Alex Gourevitch and Aziz Rana: America’s Failed Promise of Equal Opportunity
Alex Gourevitch is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University's Political Theory Project. He also co-authors the blog The Current Moment. Aziz Rana teaches law at Cornell University and is the author of "The Two Faces of American Freedom," recently published by Harvard University Press. He writes on American constitutional development, with a particular interest in issues of citizenship, immigration and national security
Americans are increasingly aware that the ideal of equal opportunity is a false promise, but neither party really seems to get it....
...While Republicans profess a more abiding faith in a self-regulating economy, Democrats believe carefully tailored state interventions are needed to ensure equal opportunity....
Most Democrats and Republicans share a commitment to an inegalitarian, early 21st-century version of social mobility first articulated in the United States by Thomas Jefferson. In a famous letter to John Adams, Jefferson argued that there is a “natural aristocracy amongst men” who are marked by “virtue and talents.”
According to Jefferson, the natural aristocracy was “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.” He distinguished this natural aristocracy from the “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.” The latter won its power through circumstances and laws that protected the privileges of birth – like laws of primogeniture, or hereditary political positions. Jefferson’s view was seemingly egalitarian: Inherited status, wealth or power is undeserved. But at its heart, this view – let’s call it meritocracy – remained deeply inegalitarian. It favored a society in which the majority were deferential to, even subject to, the power and authority of the naturally talented few.
Republicans and Democrats each pay tribute to this Jeffersonian vision of meritocratic decision-making and political leadership. If anything, Democrats are often even more intent that Republicans in promoting expert authority and professional management....
Still, there is another possible interpretation of equal opportunity that we can look to. Just before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln articulated an alternative account of economic improvement: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while… [This] is free labor.”...
This Lincolnian vision is truly egalitarian and highlights precisely what is troubling about the current crisis of social mobility. The problem is not just that we do not to live up to the ideal, but that the underlying ideal is hierarchical, and fails to grasp the way in which we ought to be making it possible for everyone to escape relations of dependence and control....