Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money.Here's the simplified version:
diversity = inequality (boo!)
homogeneity = equality (yay!)
It's very clever doublespeak when you can pitch the Republican-dominated suburbs as the road to egalitarianism. Just think how great everything would be without all those darn nonwhite minorities and single people. Has anyone suggested this as a talking point for Mitt Romney yet?
Now how do we know that Frum is arguing in bad faith? Because he begins with this pleasant thought:
It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.Yes, that's right. The suburbs were established not out of white flight but because white people and white Republicans "care most deeply about equality." It's all about the common good and happy go lucky communal living out here in the suburbs. Republican Communism. That's got to be the response to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Right?
The debate in the comments is pretty intense: Michael Bérubé puts in his very welcome two cents and someone called Lemuel Pitkin and someone called Grand Moff Texan go at it with tooth and claw. You can also learn about something called the Gini index which measures income inequality (or at least I think it does).
