Why is it that the only nation on earth, the United States of America, that is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and that all are endowed with natural rights, should be in such chaos?

If the entirely justifiable, non-violent protests to the murder of George Floyd could be airbrushed away, the picture in the US would still be overwhelmed with scenes of extreme violence, looting, theft, murder and an anarchy that seeks the destruction of constitutional government. 

When the United States was still very young, disagreements emerged among its leaders as to whether the nation would be based on commerce or agriculture, on the philosophies of the Englishman, John Locke or the Frenchman, Rousseau. As a result, there was a concern whether the supporters of one side would accept electoral results if their candidate lost the election without resorting to the gun; would they accept the result of ballots without resorting to bullets.

That question is still alive in the Democrat response to the election of Donald Trump. But, increasingly, the violence is being supported by the intellectual leaders of society.  Many university academics and high school teachers have taken to the streets in both countries to support the mob violence, the murder and looting, supporting the resort to force and abjuring reliance on ballots? Why the flight from reason by those whose profession can only be practised in peace?

One part of the answer was inadvertently alluded to in a critique of a US Supreme Court decision that, by granting equal protection to LBTIQ people under anti-discrimination law, threatened religious freedom in the name of “equality.”

The ruling will lead to a tsunami of polarizing court cases and further degradation of Americans’ natural rights to free speech, to free association, and to worshipping God as their consciences require. All this in the name of “equality”. 

In fact, equality is the key that unlocks all left-wing ideas for they all follow Marx and embrace a crude version of it. 

“Equality” at the founding of the United States and Australia, on the other hand, meant that we are all equally human beings; that all men are created equal, meant equality as a human being before the law. As one fellow put it, some human beings are not born with saddles on their backs while others are born booted and spurred to ride them. This natural equality was compatible with people having natural differences and different natural abilities. 

Left-wing equality has nothing to do with human nature, with natural abilities and nothing to do with the law. It has everything to do with the constraining all speech and all opinions so that they comply with a particular left-wing ideology. 

Left-wing equality comes to light as an ideology: feminism, racism, sexism, elitism, white privilege, to name a few, are all left-wing ideologies, essentially spin-offs from Karl Marx’s communism where all human differences, including sex, are acquired and can, therefore, be unacquired. Equality is the leftwing weapon with which it crushes freedom of thought and freedom of speech by silencing everyone’s opinion that does not comply with the opinion of the particular ideology.  

Left-wing equality is the prevailing ideology in American and Australian universities and was as evident in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations across US campuses as it was in the local universities’ rejection of the Ramsay Centre’s Western Civilisation course. The Ramsay Centre courses, like the US liberal arts courses, threaten left-wing ideologies by demanding that students learn how to test dialectically for the truth.

Dr David Long is a retired solicitor and economist.

Illustration: Channel 9.

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