Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.
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But what of less murderous mechanisms of combating inequality? History offers little comfort. Land reform often foundered or was subverted by the propertied. Successful programs that managed to parcel out land to the poor and made sure they kept it owed much to the threat or exercise of violence, from Mexico during its revolution to postwar Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Just as with the financial crisis of 2008, macroeconomic downturns rarely hurt the rich for more than a few years. Democracy on its own does not consistently lower inequality. And while improving access to education can indeed narrow income gaps, it is striking to see that American wage premiums for the credentialed collapsed precisely during both world wars.
Societies that have stubbed out their traditional institutions, flattened subsidiarity in favor of Jacobinism and have abolished all formal distinctions of status and prerogative, suffer from chronic identity issues. In such a context, indeed only displays of mass mobilization and contrived ritual can be a substitute. During the period of the Kabinettskriege when wars were becoming increasingly private and propertarian (this was the reason why Clausewitz called war the “continuation of politics by different means,” it was a comment on the fact that much of war in the 18th century was a dynastic succession resolution mechanism), the relative peace afforded an idealism that made Rabaut Saint-Etienne naively predict the decline of war altogether.
Months later, the Bastille would be stormed and in its wake, the levee en masse would be called. Only the trial of war and its animating spirit that Ernst Juenger would later write of could provide lasting ties.
Why would any society strive for equality in result? The tyranny of the IQ curve tells us that only a leveling to worse than mediocrity is possible.