Kevin R. C. Gutzman

June 10, 2009

Tom Piatak would have one think that when M. E. Bradford castigated believers in “Equality with the capital ‘E,’” he was denying that the tradition to which he adhered included belief in any kind of equality at all.  Bradford went on to explain that he of course did believe in equality before the law, but that the only other equality in which he believed was politically untranslatable.  The belief in equality before the law is precisely a classic left-wing position, the type of position that people such as Tom Piatak (with his advocacy of federal largesse for his region because it is his region and his relatives because they are his relatives) disapprove.  In sum, Bradford agreed with what I am saying.  When Piatak quotes Bradford saying that he disbelieved in Equality, Piatak does not recognize the significance of Bradford’s capitalization.

Bradford’s idea of the rightness of equality before the law is also at odds with Christian Kopff’s explanation of the reason why Kopff laments what lately has been done to a substantial group of New Haven, Connecticut firefighters.  Where I said that what most Americans lamented about that case was that the firemen had not been treated equally, but had been treated as if they had found themselves on the wrong side of a contest for government largesse with Tom Piatak’s region and relatives, Kopff responded that Kopff preferred Jared Taylor’s grounds for lamenting the firefighters’ fate thus far instead.

M.E. Bradford wrote at length, and that quite disapprovingly, about the use of the Federal Government to favor organized Northern interests (such as, in our day, Wall Street and the UAW) at the expense of the rest of the country (most often including the South).  Tom Piatak denigrated “Toyota Republicans” for opposing such an expropriation quite recently on this very site.  Those “Toyota Republicans” were mainly southern senators who wanted their people to be extended an opportunity to compete with, rather than subsidize, the UAW and Formerly Big Three As I read that column, in my mind’s eye, I could see the shades of John Taylor of Caroline and M.E. Bradford rolling their eyes and exchanging knowing glances.