Thomas Jefferson Knew What He Was Talking About

This is, basically, a follow-up post to my earlier piece about the liberal brand. Having said what I consider my own fundamental value to be, I want to address what I see as a key difference between what I believe and what conservatives say they believe. Note that I'm being generous here in judging conservatives on the basis of what they say; I think their actual beliefs are more explicitly cronyistic and self-serving.

What the conservatives always like to say is that they favor equality of opportunity, not equality of results. I think that in reality, this simply betrays their shallow, materialistic understanding of life. To show this, I will use the concept of the hierarchy of needs, conventionally associated with the psychology Abraham Maslow. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is the idea that some needs in life are relatively more basic than others and must be satisfied before the deeper needs can be fulfilled. On the bottom of the hierarchy are physiological needs: food, water, sleep, etc. Then come the needs of safety, followed by love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, Maslow's top-level goal. Personally, I think that the latter three are not dependent on one another, and I would tend to lump them all into a broader category of spiritual needs which can be pursued independently of one another.

I argue that both liberals (and social democrats!) and conservatives believe in a kind of equality of opportunity, but they believe that this should be located at different places along the hierarchy of needs. Republicans believe everyone should have an equal opportunity to have their physiological and safety needs satisfied. Democrats believe everyone should have an equal opportunity to fulfill their spiritual needs, which requires that their physiological and safety needs be satisfied across the board. So when Republicans say that we liberals believe in equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, they're right, we do, at the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs. But they, by the same logic, are opposed to an equality of opportunity at the higher levels that we liberals like to focus on. They favor a world in which some people are denied the opportunity to live a fulfilling life with deeper meaning, based on their failures to attain security and sustenance. And to claim that this amounts to endorsing equality of opportunity is to claim that those spiritual needs are worthless, to endorse a shallow, debased view of what makes life good.

To bring this back to Thomas Jefferson (and I should give credit here to my father, who came up with this part of the argument), it's Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. It is not the pursuit of life, or the pursuit of liberty. Life and liberty are guaranteed. Happiness cannot be guaranteed, but the conditions that enable an active pursuit of happiness can be.