Reading the EW’s “Socializing with Socialists” article from last week, it struck me that the problem with being anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and all similar things is that the negation of hierarchy does not in itself solve the problem of hierarchy. Hierarchy, in short, reasserts itself, covertly at first, and then again in the fresh bloom of self-aggrandizing justification. Recent events at Evergreen provide a ready example of this principle, as documented in a wealth of cellphone videos.

Lenin understood this problem back at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution. He located the tendency toward hierarchy in what he termed the “capitalist impulse.” As this impulse was written deeply in human nature, he reasoned, destruction of existing hierarchies (i.e. Statist Capitalism) would only fertilize the ground from which new tyrannical (i.e. Capitalist) hierarchies would arise. He proposed a Dictatorship of the Proletariate, a hierarchy of naked force committed to reprogramming individual nature on a mass scale, as a solution.

Students at Evergreen are heading toward a similar solution, though their commitment to force is still somewhat clothed within their previous commitment to idolization of the victimized. Their “Equity Council” is nonetheless seeking a position unchallenged atop the systemic hierarchy. Their goal is likewise the same: to reprogram everyone at Evergreen on a deep level. It is, in short, a cult of human perfection, but so is every civilization.

In its division of Church and State, the American System was an attempt to correct for this cult-like quality. The limited government secular state conceived of itself as stopping self-consciously sort of seeking to reprogram the individual. It was built, rather, on the idea of a virtuous individual, should said individual be released from the distortions imposed by the Monarchical Cult of God on Earth. When this virtue proved untenable, it was replaced by the idea of the Invisible Hand, as a beneficent Emergence – Providence without a Provider – from the mass of self-interested actions of a free people. E Pluribus Unum -From Many, One- is another way of saying from evils, Good.

Of course this Republican Experiment was wrapped up with a system of slavery, an unfolding genocide, and a growing imperialism – all founded on a domestic sexism. Thus, the American System split into an Actuality in a state of profound tension with its own Ideological Origin. This tension came to a head in the person of Martin Luther King, Jr, the American Ideal in the Body of the Other. America’s Jesus.
I’ve followed this line of thinking this far because I want to point out MLK’s solution to the hierarchy problem. It was, in short, the Traditional solution, completely coherent with and integral to his religion. Racism, sexism, militarism – and all of the other isms that attend unjust hierarchies – was replaced not by an imaginary absence of hierarchy, but by a hierarchy of character.

I’ll conclude with the observation that the denial of character is common on both the Left and Right, for reasons that are both the same and different. Both feel that character is a luxury they can’t afford: too much concern for the outward forms of such is either political correctness, or tone policing. Both agree that this behavioral scruple needs to be thrown off in service to the higher good of their ideology. One side wants to make America great again; the other wants to make it great for the first time. Whatever the case: you’ve got to break some eggs to make the perfect omelette.