The battle for equity will go on forever

The second round of San Jose's Equity Training  Workshop occurred in early February, with much discussion of slippery concepts such as systemic injustice and concealed bias. It recalled William Voegeli's observations on the never-ending nature of identity politics in the Fall 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

"I once wrote a book that asked what it would mean for a nation's welfare state to be a completed endeavor, to acquire all the resources and authority it could possibly use to achieve its objectives. The answer turned out to be that there is no answer, that the welfare state's ultimate purpose is to facilitate (and necessitate) the welfare state's perpetual expansion.

"Now that identity politics has come to be the salient feature of modern American liberalism, it's time to update my older question. What, exactly, are the 21st century identitarians trying to accomplish? What would it mean to achieve the equality they are demanding, and how will we know they've succeeded?

"As with the welfare state, the goal's only definable feature is that it recedes constantly. Ending racism requires ‘more equitable education and healthcare,’ and a ‘commitment to end discrimination in work and institutions, to be more open with our hearts and also with our borders.’ But how much more would be enough more? Everything about the theory, practice, and spirit of modern egalitarianism tells us that ‘more’ is going to end up being a lot more, and for a very long time.

"Along the same lines, what does ending discrimination consist of? Not the elimination of disparities, we'll be told, just the bad ones, the unfair ones. In practice, this means that any particular disparity is presumed guilty until proven innocent of resulting from discrimination, defined expansively to encompass such unspecifiable concepts as unconscious, implicit, and structural bias."

Read the whole thing at: www.claremontreviewofbooks.com

William Voegeli is senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

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