Fareed Zakaria on the Tension Between Democracy and Liberty

In earlier posts, I've expressed my scepticism about the possibilities for any system of government that Americans would recognize as democratic emerging from the social upheaval of the nations in the Middle East and North Africa. Fareed Zakaria's 2003 book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad raises interesting questions about democracy and democratization, asking, in particular, if there is a tension between democracy and freedom  that requires a delicate balance.

The idea that democracy and freedom are not the same thing is a fairly old one. The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the 1835 book Democracy in America, was interested in the question of why American democracy had not led to dictatorship, as it had in his native country. Part of de Tocqueville’s answer was that effective democracy must rest on an existing social and legal system that is consistent with popular rule and that prevents majorities from becoming tyrannical. Fareed Zakaria restates this line of reasoning in contemporary terms, and he extends it by arguing that even in relatively successful democratic nations, such as the United States, there can be too much democracy.

Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria identifies the present period in history as a democratic age. He points out that more nations than ever before create governments by popular vote and that the support of the people has become the only basis of political legitimacy in much of the world. The age is also democratic because the broad masses of people have more cultural and economic power than in previous times, as well as more political power.  The word “democracy” has acquired the connotation of something that is always good and always desirable and that will always tend to produce free and just societies. Our news media suggest, for example, that the problems of former Communist societies or of authoritarian nations can be cured if only sufficient democratization can be achieved.

As Zakaria sees it, democracy is not the universal solution. He is not opposed to popular rule, but he does see difficulties with the direct rule of the people. Democracy, he maintains, only maintains individual liberty and works properly when it works within a regulated system of elected representatives with limited, legally defined powers.  Further, protections of individual liberty must generally be created first in order to establish a workable liberal democracy.

He begins to support his argument with a quick and rather breathless look back at the history of human liberty. He argues that liberty in the Western world does not spring from Greek democracy but from the split between the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire, which eventually freed the Roman popes from imperial control and made the popes competitors with the secular rulers of Europe. Liberty, then, began in the space created by the struggle between church and state.  Other struggles, between kings and nobility and between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, expanded this space. Conflict limited the powers of central authorities and this led to greater personal freedom.  Capitalism pushed the cause of individual liberty further by eroding the powers of monarchies and feudal aristocracies and by putting in place a system based on individual and property rights.  While this history might seem peculiar to Western Europe and North America, Zakaria asserts that it contains a pattern that may be applied elsewhere. However, he contends societies must first achieve economic liberalization, with strong protections for property rights, and only afterwards move toward popular rule.

There are at least two conditions for the development of liberal democracy in Zakaria’s view. A country must not only have attained a decent standard of living, it must have attained this through trade and industry and not through the sale of abundant natural resources. In fact, natural resources may often be a disguised disadvantage for nation, an easy source of riches that prevents the development of an active and involved middle class. In addition, a nation must have a strong government that can enforce the laws and regulations necessary to protect the property rights and freedoms needed for efficient markets. Zakaria disagrees with those who see government land reform as denial of property rights. Instead, he maintains that land reform moves the ownership of land away from feudal landlords, who merely hold titles, and to those who actually work the land. This can set the stage for industrialization.

Zakaria devotes a chapter to the problem of democracy in the Islamic lands of the Middle East. This chapter will probably draw the attention of many readers because of the American occupation of Iraq and stated U.S. Government intentions to establish democracy in that nation. The author maintains that the general absence of liberal democracy in the Middle East is not a consequence of a cultural contradiction between Islam and liberty. It is also not a consequence of property, since many of the region’s problems are results of sudden wealth, particularly in the form of oil.  Islamic fundamentalism, as a challenge to liberal democracy, has been caused by the failure of the political institutions of the region to face rapid social and economic changes.  Zakaria’s prescriptions are economic and political reform. Among the economic reforms, he would seek to lessen the region’s dependence on oil as a source of unearned wealth. He offers the example of the African oil-producing nation of Chad, which was required by the World Bank to deposit its oil revenues in an offshore bank and spend all but a fraction on investments and building up national infrastructure. Without the source of money, the government will have to encourage its citizens to engage in constructive and profitable activities in order to provide tax revenues. The major political reform he recommends is the encouragement of constitutionalism. He identifies this as systems of checks and balances that will prevent any part of a government or society from gaining excessive power over other parts. Zakaria does not say who should enact these reforms or how people in the West can or should nudge the Middle East toward capitalism and constitutionalism.

Although Zakaria has a high opinion of the United States, he sees the tension between liberalism and democracy in this nation, as well as in the developing world.  He cites evidence that Americans had become increasingly alienated from their political system and distrustful of it, in spite of generally rising prosperity.  His explanation, as one might expect, is that the United States had become too democratic. After 1970, Congress democratized itself by moving decision-making power away from closed congressional committees and into open committees, making government more responsive. This responsiveness meant that legislators would have to answer to their most active and informed observers, who were the lobbyists and special interests. Finance reforms, which sought to limit politicians’ reliance on a few large donors and broaden small contributions, ultimately increased the power of fund raisers and made raising money the main activity of political campaigns. Zakaria finds one of the most destructive forms of excessive democratization in the referendum system, which exists in several states, but which has received the most attention in California. The referendum system allows those who gather enough signatures to place specific issues before the voters, rather than have those issues decided by elected legislators.  California’s referendum system, according to Zakaria, crippled the state’s economic and political system by placing most of its budget outside the control of its legislators.

 Zakaria’s prescription for the United States is to accept less democracy and to delegate more authority. He points out that public opinion polls identify three public institutions as particularly worthy of respect. These are the Supreme Court, the armed services, and the Federal Reserve System. The first and the third are appointed decision makers with decidedly undemocratic powers. The second is a hierarchy of authority that operates on entirely different principles from most of American society. He does not, I think, give sufficient attention to the problems posed by too much undemocratic, uncontrolled authority. Appointed judges may become unelected rulers and the Federal Reserve may become a mechanism for economic cronyism.

Zakaria may  put too much faith in the ability or willingness of authoritarian governments to create the economic and political foundations for democratic societies. He cites Chile as an example of an authoritarian nation that became a relatively successful democracy.  It is true that Chile did achieve a fairly high level of economic prosperity under the government of General Augosto Pinochet and that it did establish a stable elected government after Pinochet’s rule. Chile had a long democratic tradition before Pinochet seized power, though, and it could be argued that this tradition formed the basis for the current government.

Russia and China provide Zakaria with one of his favorite comparisons. Russia, according to his argument, democratized first and only after that attempted to liberalize its economic system. China, on the other hand, has kept power firmly in the hands of the Communist Party, while creating a capitalist economy. China stands a good chance of becoming a workable democracy, while Russia is economically troubled and has been under two presidents (Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin) who have used democratic political institutions to increase their own power. There are several problems with this comparison. First, it compares what Russia is with what Zakaria believes that China might become. The future is notoriously difficult to predict, and it may well be that Russia will be a prosperous democracy in a decade and China will find it difficult to move beyond party rule. Second, one might reasonably maintain that Russia’s problems have little to do with a rush to democratization in the post-Soviet era.  These problems could be seen as the historical consequences of a backward empire suddenly plunged into rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, torn apart by revolution and civil war in the early twentieth, and subjected to brutal mismanagement under Stalin and his heirs.  Third, by the early twenty-first century, the Chinese economy showed some signs of stalling, while Russia began to recover from the economic chaos of the 1990's.

Although one may question Zakaria on these and other issues, the book makes some extremely valuable points.  Democracy may not be an unqualified good.  The rule of the majority does not necessarily lead to harmony and respect for minority rights. A stable and lasting democracy cannot be founded simply by holding elections. Political systems are not products of ideals, but products of concrete social and economic conditions.

The Arab Fall

Protestors in Egypt

This past year, when many were waxing euphoric about the “Arab Spring,” I expressed skepticism about the prospects for anything that Americans would recognize as democracy in the Muslim-dominated nations of North Africa and the Middle East. Political systems, I’ve argued repeatedly, are not produced by theoretical blueprints. The government of a nation exists within that nation’s larger social setting; it rests on social institutions, interpersonal networks, historical traditions, and cultural practices that go much deeper than politics. A liberal democracy, in the classical sense, cannot be created by efforts to reshape a society because this type of governance simply represents the interests that exist in a society that is sufficiently stable to work out its differences through elected spokespeople.

The recent events in Libya and Egypt offer more evidence that these countries do not have societies do not have societies that can give rise to liberal democracy. Obviously, part of the problem is the cultural influence of radical Islam. In both countries, the violent protests broke out in response to a film made by someone known as “Sam Basile,” who reportedly lives in California. I watched part of the film, and I can certainly see why a Muslim would regard it as offensive (I don’t think anyone will defend it on artistic grounds). Still, the violent reaction of the protestors and their demands that the United States ban the film and imprison its maker clearly demonstrate that they understand neither how the American system works nor the basic principles of a liberal democracy. They may be minorities in their countries, but a substantially large rambunctious minority is all it takes to ensure that liberal democratic processes just won’t work.

I argued earlier that the central role of mass movements in the Arab Spring made me pessimistic about the chances for democracy.  Masses are not conducive to democratic behavior. In neither Egypt nor Libya can one find behind the mass demonstrations the types of orderly patterns of community interaction necessary to democratic processes.

Libyan Guards at the US Consulate in Benghazi

The lack of an orderly society to create a government is especially clear in Libya, a collection of tribal groups that is a nation only in the sense that it has internationally recognized borders.  The tragedy in Libya, I think, resulted in part from a failure to acknowledge this. Our State Department has said that the Libyan government had primary responsibility for protecting our consulate in Benghazi. But just as Libya isn’t really a nation, it doesn’t really have a government. If we are going to send an ambassador into a wilderness of warring tribes, we should make sure he’s ringed by heavily armed Marines.

We cannot bring peace and stability to countries in upheaval. What we can do is keep our expectations for those countries realistically low for the near future and prepare to protect our personnel and our interests.

Preaching a New Civic Gospel

The Spring 2012 issue of the journal Democracy features a trilogy of articles calling for a new emphasis on “civic responsibility.” Introducing these articles, the editors observe that”[i] f progressive politics over the past half century is identified with one activity more than any other, we think there is no question that that activity is the pursuit and expansion of rights.” They don’t call for any backing away from the continual expansion of rights, including the progressive creation of new entitlements, many of which are inconsistent with older rights from state interference with individual liberty. Instead, they want to add “civic responsibility” to the agenda of expansion. “Here,” they helpfully explain, “ we don’t mean—to use that phrase that Bill Clinton tried to appropriate from the Republicans in the 1990s—personal responsibility. We mean something else: civic responsibility.”

Of the three articles on “Reclaiming Citizenship,” the one that I found most interesting, for reasons of professional background, was Eric Liu’s piece entitled “Sworn Again Americans.”  Liu (pictured above) advocates a new creed of assimilation and Americanization , not only for our large immigrant population, but for Americans in general. My most recent book, Public Education – America’s Civil Religion: A Social History (2009) argues that public schooling took its present form in the United States as part of the Progressive movement’s effort to build a highly unified and centralized state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through schools, social planners sought to propagate a civic creed intended to “Americanize” both immigrants and native-born Americans. While I recognize that a nation is more than just people who share a common territory and government, in the book I express concerns about the top-down nation-building goals of social planners to use an institution of the state to re-shape the population. There may be, I suggest, an element of authoritarianism or even totalitarianism about the idea that the state creates the nation, rather than the reverse.

Mr. Liu advocates a strong, new civic religion in the United States, which should, in his opinion, involve the three core elements of creed, character, and culture. On the creed that he proposes, I agree that Americans should be immersed in the central texts of our government, from Jefferson onwards. But, beyond that, who defines what we should believe? I suggest that members of the American public, based on knowledge of our history and traditions, should decide for themselves. Liu wants the cult directed from Washington, D.C. “[T]here can and should be a federal requirement that the basic texts and ideas of our nation’s civic creed be taught, in an upward spiral of sophistication, every year from kindergarten to twelfth grade.” If our nation is polarized at present, how much more polarized will it become when the parties and philosophies that control the government get to oversee the “federal requirement” of a “civic creed” through all of American schools?

If the central state can try to direct what we believe, then it can also try to control who we are. This is the essence of Liu’s call for developing “civic character.” Comparing this activity to the cultivating of a garden (are we plants?), Liu wants more “national service programs” and argues that we should be “trained to organize” so that we will make “the right decision.” He wants us to make decisions that he sees as “right” because we have been trained and organized, like plants growing the way the gardener wants them to grow.

What kind of “civic culture” does Liu want our gardeners to cultivate with their manipulations of culture?  He suggests that we should reinvent and rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance. “That’s why,” he tells us, “recently I helped launch a civic-artistic project called Sworn-Again American. It mashes up aspects of a naturalization ceremony, a multicultural festival, and a revival tent to make a playful public experience in which Americans recommit to the content of their citizenship. What we should celebrate more than diversity is what we do with it.” In this view, “diversity” is no longer a recently invented and debatable concept, but a positive item of faith celebrated by all Americans in “multicultural festivals” and “revival tents.”

After reading Eric Liu’s call for a new civic religion, designed according to his own political ideals, I wondered: Who gets excommunicated?

Against Social Policy

Over the past few years, I have grown increasingly suspicious of the very idea of social policy. This may be biographically rooted in my work during the 1980s with refugees from authoritarian societies with aggressive social policies. It may also be a reaction to working in a modern university and being surrounded by calls to fall into line and march for social change. I don’t like following anything but my own dim vision of the truth. Beyond these personal inclinations, though, I don’t see intentional efforts to achieve one or another sort of society as consistent with democracy.

While different people and different political philosophies use the word “democracy” in a variety of ways, the term most commonly refers to a system of government in which people either make political decisions for themselves (direct democracy) or elect representatives to make political decisions (representative democracy). In the former, there is no question of anyone “re-making” the people, since the people think for themselves and have the freedom to be what they are. In the latter, also, the goal of re-shaping a society along democratic lines is a contradiction because a representative government represents its public as it is; the government does not try to make the public into something it is not. Since a society is made up of people and of the total of formal and informal relations among people, changing a society means changing the people and their relations with each other. It is a profoundly authoritarian effort and even, as it approaches a goal of total reform, totalitarian at its extreme. Political reform is a matter of changing laws. Economic reform involves changing policies relating to matters such as taxation, public expenditures, or interest rates. Either of these may be consistent with democracy. But social reform aims at changing people and their relations with each other. This is a reversal of the direction of action and control of a democratic society, since it involves the authorities attempting to constitute or re-constitute the public, rather than the public constituting the authorities. This is reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 quip that the East German people had apparently lost the confidence of their government, so the government should “dissolve the people and elect another one.” Creating a new society is precisely the attempt to dissolve the people as they are and to appoint the people as one would like them to be.

Jefferson-Adams and the Natural Aristocracy

The historian Gordon Wood, in his magisterial 1969 classic The Creation of the American Republic, observed that the ideal of equality was a formative part of early American culture.  For Wood, the early American attraction to goals of equality grew out of the unsettling experience of the Revolution, the severing of ties to the English hierarchy, and the rise of new individuals to political and social power during the bitter struggle for separation from Britain. The turmoil of the Revolutionary years did undoubtedly contribute to an American rhetoric and ideology of equality.  However, the ideal of a political body of equal individuals took such a strong hold because it emerged from a long historical experience before the establishment of the new nation and the ideal developed in the ways that it did because the historical experience both promoted dedication to some form of equality and presented that dedication with grave challenges and contradictions. The intellectual currents of the eighteenth century, including the egalitarian theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Paine, undoubtedly influenced the thinking of leading individuals in the American war of independence and the early republic. But the history and social setting of the period left them open to these kinds of ideas and created the need to reconcile thoughts about equality and inequality among citizens. 

By the time of national independence, the central political issue for most Americans was not the redistribution of wealth. It was whether the acknowledged and accepted inequalities of condition would subordinate some to others. Looking back to England, the citizens of the new nation saw that the hierarchy of dependence in Europe rested on inherited status. Thus, the great debate over stratification at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the argument over the Natural Aristocracy, was in large part fueled by concerns about whether the “well-born” would be able to re-create and a European-style hierarchy of dependence in the United States. From this very early time, Americans readily accepted differences in wealth, as long as those differences resulted from each person pursuing an independent course. Wealth from the accident of birth carried the taint of Old World hierarchy and raised the possibility of replacing what we now call acquired status with ascribed. Definitions of the Natural Aristocracy were often complicated and contradictory, sometimes portraying the elite as a coherent social class to be balanced against other classes in maintaining equality and sometimes as a collection of individuals of talent. These differing definitions affected how people saw the members of the elite and what kinds of responses they advocated to keep inequality of condition from threatening the political equality of independent yeomen or middling town dwellers.

The idea of equality as the independence of landed freemen took on a quasi-mythical form in the thinking of Thomas Jefferson. Recognizing the importance of land speculation in creating inequality, Jefferson observed that “the greatest Estates we have in this Colony were made … by taking up & purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable lands we possess” (Quoted in Linklater 2007, p. 27).  Jefferson saw little contradiction between great estates and equality because he understood equality as the absence of hierarchical dependence. Jefferson’s model of society was one of independent farmers, each working his own land. He believed that Saxon England prior to the Norman Conquest had been based on alodial law, in which land belonged to the person who worked it, and argued that American society should be a return to this old Saxon system (Jefferson 1950).  “In the model he envisioned, the political structure would be built up from the community based on the local ‘hundred’ or county with its own court and administration” (Quoted in Andro Linklater, The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity. New York: Walker & Company, 2007, p. 47).

Jefferson’s social vision makes it clear just how he managed to square social egalitarianism with a belief in the existence of superior individuals. All men (and Jefferson’s ideas did apply chiefly to “men” in the narrower sense of male humans) were indeed not only created equal, but would live in equal circumstances insofar as none were dependent on others for support or patronage because each controlled his own agrarian base. Some might indeed hold larger tracts, as Jefferson did, But this would not give larger land holders power over smaller holders.

American beliefs and concerns over equality as independence coalesced at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the phrase “natural aristocracy.” Today, we remember this phrase either as a point of contention in the struggle between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists over the adoption of the Constitution or a question of political philosophy in the late correspondence of Jefferson and John Adams.  The concept of the natural aristocrat was one of the most widely accepted notions in early social and political thinking about the creation of the American nation. Writing back in England, in the Wealth of Nations (Everyman’s Library,1954 [1776], vol. II, p. 118), Adam Smith attributed the American struggle to the desire of the “… the leading men, the natural aristocracy” of the colonies to manage public affairs.  In America, this elite management, taken for granted by Smith, came under scrutiny during the efforts to design a governmental structure following independence. Even those who were most sympathetic to an an English-style rank-ordering of society, who were often members of an elite based on birth, tended to accept an implicit and generally unexamined assumption of the situation later known as “equality of opportunity,” in which personal virtues and talents, not advantages of birth, would be the primary sources of preeminence.

Because American concerns were chiefly about hierarchy and dependence, arguments about unequal wealth and position in the early republic often concentrated on whether the most advantaged would employ power to subject others and become a true estate. A concentration of power could help to turn wealthier, more socially connected, and cleverer people into a European-style elite. This was the reason the Federalist-Anti-Federalist debate over the Constitution became a debate over stratification. It was a debate that broadened and deepened American thinking about social classes and produced a range of views, but always stayed close to the issue of what a generally accepted socioeconomic inequality meant for relations of independence.

John Adams took a complicated view of the natural aristocracy, seeing its members as sources of both danger and national political advantage.  To overcome the dangers of natural aristocrats to political equality, he proposed “to throw the rich and the proud into one group, in a separate assembley, and there tie their hands; if you give them scope with the people at large, or their representatives, they will destroy all equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamation of the people themselves [italics in the original]. They will have much more power mixed with the representatives, than separated from them. In the first case, if they unite, they will give the law, and govern all; if they differ, they will divide the state, and go to a decision by force. But placing them alone by themselves, the society avails itself of all their abilities and virtues; they become a solid check to the representatives themselves, as well as to the executive power, and you disarm them entirely of their power to do mischief” (John Adams, Letter XXXII, Massachusetts Gazette, Sept. 4, 1787, p. 4). Behind Adams’ political theory is a concept of stratification based on a categorization into the natural aristocrats and “the people at large.” Adams’s argument about restraining the natural aristocracy was an ingenious use of a common Anti-Federalist argument for Federalist purposes, since those opposed to a more centralized government often argued precisely that localized and diffused politics were needed to restrain the natural aristocrats.

With the successful adoption of the Constitution, the debate over the role of inequality in American life became less immediately relevant.  But looking back at this debate reveals some of the assumptions and ideas about equality and inequality held by early Americans. Americans did not all agree on their opposition to rank-ordered subordination, nor were they always consistent in their views. The elite Anti Federalists, in particular, often appeared to oppose centralization of governmental authority because they were inclined toward a kind of subordination, in which they imagined themselves, as local elites, better able than a distant authority to direct their own communities. This kind of anti-democratic localism would continue to be one stream in American social views, later appearing in the thought of John C. Calhoun and again among the Southern Bourbons after Reconstruction. Alongside this regional elitism, though, the Jeffersonian image of independent white yeomen continued to hold imaginations in the South.

The most common opinion was a general acceptance of human inequality, combined with the goal of keeping that inequality from becoming permanently institutionalized as hereditary aristocracy and restraining it from becoming a system of subordination.  The last important discussion of the concept of the natural aristocracy took place as an epilogue to the old debate at the time of the Constitution, in the letters of Jefferson and Adams in the Fall of 1813, the year after the two political rivals finally renewed their friendship. Writing on September 2, and commenting on a passage of Theognis, Adams raised the question of who are the “aristoi”  He translated this word, which means “the best” in Greek, as “aristocrats.” “Philosophy may Answer ‘the Wise and Good,’” Adams maintained, “But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, ‘the rich, the beautiful and well born’” (Adams, in Lester J. Cappon The Adams-Jefferson Letters, Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 1988, p. 371).  Adams told Jefferson that “the five Pillars of Aristocracy are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time over bear any one or both of the last two” (Adams, in Cappon 1988, p. 371).

Adams, then saw the inequality described by aristocracy as consisting of individual qualities, rather than inhering in social structure. Today, most commentators would probably classify being “well born,” having an advantageous family situation, as a matter of the system of positions into which individuals are born. Adams, though, writing at a time before sociologically thinking permeated views of the world, considered advantages of birth, personal appearance, and financial situation all as individual qualities. Moreover, he argued that the social assets that individuals possess outweigh moral and intellectual capacities.  Although Adams threw together different kinds of human inequalities, it is evident that Adams took a highly skeptical and critical view of social inequality, even while regarding it as inevitable.  The things that make people “the best” in a society are usually not the most constructive traits.  The suspicion of preeminence is consistent with the old Federalist’s earlier concerns with setting up institutions that can control and direct the political influence of the supposedly best people.

Jefferson replied to these thoughts on October 28. He recognized that Adams was lumping together different types of inequality as components of the aristocracy, and then assuming that the least desirable components would receive the greatest emphasis.  Jefferson responded by dividing the qualities identified by Adams into two categories: those belonging to the “artificial aristocracy” and those belonging to the “natural aristocracy.” “The grounds of [the natural aristocracy],” according to Jefferson, “are virtue and talents.” Bodily strength, he explained, was a primary ground of this natural preeminence, but modern weapons have rendered this obsolete. “[B]odily strength, like beauty, good humor, politeness, and other accomplishments, has become an auxiliary ground of distinction.” Jefferson did not make it clear why these other accomplishments should have diminished along with strength, although presumably gunpowder did not displace beauty or politeness in the same way that it displaced physical prowess. The artificial aristocracy, on the other hand, is “founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents” (Jefferson, in Cappon, 1988, p. 388).

Jefferson distinguished between the fundamental political rights of white men, which were equal, and their opportunities for leadership, which the author of the Declaration of Independence believed should be distributed according to virtues and talents.  Neither Jefferson nor John Adams was a social leveler. Both saw stratification as inevitable, and justifiable to the extent that it was the product of those virtues and talents. It is notable that Jefferson’s optimism about the natural aristocracy was based on his differentiation of inequality based on “virtues and talents” and inequality based on “wealth and birth.”  We can see in Jefferson’s interpretation some of the early traces of the “equality of opportunity” view that was gradually to emerge from the “equality of independence” perspective. The willingness to free the natural aristocrats from constraints came out of the belief that their superiority would be the expression of personal qualities. However, Jefferson also believed, as we have seen, that in a society of independent individual yeomen even political leadership by people of superior talents would not subordinate the general citizenry.

Adams, true to his old dedication to restraining the natural aristocrats, was much more skeptical of inequality. While he combined different kinds of inequalities, he also made a point that many social scientists would accept today: that the advantages that modern commentators might describe as “ascribed status” influence and can outweigh the advantages of “achieved status.” This did not lead him to argue for abolishing social inequality, but to continue his long-held support for finding ways to restrain and direct those at the top.

In the years that have followed this interchange between the two founders, Americans have tended to lean toward the Jeffersonian approach when they have seen a wide opening for virtues and talents, especially as opportunity became a greater part of the national understanding of the meaning of equality. When they have become more conscious of threats to the efficacy of individual virtues and talents, as in the Progressive Era, they have tended to favor the Adams approach, although fostering opportunity for achievement became a more common rationale for constructing political means of constraint.