Uncouth Reflections

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.