The lie of egalitarianism is the belief that we can dispose of elites and hierachy, or at least radically minimise them. But the real choice is between hierarchies of virtue and utilitarian hierarchies. Those who claim to abolish the former always end up building the latter.
Equality becomes an abstraction, one that ultimately and paradoxically EXCLUDES questions of distributive justice, precisely because equal justice for all is not the same as equal outcomes for all. Social justice effectively ceases to be a political question in modern discourse.
More perniciously of all once everyone has been subjected to an abstact equality or meritocracy, those who hold power and wealth cease to see these as carrying any obligations outside of those imposed extrinsically and formally through taxation and law.
A central example of where egalitarianism is unjust and bad for everyone is the loss of deference towards the older generation by the younger. This most natural and self-evident hiearchy, between those with greater experience, those who have given us birth, is today erased.
The result is on the one hand a 'social care crisis' in which the young are either unable or unwilling to take care of the old, and on the other a housing and inequality crisis whereby wealth and property is concentrated in then hands of the old at the expense of the young.
Behind all the structural, institutional and demographic issues is a breakdown of social solidarity between the generations, in which the young won't or can't share their energy and strength, and the old can't or won't share their accumulated wealth and power.
What many 'progressives' of both left and right refuse to see is that human societies are naturally asymmetrical and specialised, by age, intelligence, geography and a hundred other inescapable factors. Seeking to erase these distinctions is often unjust and always impossible.
What creates an equal justice for all is a situation in which power always has responsibility imposed upon it by law, convention and moral teaching, and in which respect is accorded both to strength and to need, in which every aspect of society works towards the common good.
Finally to return to our old/young example, we see that it is often (in fact usually) the case that we are mixtures of strength and weakness, power and need. What those who attack deference fail to grasp is that we defer to BOTH - we respect the wisdom of age and its infirmity.
