Fenster writes:
The left’s ideological blinders have caused it to miss the obvious: that there can be such a thing as “too much” diversity. Should it really be all that shocking that high levels of difference can result in a fraying of bonds and in hunkering down? Like all law, policy and social behaviors depends on a kind of reasonable man argument. When reasonable men differ markedly, and according to group, there is bound to be trouble.
What I find interesting, though, is how the right deals with inequality in almost exactly the same way as the left deals with diversity. The right may not celebrate inequality in exactly the same way some on the left celebrate diversity: that some is good and that more is always better. But there is, on the right, seldom any acknowledgement that high levels of inequality can erode bonds as surely as high levels of cultural difference, and for the same reason.
As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry remarks in a recent Federalist article:
. . . any collective endeavor, including self-government but also functioning free-market capitalism, cannot be successful for long if some significant number of the people involved in the enterprise feel that they’re getting screwed. Even if you see no value in equality as such and you are a total capitalist red-in-tooth-and-claw you must realize that if too many people feel that capitalism destroys them, at some point they will use the levers of political power to destroy capitalism.
This is hardly a new insight, though it seems to have been a buried one over the last few decades. Inequality we will always have with us, just as we will be continually faced one way or another with the question of cultural difference.
Is the right capable of questioning the received wisdom of The Market, as Florida has at long last begun to do with vibrancy? Maybe. Here’s a recent Weekly Standard article that shows some real concern over the wealth divide. Of course, it is unwilling to take the issue on whole hog, preferring to poke fun at the digital, green, liberal-voting oligarchy. But below the obligatory right-side fancy-dancing, there is in the article a lurking concern that we are headed toward a new feudalism, and toward a future (as Tyler Cowen writes) of rice and beans. I think the raising of that concern is a good sign.
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Uncouth Reflections 
I’ve been meaning to write up something on the theme of how widening inequality undercuts conservative values, particularly the importance of community. It’s not only the animosity created by a large divide between haves and have-nots, but the separation of their cultural identities.
Rich and working-class people just plain *looked* more similar to each other back in the ’50s. Now there’s almost no overlap of cultural interests and symbols (as in, membership badges).
Any cohesive community needs a certain degree of similarity in appearance, norms, rituals, activities, and so on. Thus inequality leads to cultural fragmentation along class lines.
And as Peter Turchin has shown, one of the strongest correlates of rising inequality is rising immigration, which serves as a separate source of communal disintegration. Too many languages, too many dress styles, too many expectations about how we are to treat each other.
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Most people, even conservatives, don’t have much of an interest in history. They have no frame of reference, like when was the last period marked by soaring inequality. Answer: in America, from roughly 1820 to 1920, but especially after 1870. Did that society look like one they’d want to live in?
I think their kneejerk defense of Victorian and Gilded Age society is based on blacks not having much influence, albeit indirect, as in the post-Civil Rights era. And based on people not behaving as wild-and-crazy as during the Sixties (crime was falling from 1870 through 1890 or 1900, promiscuity was taboo).
But they don’t see all the saloons, gambling houses, and brothels — all located near each other in red light districts — or the abandoned and orphaned children with no nuclear family to raise them. Or all the vagrants (homeless / bums to us). No normal person would want to have to wade through that day in and day out, but we’re becoming habituated to it slowly but steadily in our neo-Dickensian age.
I think it helps to point out how people’s ideal world of the 1950s was the polar opposite of the Gilded Age in political-economic terms, and that it didn’t happen by magic overnight, but through decades of tireless effort by Progressive Era reformers (whether they were Progressive or conservative).
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It’s funny, isn’t it? You’d think that the discussion over inequality (like the discussion over immigration or the one over Diversity) would be a largely practical one: up to what point is it beneficial or at least non-harmful, and after what point does it start to create serious problems? But almost always we see these topics projected thru an ideological lens. So people wind up quarreling over ideals and team memberships rather than discussing the practical core of the questions.
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This is one of those meta-problems that confound me. I can sort of get behind the ideas in a very general sort of way, but…
You guys even have a glimmer of an idea of a solution? I suspect not.
My circumstances aren’t going to change, nor are my kids, by anything I do or say in this regard. So, what in the world would I do?
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And, here’s the reality for my family and extended family, including the two branches that are mostly Filipino… Everybody lives in a nice house, eats too damned much, owns a flat screen TV the size of a wall, owns almost a car per person, and owns every electronic gimcrack you can buy. You’re going to rally such people to some vague political cause?
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Not looking for a rally exactly. If wealth goes up for all, the envy factor is lessened. And while people tend to make judgments on relative rather than absolute terms, I think there is some truth too to the idea that as long as life’s basics and some special baubles (flat screen TV) are reasonably well distributed, that also would tend to depress social angst.
So far we are well within familiar depression-through-post WW2 territory–a growing and increasingly prosperous middle class is not likely to be really angry, to say nothing of revolutionary. Even back in the sixties, I was hugely skeptical of The Revolution exactly on the grounds that America was essentially bourgeois.
The issue is whether those conditions are changing. The lower part of American society has not really kept up not only in relative but also in absolute terms. Sure there’s the flat screen, but is that all there is? Consider the paltry nature of retirement assets for millions of American households.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2013/07/01/retirement-savings-shortfall-crisis-catch-u0p/2464119/
So the point of the post was not to rally people for an egalitarian cause. Rather it was to note that if things truly are getting further out of whack, people may well grow less content irrespective of what I write about it, and that at some point both right and left might want to wise up and think about it.
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