Are we moving beyond "equality of opportunity"?

Much has been made of the speech Obama gave at the Associated Press luncheon last Tuesday. He is definitely in campaign mode, as he singled out Romney by name, although laying enough blame on the entire Republican establishment to keep his options open.

He reserved particular vehemence for his attack on the Ryan budget:

This congressional Republican budget is something different altogether.  It is a Trojan Horse.  Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.  It is thinly veiled social Darwinism.  It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.  And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last  -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it is a prescription for decline.

What's interesting here is that he seems to be - albeit hesitantly - moving beyond the standard prescription of American politics: "equality of opportunity". Conservatives like to add to this, "but not equality of outcome".

Following on from Obama's speech, Robert Reich quotes from one of the founding texts, William Graham Sumner's What Social Classes Owe Each Other (1883) to flesh out where social Darwinism falls on equality:

Let it be understood that we cannot go outside of this alternative: Liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest; not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members.

 This, of course, is the hard-nosed libertarian version of equality, which basically says that equality should be respected only to the degree that it does not interfere in any respect with liberty. Usually, this is limited to "equality under the law" and "equality of conscience".

The American polity has more complex notions of equality. Searching for references to equality in State of the Union Addresses, I found this gem from Warren Harding's 1921 SOTU:

Through the eradication of illiteracy and the diffusion of education mankind has reached a stage where we may fairly say that in the United States equality of opportunity has been attained, though all are not prepared to embrace it.

Of course, the civil rights movement found one or two exceptions to this assertion (though conservatives have never stopped saying it).

By the end of the civil rights movement, at any rate, as a country we were pushing pretty hard against the limits of the "equality of opportunity" argument. Here's LBJ:

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.

This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

The emphasis is mine. Conservatives seize on this phrasing to say that LBJ had moved definitively from equal opportunity to equal outcomes (follow the link to see an example). Reading the entire quote, it doesn't seem so clear-cut, but the tension is definitely there. By the Clinton era, we had moved back so far from this "precipice" that the quota system of equalizing for racial bias was dismantled without great resistance.

Returning for a moment to Obama's formulation, it is in many ways an older notion - that of shared prosperity. In the vision of the Founders, extremes of wealth and poverty were dangerous because of the political influence that the very wealthy could wield, and the manipulations of the demagogue that were possible when there were masses of the dispossessed. To prevent this dystopia, of course, they relied on the notion of a yeoman republic, in which land was available to anyone with the willingness to till it.

In case you didn't notice, that vision is cannot be simply transplanted into today's world. The fear of the unaccountable power of elites transposes well, but when economic independence, first and foremost, revolves around having a job at decent wages, the "self-reliant" prescription of American individualism is utterly insufficient. This is the challenge before us: how do we embrace a real equality, an equality which is more than an equal right to be poor and wretched?