The Equity Trojan Horse

corporatist dog whistle of class warfare

one big dog whistle for one big dog

My dad, a party-line FDR/JFK Democrat, told me one evening way back in 1976 that the only difference between the Right and the Left as far as Jews are concerned is that the Right will kick the Jews in the teeth while the Left will use the Jews first and then kick them in the teeth. By the very next morning — forty-five years ago — it had already occurred to me that the same Right/Left dental dynamic might apply to other races and ethnicities as well. So I did some research. Then I walked away from the Democratic Party.

And now — forty-five years later — it occurs to me that perhaps those of us who might deny the existence of systemic racism simply cannot bring ourselves to accept the unqualified success of Democratic Party efforts in recent decades to re-brand, justify and establish it as the default lingua franca in every major American institution, public and private alike. Unwilling and ill-equipped to survive without the historical DNA of their political power intact, the masters of slavery and the architects of Jim Crow segregation have simply repackaged it instead. Credit where credit is due, however: for the party of systemic racism to re-brand themselves as the sworn enemies of systemic racism and — even more incredibly — as the true custodians of racial justice is downright Machiavellian (and more than a little Orwellian) in its brilliance, guile and audacity.

Before you dismiss the above observation as hyperbole, consider this: Nowhere is the success of Democratic Party re-branding efforts more evident than in the sudden and seemingly harmless shift from equality to equity as the driving meme of institutional America. While the linguistic sleight of hand that hides and otherwise facilitates the near-total replacement of equality with equity in common discourse may seem innocent and insignificant enough, the difference between the two concepts couldn’t be more calculated or profound: Equality — as embraced and preached by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s — is about individual freedom of opportunity. Equity — as the 21st-century application of Critical Race Theory — is about institutionally compelled redistribution of power and wealth. Not too surprising, perhaps, since the compelled redistribution of power and wealth is pretty much what the Democratic Party had in mind all along as the political party of slavery, the political party of Jim Crow segregation, the political party of the Ku Klux Klan, the political party of more black babies aborted than born each year in NYC, the political party of black-on-black crime and the political party of generationally failing, deeply segregated inner-city schools.

Where equality demands and requires procedural fairness of the precise sort codified in the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution, the racial essentialism of equity demands the opposite: the obliteration of procedural fairness. Where equality assumes justice and justice demands equality, equity assumes and demands neither. Equity abandons equality and justice to the collective dystopian whims of a highly commercial and immensely profitable form of corporate frontier law better known these days as social justice. But social justice — like racial justice, green justice, trans justice or any other form of justice that requires a modifier — is in fact just the digital version of good old fashioned mob justice. All in, equity is the polar opposite of equality and the calling card of progressive fascism…

“We need to open the promise of America to every American.  And that means we need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government.”
— President Biden

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
— Benito Mussolini

Not to gild the lily, but maybe we should excuse the ghosts of Bull Connor and Orvul Faubus for feeling a little nostalgic (and maybe a little envious) while they watch equity emerge as the most insidiously successful manifestation of Democratic Party systemic racism to date. For Bull and Orvul, equity would represent not only a perfectly viable extension of systemic racism as a reliable and historically proven means to an end, but an ideal institutional currency and corporate media dog whistle as well.

As with Democratic Party responses to all other items high on the elitist agenda of culture war issues — items like systemic racism, global warming, gender identity, abortion and Covid mandates — equity is designed as yet another Trojan Horse to deflect attention away from the real objective: the relentless prosecution of an undeclared yet already protracted class war against poor and middle class people of all colors worldwide. It ain’t about race, folks. And it ain’t about global warming, gender identity or vaccine mandates, either. It’s about class.

[Excerpted from my longer essay, Systemic Racism — the DNA of the Democratic Party.]