Growing up I didn’t know another child, let alone an adult with a doctorate, who was confused by “all men are created equal.” You didn’t need to be propagandized by Milton Friedman to know it didn’t mean “all men are created with equal abilities and advantages” or “all men should remain economically equal,” or some other absurdity. Like a lot of the foundational American concepts, Jefferson’s line was easy to understand even for a child, one of the reasons it’s resonated across centuries. Now, a Columbia professor pretends in the pages of the nation’s leading newspaper to be confused by it, and Times editors play along with the insulting gambit.
Phillips-Fein writes, “Opposition to equality has sometimes taken on an explicitly racial character.” In support of this idea, she then quoted the author of an 1849 treatise called “Slavery Justified,” George Fitzhugh, in saying Jefferson’s preamble wasn’t a problem until emancipation. Fitzhugh believed people were “not born physically, morally or intellectually equal” and therefore, he wrote, “their natural inequalities beget inequalities of rights.”