment of a new Supreme Court Justice, it is useful to keep in mind a few examples of “social justice” terminology that deliberately project a false image to the voting public.
 
Supreme Court decisions since 1937 have increasingly been little more than expressions of what a majority of Justices thought was “fair.” Repeatedly the Court has overturned long settled principles and precedents of law, some of them in the common law antedating the formation of the United States. 

Boiling it down to essentials, the Court has arrogated the right to overrule laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives, whenever those laws failed to correspond to a majority of the Justices’ opinions about what constitutes “social justice.” They have adopted the pragmatism of socialist John Dewey, who preached that there are no fixed standards of right or wrong, merely changing opinions in specific situations.  In that atheistic view, Darwinian evolution is the controlling process in social structure, as well as in biology, and whoever has the greatest power is entitled to impose his view of political correctness; in short, survival of the fittest.

In this Darwinian rat-race, the terms equality and diversity are among the most important shibboleths of liberal socialism, which the New York Times editorial board calls “mainstream” thought in America today.  Equality and diversity mean very different things to different groups of people, and their meanings, in the “mainstream” sense, are entirely different from their meanings in 1787 when the Constitution was written.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines equality in two ways: as a mathematical statement in an equation, and as the enjoyment of equal political, social, and economic rights.  The nub of the difference between 1787 understandings and “mainstream” ideology lies in defining rights.  In the 1791 Bill of Rights, individual rights were barriers to keep the government out of peoples’ daily lives.  Today, liberals define rights as servile dependence upon the welfare state that interferes at will with individuals’ political liberties, aiming to force economic and social equality.

Liberal-socialism defines equality as government-imposed equality of income and property in an economy where Federal regulators have unlimited potential power to control every economic decision of individuals or businesses.  If someone has more money than another, in the liberal rhetoric, this is not “fair,” and the government has both a right and a duty to take from the better-off and give to selected ethnic, racial, or social groups.  In 1787, equality meant simply that everyone was entitled to equal treatment under the law and that there there was to be no hereditary nobility of the European sort (there never having been any feudal system in North America).

That same American Heritage Dictionary defines diversity as the fact or quality of being diverse or different, and as variety or multiformity.  The difference between that usage, which was the same as in 1787, and “mainstream” ideology is greater even than with the term equality.  The “mainstream” definition of diversity is not, for example, free and open debate about political and philosophical views, but the exclusion of all ideas that challenge the liberal orthodoxy regarding racial, cultural, and economic ideology, as well as exclusion from government and education of any doctrine other than the secular materialism of socialism.  Diversity, in short, means monopoly and uniformity of thought and expression.

These vast differences in usage are good examples of George Orwell’s New Speak.  In Orwell’s novel 1984, Big Brother’s totalitarian NewSpeak is the deliberate use of common words in a completely different sense from their established definitions.  This confuses the people and leaves them in perpetual fear that they may have misunderstood the latest regulations issued by Big Brother.  This uncertainty engenders fear and suspicion, enhancing the effectiveness of Big Brother’s thought police.  If nothing else, in our own case, using words like diversity to mean monopoly will make the people ignorant and unable to communicate ideas accurately, thus forestalling political opposition.

NewSpeak since the 1960s has become commonplace in almost every sphere of activity.  Using the correct words to describe something honestly is no longer permitted, because it might offend someone, and if that someone is a member of a protected interest group, the Feds will be on the case threatening criminal prosecution.  In a nice Orwellian touch, we have created the concept of “hate crimes,” making personal thoughts subject to criminal prosecution.

Examples of NewSpeak are on all sides.  Fairness historically meant such things as dealing ethically with people, paying a just wage in proportion to work done and the skill required, as well as letting the punishment fit the crime.  Liberal fairness requires government regulations and judicial fiats granting special privileges to selected special interest groups under the cloak of equality and diversity.  Welfare “clients” were free-loaders who remained dependent on the government for years, over several generations.  Someone with a bad leg is not a cripple; he is physically-challenged.  Multi-cultural education means, not teaching about other cultures, but teaching that the nation’s founding ethos is not as good as other cultures. 

Conservatives are always radicals; liberals are experts.  People in the 1880s through the 1920s who wanted government to crack down on socialists and anarchists responsible for hundreds of bombings and assassinations in the United States were, in NewSpeak, hysterical red-baiters.  What went on during that period was almost exactly the same thing experienced today at the hands of Islamic terrorists, the only difference being that the anarchists and socialists from the 1890s through the 1920s were not suicide bombers.  They simply threw sticks of dynamite into crowds or planted bombs where crowds would later gather. 

Today, people who wanted to pursue the War on Terror after the destruction of the World Trade Towers, or the Israelis who retaliate for almost daily suicide bombings by Islamic militants, are denounced as war-mongers. 

Liberals demand “tax-cuts” for the poor, even though the bottom third of all tax-return filers pay no income taxes at all. 

Liberals exchanged publicly-held Treasury notes and bonds for non-marketable Treasury debt and called this reducing the national debt.  That is the equivalent of putting a second-mortgage on your house to pay off credit card debt.  Meanwhile the national debt has never for an instant ceased to grow. 

Liberals want to protect the Social Security “lock-box,” an account that never contains anything but IOUs, because politicians of both parties quickly remove all surplus cash and spend it immediately on new welfare programs.  Liberals claim that they are protecting Social Security, but ignore the fact that, over the next few decades, the mandated entitlements of beneficiaries will have to absorb almost every dollar of Federal revenue, leaving nothing for defense or other essential needs.  At the same time, both Democrats and Republicans blithely enact more entitlements such as free prescription drugs.

As Orwell anticipated in 1984, the deterioration of standards in language usage under the impact of liberal-socialist NewSpeak has fostered an educational system that produces ignoramuses.  No longer able to read, or at least unable to understand what they attempt to read, most people truly believe that the Constitution contains language guaranteeing them the rights to free food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, and well-paying jobs.  No wonder Harvard and Yale throw in the towel and give most students grades of at least B+.

The result of “mainstream” doctrines of equality and diversity is inequality under the law and elimination of speech that challenges socialism.  In addition, the NewSpeak of Federal regulators is extremely costly to the nation, diverting resources to completely unproductive uses.  Employers and educators must pay vast sums each year to armies of lawyers and accountants whose sole function is to chart a safe path among the literally millions of conflicting Federal regulations and court orders.  Al Gore maintained that highly restrictive environmental regulation was good for the economy, because it created new regulatory jobs.

No one should be surprised that perennially the fastest job growth segment is government employment.  No one should be surprised that municipal, state, and Federal unions are now the biggest parts of the union movement.  Being effectively free from the threat of losing their jobs, these unions have become the biggest contributors, and the main swing factor, to political campaigns.  In many jurisdictions, no state-wide or Federal candidate can win without Teachers Union support.

This huge and costly waste of economic resources is paid for by the people of the nation in the form of fewer jobs and lower wages for those outside government and the accounting and legal professions.  The cost of legal defense against government regulatory harassment and suits by predatory class-action lawyers, not to mention organizations like the ACLU, unions, and interest groups like feminists, gay-rights, blacks, and Hispanics, has bankrupted some companies and, in all cases, has dampened business expansion that would have employed more people at higher wages.

An implicit assumption in liberal-socialism’s devotion to equality is that the natural state of any society is equality of income and other conditions.  No historical or archeological evidence exists to support this assertion, which nonetheless is characterized as scientific.  It is perfectly evident to all observers that there are vast inherent differences in people’s abilities and interests. Some are born more intelligent than others, some have superior athletic abilities, and others have the capacities to create and run businesses that add to the wealth of the whole of society. 

Liberal-socialism must ignore these empirical facts and postulate that people’s accomplishments are the result, not of individual talent, but of the society in which they live.  Thus, implicitly in socialistic theory, people’s incomes are merely loans from the government, which reserves the right to reclaim any or all of it at its whim.

The precedent for this is the Continental European doctrines of socialism, exemplified in the German Socialism of Bismarck’s German Empire.  In Hegelian and other German philosophical doctrine, the individual has existence only in so far as he is a unit within the national state.  The individual becomes merely a brick in the structure of the national state; his meaning in life is subsumed in the goals of the national state.

Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns. His website is The View from 1776.

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