I very much like Matt's point on this:
Like most Americans, though, I'm inclined to forgive inequality if it leads to nationwide prosperity and if our society remains mobile -- the sort of place where a person born poor has a fair shot at getting rich. The common presumption is that America is an unusually mobile country in this sense, more mobile than tradition-bound Europe and more mobile than the more hierarchical, slower-paced economy of decades ago. The reality is that this isn't really true. The United States has grown somewhat less mobile since the 1970s, and exhibits less mobility than do the continental European welfare states or Canada. We're slightly more mobile than the relatively laissez faire United Kingdom.
It's not just, however, that we're willing to forgive inequality if it offers prosperity and mobility, we're actually willing to trade it. The American ethos is a value judgment that we'd prefer the potential for greatness over the guarantee of goodness, and we've structured our economy, to a large degree, as if the two are mutually exclusive. But if the studies are true and Europe's socialist utopias are offering greater social mobility and a guarantee of relative equality, at least on basic levels, then we've really screwed up along the way, haven't we?
I've little hope that we'll address this, though. The overarching evils of vast inequality and the transcendent good of do-it-yourself mobility are such foundational philosophical tenets of America's two parties that I can't see either coming to recognize that the fix, such as one exists, might be the same for both. Indeed, while the Democratic party may be convincible simply because the solutions line up with our proposed programs, Republicans will, for good reason, never relinquish the strict dichotomy they've created between individual mobility and general equality. The belief that large social programs must be avoided because they tamp down on individual virtues stretches back to Hoover and Associationalism, it's not going to be given up now.
