In the second
volume of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
predicted that the working class and racial minorities would
agitate for ever greater equality with every succeeding
increment of social and economic advancement—what
he called “the revolution of rising expectations.”
This has come to be known as the Tocqueville Effect or Tocqueville
Paradox, the phenomenon in which, as life improves for the
masses, social frustration keeps pace or even escalates.
When anticipated improvements fail to materialize in timely
fashion, or when major improvements reveal smaller lacunae,
discontent will surge and even revolutionary sentiment may
arise.
In other words,
as the flux of social change and gradual upward mobility
enable the laboring classes to acquire the goods, services,
and conveniences previously unattainable, the gap between
themselves and the more affluent or fortunate will be seen
as a form of oppression and unfairness, and will persist
in inflaming the socially destabilizing vices of envy and
resentment. In a Tocquevillian nutshell, people tend to
grow increasingly restless and disaffected as their condition
improves.
The socialist
solution to so ostensibly egregious a socioeconomic disparity
is, put simply, downward mobility, the leveling of perceived
inequalities. The result is either the creeping uniformity
and monotony of the welfare state or the violent convulsions
of revolutionary communism, perpetuating, as Winston Churchill
said, “the equal sharing of misery” (except,
of course, for the insulated elite). The Tocqueville Effect
can be laid to rest by ensuring that vertical expectations
cease to rise and that horizontal equality prevails.
This is not
to suggest that the concept of equality is anathema or socially
contra-indicated, but only that it must be properly understood.
Equality before the law is the lynchpin of a democratic
polity, and equality of opportunity (rather than equality
of predetermined outcome) is the sine qua non of a healthy
and economically viable society. Once these prerequisites
are entrenched, the rest is up to the aptitudes, emotional
gradients, and personal goals of the individual within the
purview of tradition and common law.
Luck obviously
plays a role as well, since not everyone begins with the
same advantages of status, class, and a nurturing family
life, nor does everyone profit equally from the inheritance
of intrinsic physical and mental traits and capacities.
Such variations are implicit in the human condition, which
no political fiat or legislative instrument can change.
Enforced equality in defiance of abilities or idiosyncratic
differences is a recipe for social inertia, spiritual apathy,
and intellectual tawdriness—the tainted fruit of the
dismal and misnamed “social justice” movement.
A blanket program
of equality—aka equity—in all the realms of
life, work, and remuneration is inevitably destined to fail.
In provoking an attitude of discontent and endemic jealousy
of those who have, in one way or another, been legitimately
favored through individual initiative, a society works against
its own best interests. Even if an enlightened state has
provided for skill, virtuosity, drive, and competence to
be rewarded, and even though First World grudge-bearers
may enjoy the necessities and comforts that the truly dispossessed
in the Third World sadly lack, the socialist project for
omnibus equality at the expense of individual freedom will
find us, as Friedrich Hayek memorably put it, on “the
road to serfdom.” A central authority that controls
our position in the social hierarchy irrespective of individual
qualities, inclinations, or desires leads to a pervasive
state of languor and indolence, and renders it “impossible
to be just.” Hayek notes that “Independence
of mind or strength of character is rarely found among those
who cannot be confident that they will make their way by
their own effort.”
The work of
Vilfredo Pareto, in such books as The Transformation
of Democracy and especially his Manual of Political
Economy, is pertinent in this connection. Pareto developed
what is now called the Pareto Principle, or the “law
of the vital few,” which specifies a scalene relationship
between causes and effects in human endeavor, for example,
in the accumulation of wealth, the incidence of discoveries
and inventions, the accession to corporate authority, the
acquisition of honors, and so on. The principle states that
roughly 80% of significant consequences come from 20% of
sources, a ratio that is known in the finance sector as
“factor sparsity.” In ruling against the “vital
few,” against those who propel the nation forward
through their individual faculties of will, talent, diligence,
and personal initiative, a society ensures its eventual
stagnation.
The truth is
that we are not all equal, nor should we be if we want to
escape the hell of ennui, spite, indigence, moral torpor,
and intellectual mediocrity that accompanies the socialist
state. Moreover, those who have contributed positively to
the advantage of their fellows on any level of enterprise
deserve the plaudits and emoluments they will have earned.
Socialism is at root the politics of resentment against
human variance, personal independence, and individual achievement,
targeting the gifts and facilities of society’s benefactors.
In this sense, the mantra of “inclusion” so
beloved of left-wing progressives is really a form of exclusion
directed at those whose native endowment and personal effort
are the engine of human advancement. This is the real paradox
at the heart of human betterment. In Pareto’s terms,
the 20 percent make life better for the 80 percent, but
the 80 percent in erasing the 20 percent make life 100 percent
worse for everyone.
It should be
said at this point that the “vital few” need
not refer only to the exceptional figures in the “higher”
or more prestigious disciplines, but also to the honest
tradesmen and public workers who maintain a nation’s
infrastructure and serve its basic needs—those, as
the saying has it, who pull the wagon others ride in. Regarded
more comprehensively, the Pareto Principle continues to
hold across the board.
This is another
way of saying that the politics of social equity, which
fragments people and groups into lumpen racial or sexual
identities, and affirmative action, which annuls distinctions
of merit, are invasive and reductive policies, elevating
the category over the person. The quest for the equal distribution
of goods, professional placement, and social preferment,
based on the desiderata of identity politics and the incitements
of the grievance industry, has an inescapable flattening
effect on both cultural and economic life. The inept will
in consequence often replace the adept in the various walks
of life and work. This does not mean that the stigma of
greed or the vice of discrimination will somehow cease—certainly
not this side of heaven—but it does not change the
fact that freedom is also the freedom to excel and to be
productive without political hindrance or ideological obstacles.
In Milton Friedman’s words, “Freedom requires
individuals to be free to use their own resources in their
own way”—as does prosperity.
The Tocqueville
Effect is innate to human psychology—as Tocqueville
said in this context, “I marvel at the imbecility
of human reason.” But the socialist response is immeasurably
worse. Ultimately, sameness is the adversary of beneficial
progress, no less than the effacing or suppression of the
talented, the ambitious, the self-reliant, and the industrious
is the death knell of the flourishing society. Once difference
is reduced to a lowest common denominator on the grounds
of eliminating privilege and private interests, once the
unique individual is subsumed in the featureless collective,
quality inevitably leeches out of equality, as does justice
out of “social justice,” a hard lesson the egalitarian
sensibility appears utterly incapable of learning.
