William A. Henry III on Egalitarianism

Egalitarians - or at least the sort who rile me - believe that all humans are equal ("men" being no longer a politically correct synonym for mankind), and, worse that they should be, on a more or less permanent basis, whatever the real-world differences in their performance and contribution. However much Karl Marx may have been rejected by the nations that once enshrined him and ostensibly followed his dicta, American egalitarians continue to believe Marxian romantic twaddle about the blamelessness of the unaccomplished. They argue that talent is distributed absolutely evenly along class and educational lines, in defiance of everything we know about eugenics. Consequently, they insist that differences in attainment are explained entirely by social justice. Egalitarians fear and detest the competitive impulse. They regard exploration, conquest and colonization as having been unrelievedly barbaric and destructive, thereby mulishly overlooking the impact those movements had in dispersing administratively and technologically superior cultures and compelling inferior ones to adapt. Egalitarians are the sort who are trying to end ability tracking in elementary and sometimes secondary education, on the theory that bright children ought to be helping slow ones rather than maximizing their own achievements and pulling ahead. (I'm not making this up. This is actually popular, if not prevailing, educational theory.) Not far below the surface, this attitude embodies a Marxian belief that the smart pupils' intelligence is not theirs alone to allocate and command but is instead a communal asset to be deployed for the whole class's good.

~~William A. Henry. In Defence of Elitism. (New York : Anchor Books, c1994) p. 17-18.