Some of the posts contend that I ignore the importance of inequality of economic power in undermining the freedoms we enjoy, especially freedom of speech. For example, Andris Heks says:

…you overemphasise the importance of identity politics in undermining Western Civilisation and you underemphasise the importance of inequalities of power.

Opening Response

I would ask Andris, and any others who share his view, can they point to any complex society that is not characterized by an unequal distribution of power, whether that power is exercised by a caste of bureaucrats, such as the privileged ‘nomenclature’ that rule communist societies, or business leaders, or political and media elites, or religious leaders as in Iran, or tribal elders in indigenous communities?

So how can ‘inequality of power’, per se, pose a threat to Western civilization and the freedoms we value given that inequality has always been a condition of such societies (as with all others)? This notion that anything like an equal distribution of power can be achieved is a silly chimera typically raised by those with communist sympathies hankering after a ‘classless society’, the attempt to gain which has produced some of the worst dystopias in human history. 

The key feature that distinguishes our kind of society to most that have existed in human history – and today – is the legal and constitutional structures that have evolved that restrict the scope for those at the top to exercise arbitrary power, power free of any effective constraints, including the power to dispose of human beings any way the rulers see fit, as in China today where a million Uighurs are incarcerated and religious and political dissidents are murdered to harvest their organs.

We dare not take these features, things like an independent judiciary, a free press, and democratic elections, for granted lest we lose them, as the historian of Roman decline I cited in the talk points out.

Andris may reply that the growth of inequality over the past several decades is exceptional, maybe unprecedented, and for that reason poses a civilizational threat. It is not exceptional – indeed it is still less pronounced than in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the period in America known as the Gilded Age, another period of great technological transformation. Check out the graph at the top of this article. What is exceptional is the massive compression of inequalities that occurred in the decades following the second world war, that went into reverse in the early 1980s.

So what is so exceptional about current inequality trends as to threaten the foundations of ‘civilization as we know it’? Absent such an explanation, saying ‘what about inequality’ becomes, well, just another case of the argumentative fallacy known as whataboutery. 

Having said that, I certainly think that high levels of inequality and steep social hierarchies are a bad thing. A commitment to greater equality is what drew me to a career in centre-left social-democratic politics in the early 1970s. 

But here is the irony: the rise of identity politics and political correctness, and its displacement of the old equality priority as the defining feature of ‘progressive’ politics, has provided the most powerful in our societies with a perfect means to engage in moral exhibitionism, otherwise known as virtue signalling, without the slightest sacrifice of their power and influence.

Which are the most valuable and powerful companies in the world today? The social media giants, especially Alphabet Inc with its Google and YouTube subsidiaries, Facebook and Twitter. Who are the greatest censors and enforcers of identarian orthodoxy today, removing and demonetizing content that contradict their ideological prejudices, and who fire staff at the slightest divergence from the corporate ideology? The same. Now that is arbitrary power!

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