Each week Liberty Nation straps on its Personal Protective Equipment and dives into the TwitterZone to bring you the biggest news, the most outlandish arguments, and the real Zeitgeist of what is taking place in the internet’s wildest frontier.
Anyone paying attention to President Joe Biden’s official Twitter account in recent weeks might have noticed the emphasis on the word “equity.” Whether tweeting about equity in faith, civil rights, or income, Biden has casually supplanted Americans’ near-universal regard for equality with needs-based equity. The abolishment of all misfortune goes hand in hand with this push, culminating in what could be one of the progressives’ most terrifying political victories. Blue checkmark Twitter is entirely on board with equity, with almost no significant Republican protest.
For as long as I can remember, equality of opportunity has long been advocated for regarding class and race relations in modern America. Disagreements often developed around how to achieve it in the arenas of law, education, and job opportunities. But most mainstream Democrats understood long ago that they could champion equality of opportunity along with most Republicans, even though they debated about the ways to fix existing issues. Equality of outcome has been widely disparaged by many Republicans as a staple of Marxist orthodoxy, while Democrats deny their desire for countrywide equity in their public policy goals. Policies such as affirmative action and workplace gender and racial quotas are prime examples of equity-based initiatives embraced mainly by liberal Democrats.
Today, progressives seem to be seizing the power within the Democratic Party, despite claims otherwise, and the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus has become their second most populated congressional caucus, just one member short of the more moderate New Democrat Coalition. As progressives capture glowing admiration from the mainstream media, the calls for an end to equality in favor of societal equity have become more pronounced.
In his well-regarded book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell once described cosmic justice as the relief of all misfortune. The push for total equity encouraged by the left-wing Twitter mob may be a perfect example of this push for societal realignment. Even as Biden promotes himself as both the most progressive and moderate president in recent history, progressives cheer Biden’s various tweets dipped in far-left platitudes.
How have we allowed our political discourse to shift in such a radical way? It may be easy to point fingers at the Democratic Party, which has grown more left-wing over the years, but Republicans must share some blame. Critical components to equality of opportunity -- such as the criminal justice and education systems -- have flaws that have not been adequately addressed by either Republican or Democratic governance across the country. This failure has allowed populist movements on both the left and the right to supplant establishment politics.
The radical shift to a desire for equity – which is equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity -- is perilous. The failure of equity-based policies has already been seen in authoritarian one-party countries such as Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China. Is any American eager for the United States to follow in the footsteps of those countries? Yet the leftist Twitter mob romanticizes the starry new rhetoric that leads to dictatorial outcomes. The Biden administration is still in its infancy, but its unprecedented shift to equity-based policy early on may spell disaster for future generations if moderate Democrats stay silent.
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Read more from Jose Backer.
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