5/1/2023

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal starts with Jack Miller’s latest piece at RealClearEducation, which contrasts equality as the American Founders understood it with a more recent notion of equity. Miller argues that in writing “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, the Founders signaled that the country they founded was based on the principle of equality of opportunity. Though well-intentioned, the modern idea of equity – especially in the field of education – instead pushes equality of outcomes, an idea Miller says that the 20th century American novelist Kurt Vonnegut showed would have terrible consequences in his short story “Harrison Bergeron.” The growth of DEI bureaucracies at colleges and universities and the elimination of honors classes in high schools are a couple of examples of how this equity agenda goes awry. “Equity, as activists preach it, trades away” the “American heritage” of equality “for abstractions and fantasies,” Miller writes. “Americans should instead hold fast to the political principles that have guided us to marvelous success and prosperity for nearly 250 years.”

At the Acton Institute, Hadley Arkes argues in an excerpt from his forthcoming book that the Constitution was grounded upon principles of natural rights and natural law that are antecedent to it. He uses the example of the Bill of Rights, which was controversial when it was adopted not because it taught about rights but because its detractors thought it “would work to mis-instruct the American people about the ground of their rights” – that rights come from documents and were not pre-existing in nature. Arkes contends that the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment “would be there even if no one had thought to set it down in the First Amendment. It would be there even if there were no First Amendment. It would be there, in fact, even if there were no Constitution.” As Arkes concludes, “The Constitution was grounded in principles that were already there, but it supplied a structure, and that structure made a profound practical difference.”