Conservatives have an easier argument
The default setting in the battle between Liberalism and Conservatism, which is the same thing as the battle between equality and authority, is Conservatism. It always seems to get the better of the fight. The people of Israel in the Old Testament did not have to decide to have a monarchy. The authors of “Deuteronomy” went even further in reducing the idea of freedom inherent in “Exodus” by making the government an institution which drained people of their independent judgments by berating them. Christianity starts out, as Hegel argued, as proclaiming as its primary insight the individuality and equality of all people in the eyes of God, and yet that is replaced in a few centuries or, it might be said, in a few generations, by an hierarchical order for the administration of the sacraments and the supervision of moral life.
Protestantism provides some relief from the guilt inspired by Christianity. It allows a deal whereby a person trades in an ultimate moment of surrender to Christ for the freedom to think as one cares about all worldly arrangements, or at least that is what Luther says. Hobbes is based on the idea of every person the judge of the present validity of the social contract but that is easily enough turned into grooving on authoritarianism, embracing the exquisite subtlety of the way the ruler commands his subjects. And alongside Spinoza’s Liberalism, which has inspired or implied the following three hundred and fifty years of democratic government, there is the development of Conservatism that always manages to make a comeback even in a Liberal era. Conservatism can’t simply mean pre-Enlightenment ignorance if it is so resilient.
The reason why Conservatism tends to gain the upper hand over Liberalism is very profound. It is buried in the depths of social structure as well as in the experience of everyday life. Just about everything in social life is differentially distributed according to social class, whether social class is defined as a person’s relation to the means of production or as a set of consumption tastes. People who are of a higher social class have more wealth, higher income, more expensive clothes, better education, more money devoted to luxuries than to necessities. They also have more of what are less obvious things. They are healthier because they take better care of themselves in that they exercise and eat more nutritious food and they can afford better medical care and they avail themselves of medical care at the slightest indication that they may be in need of it.
This general rule also applies to matters that are often assumed to be genetic or otherwise beyond social distribution. Intelligence is differentially distributed. That may be because the children of people with more money study longer and from an earlier age and are exposed to a welter of speech interactions that set them on the road to thinking that you can get your way if you learn how to ask nicely. Or it may be that the children of the better off have better nutrition when they are in the womb or when they leave it, or have more stable lives throughout their childhood. Whatever the way, the children of the rich shine in school more often than the children of the poor, who need affirmative action to make up for their lower SAT scores.
Even beauty is differentially distributed. Malnourished children and people obese because they eat empty calories are not attractive, while fashion models and movie stars of whatever race are attractive whether they are as thin as Audrey Hepburn or as curvy as Marilyn Monroe. Well to do people work out; poor people who are unemployed sit around. Retired people who are well to do play tennis; that may be why they live longer.
Press the point further to where commentators are wary to tread. People of a higher social class are probably of better moral character in that they don’t have to engage in minor thievery to get by and are articulate enough to get their way through suasion rather than through beating one another up. They allow themselves the finer feelings even if we prefer to think that romance is something the simple folk are also allowed, which allows romantic comedies, just like baseball, to be a great equalizer among the classes, even if what that means is that the poor and the comfortable overlap in those specifics but not in their other tastes. Well to do people (unless they come from Texas or Trump Tower) can like literature as well as baseball, and the romance of the better off is leavened with two career families while the romance of the poorly off is dampened by the challenge of having to somehow assemble enough money to hold off creditors.
The consequence of everything being differentially distributed is that everything is a commodity in that it can be sold at a higher or a lower price. Luxuries and necessities both cost more than a poor person can afford and less than will place a dent in a rich person’s wallet, the middle class alone having to worry about how much of a middling thing to purchase, whether in education, housing, or a restaurant to go to with the family on Friday night. Poor people are like rich people in that they spend on what they don’t need just to show they can and so purchase fancy duds or electronic devices, just much less costly ones than those purchased by the rich. Middle class people mind their pennies. No wonder they become Republicans. They are angry.
While trade creates a putative equality between the two sides to a bargain, in fact one side usually has a greater store of goods or of money and so is in a better bargaining position. The factory owner can get a worker to work for less of a wage than would be the case if there were collective bargaining; a company can corner the copper or diamond market; a consumer has little to bargain with and so begs an insurance company or an auto company to live up to what the consumer had thought he had been promised.
And so, the distribution system, which is what trade does, hands out what has been produced, as Talcott Parsons would put it, according to rules of trade dictated by custom, law and government regulation, workers now but not then allowed to bargain collectively, consumers of mortgages not today but maybe tomorrow supplied with clear contracts, bondholders now and for the foreseeable future more worthy of guarantees and government protection than those who survive on a widow’s mite.
But everyone or at least most people think of themselves as making choices, well or badly, purchasing what they want or need, the onus of a purchase on the buyer to have used money wisely, which is a freedom that becomes identified with the free enterprise system, when instead people might be focusing on the conditions that govern trade, though that would turn the consumer into the victim rather than the hero of his own material existence. I do pretty well in managing my life in the market for someone who is poor or middle class or rich, and that takes pride of place over what I happen to do for a living.
Thus the connection between hierarchy and the free enterprise system is established. The idea of trade, and that is what informs the economic theory of laissez-faire, is an idea of the putative equality offered by the marketplace. Anyone can get in. As an ideology, laissez-faire justifies the differential distribution of the rewards of the marketplace. If you lose in the job market or in the stock market, that’s just tough, and so everybody pretty much is where they should be. The losers should just stop whining. There is, of course, no reason to think that the differential distribution of rewards is inherent in the idea of trade. If everyone had resources and a minimum trading ability (or access to people who for a fee could manage their resources) then everyone could wind up with enough to live on. There is enough wealth to do that. The issue of production, as Parsons pointed out, is distinct from the issue of distribution. Why computer innovations take place is a question of production while the question of why there is a real estate bubble, which has to do with what institutions have the power to leverage mortgages, is an issue of distribution. Modern society does well with production so long as the distribution system does not get too much in the way.
So differential distribution leads to inequality. It takes another step to say that it leads to a doctrine of authority. That occurs because so many forms of differential distribution overlap. An internist or a social worker is likely to be more sophisticated about any number of issues in life than most of his or her clientele. Expertise and being fashionably turned out overlap, even to the point that it is caddish or humorous to point out when they do not, as with Hillary’s pantsuits. Confronted in any number of ways with the overlap, it is easy enough to move from some people being authoritative in one area of expertise or another to a doctrine of authority, which is that there are just people to be looked up to as more central, more knowledgeable, more to be admired, and all the other things that are implicit in and conferred by authority, whether the capacity to be so is the result of appointment or the weight of tradition or some other source of authority.
People have, over the millennia, tried to compensate for the inevitability of differential distribution by creating the idea of rights and various other categories of putative equality, such as identification with an ethnic group, or the putative equality of voters, as the places where politicians and groups can take their stands. The division between Liberals and Conservatives, whatever their stripes, nevertheless remains as the division between those who advocate for the naturalness of hierarchy, which provides authority of one sort or another, and those who advocate for the naturalness of the reasoning power of human beings to alter their human relations and so can foster or bring forward a situation of equality, however much conditions are never all that ripe to sustain it, and so invent institutional arrangements, such as the First Amendment, that go a long way to sustaining some measure of equality not just in the political arena but in the social sphere because of the high regard in which the ethical principles concerning the First Amendment are held. You ought to have freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
But make no mistake about it. Liberalism is the uphill push. Christianity was a religion founded in an idea of equality and yet its history reveals just how fraught with paradox is the relation between authority and equality. Religion, all religions, claim that religion is the ultimate form of authority and that rests on the fact that everyone follows one form of principle or another. That is the natural thing to do, even if in the modern world that is expressed as the doctrine that everyone has to have faith in something, that even atheists believe in their secular humanism (which, first of all, is not the same thing, because confidence in scientific laws is not the same thing as having a basic ethical principle such as the religious like sense of the sanctity of the individual consciousness, much less an emotional feeling for being sure of something that is beyond reason, such as the Virgin Birth, and second of all, atheism is not a religion but the denial of the need for religion and so should not be classified as a religion simply because religionists would prefer to regard it that way). It is also the case that philosophers will claim that the authority of religious truths is subject to ethical judgment. Is it right to believe in a God who allows child sacrifice? But that is only to allow philosophers of ethics to style themselves as being in the catbird seat. They are the judges of deep ethical feelings. Few religious people give them that much credence because they trust liturgy and story and imagery and regard ethics as a matter of authority or of an emotional sense to be decent.
Christianity, for its part, claims it is a religion that says that all souls are in some sense equal, even if that is quite a stretch in that some people will go to Hell and some people won’t and that seems a significant difference between two sets of people. Let us allow Christians to claim merely that people are putatively equal in that each of them has the choice made by themselves or by God about whether to be classified as among the elect or among the condemned. If that is the case, then Christianity is claiming that it is doing something unnatural in that it is proclaiming a doctrine that goes against the notion that everything is differentially distributed, that everything is unequal. If that is the case, then what authority does it have for doing so? Is it that its authority as the standard of authority allows it to declare something contrary to the notion of authority?
Moreover, if that is the case, then why is it not also the case that the idea of equality is reason enough to think of people as being equal rather than unequal, to foist upon the world something that is unnatural to the world? It might be claimed that the idea of equality is merely another form of authority, but that is difficult to argue unless one has already assumed that anything is an exercise of authority. Authority, remember, is invested in something or someone external to the actor, whether that externality is the law or a person’s superego or a principle of morality. Authority, remember, is paired with power as two ways of getting things done, making them happen, when an idea of equality may reside as a passing thought or motivating thought in a person in the instant in which it is exercised, and so is rid of the idea that it is the internalization of an idea rather than an operative idea which in some sense fills the soul. Equality needs no authority to set itself in place, only the power of people to reason about what they are and what they want to be. And if that is the case, then something else and many other things as well can be introduced into the world of inequality, and so there is no priority to inequality except as noticing that this is the way things usually are. What I have just said, however, is a sociological observation rather than a morally or religiously compelling one.