Liberty or Equality

The Challenge of Our Time

In 1952, Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Liddehn’s book, Liberty or Equality: The Challenge of Our Time, was published. Coming a few years after the end of WW2 and during the emergence of the Cold War, which pitted the capitalist republic of the United States against the Communist Dictatorship of the Soviet Union, this book explores the question of which value, Liberty or Equality, should have primacy over the other in society.

Ritter begins his work defining his terms. Liberty, or freedom, “means the greatest amount of self-determination which in a given situation is feasible, reasonable, and possible.” By equality, he doesn’t mean equity, which is justice under the law, but equality of living standard, income, health, outcomes, etc. He notes that neither terms are absolute, but relative. Modern day liberals/leftists value equality over liberty whereas conservatives/libertarians value liberty over equality. This distinction is not without consequence. In America, we traditionally hold both of these values as important to the American experience, but in the 21st century, the choice of which value is primary to the other will determine whether America continues to be free or will descend into a society wholly submissive to government. The reason, according to Ritter, is that these values are contradictory. He writes,

“the artificial establishment of equality is as little compatible with liberty as the enforcement of unjust laws of discrimination. (It is obviously just to discriminate—within limits—between the innocent and criminal, the adult and the infant, the combatant and the civilian, and so on.) Whereas greed, pride and arrogance are at the base of unjust discrimination, the driving motor of the egalitarian and identitarian (identity politics - not in original text) trends is envy, jealousy, and fear. ‘Nature’ (i.e., the absence of human intervention) is anything but egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous intervention of force, which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom.”

In other words, the leftist ideal of equality necessitates a government powerful enough to enforce it by negating nature and therefore restraining liberty of the individual. It is driven by envy and jealously of those who have been successful or those groups deemed more fortunate. How would the left achieve their goals? The answer, Democracy. The term ‘democracy’ is often used by the left in conjunction with liberty/freedom, but these concepts deal with entirely different questions. Democracy is one answer to the question of who should be vested with ruling authority, while liberty deals with question of the amount of freedom an individual possesses, regardless of the government. In essence, democracy can be oppressive and quite restrictive of freedom. This fact is one of the many reasons the founders rejected a democracy or a “tyranny of the majority,” and gave us a republic.

The founders were hardly the first political thinkers to make the connection between democracy and tyranny. Aristolte’s Politics and Plato’s Republic both assert to various degrees that tyranny evolves naturally from democracy. We saw a perfect example of this in Eastern Europe after 1917 and especially after 1930. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the potential for tyranny in America because of our obsession with equality. He noted that this American form of tyranny would be new and that there was no name for it, but that it would be like a soft despotism or a benevolent tyranny. As he described this new form of government,

“above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labours, but it chooses to be the sole agent and arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances—what remains but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”

In other words, a government run by elites, put in power by the masses, that will have to power to ‘solve’ all our problems and keep us in a perpetual state of dependence, based on their conception of what is good and right. Alas, de Tocqueville said that there were three things that were unique to America that would be barriers to this soft despotism. America’s federalism, attachment to associations with our neighbor/community, and our religious nature intermixing with the public sphere. Even a cursory look at today’s society reveals that all three of these barriers have severely eroded and are, in some cases, virtually non-existent. Majority rule, such as the modern left wants (see the National Popular Vote movement and arguments against the Senate), “is a decisive step in the direction of totalitarianism.” This social justice (or social engineering as Ritter calls it) movement to establish equality can “only be done by force, restrictions, or terror, and the outcome is a complete loss of liberty.”

It appears, unfortunately, that de Tocqueville and Ritter’s predictions are coming true. Our infatuation with equality and ‘democracy’ has lead us down a path where our individual liberty is being eroded at every turn and in every sphere. If we don’t fight for liberty and our constitutional republic now, it may be too late to save it tomorrow. When society chooses equality over liberty, we risk losing liberty forever. When we choose liberty over equality, we create a society that can have high levels of both. Choose wisely.