Matthew Cochran writes for The Federalist website about the overemphasis on equality in present-day political discourse.

It’s only been a few centuries since the idea of equality became a staple of Western political conversations. In that time, it has brought about some substantial benefits. We no longer divide our citizens into peasant and lord or master and slave, for example. Those with power and authority can be brought before a judge and answer to the same law as those they govern. It’s a concept that would be quite novel in many times and places, but it has been effective when it comes to curbing abuses of authority (while it lasts, at any rate.) It’s no wonder that equality has become a powerful political concept. Appealing to it has great potential to spur action and provoke change.

Nevertheless, such power has a tendency to corrupt even good ideas, and equality is no exception. As the West became more and more impressed with this new hammer it acquired, we began to see every social problem as a nail. As time passed, we sought to extend equality and enforce it within every area of life—often to our own detriment. Eventually, we changed it from a political tool with specific and defined purposes to a broad, factual belief to which all human thought and behavior must be made to conform.

When this happened, equality ceased to be our servant and instead became our god. Rather than a means to an end, we deemed it valuable for its own sake, and today it claims unjust authority over our lives. …

… Although the word is shouted far and wide, we seldom consider what we actually mean by equality. Neither do we question exactly what measurements or characteristics we suggest are equal. Sometimes we mean our standing before the law, other times we mean our virtues, still other times we mean our genders, but we never bother to specify because the specifics have become unimportant to us.

By and large, invocations of equality are merely used to ward off good judgment by generating feelings of offended entitlement that cry either “I’m as good as you” or, perhaps just as common among the social-justice warriors who most regularly abuse the word, “He’s as good as you.” No excellence can be acknowledged lest others feel ashamed or left out.

Cochran’s words remind this observer of James Piereson’s recent observation that an overemphasis on inequality (of incomes) has blinded some political actors to a more important problem.