There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.
I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories. . . And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.
One might have thought the world would stop ascribing moral equivalence between acts of terrorism and acts of punishing terrorism. It has not happened that way.
Equivalence signifies uniformity and thus immobility.
Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.
Your kids have been taught that there is a more equivalence between Martin Luther King and today's Muslims - a moral equivalent between today's aggrieved gays and lessons and Muslims. They're all victims of an evil and ill-formed United States of America.
