Just in time for the Fourth of July, the U.S. Supreme Court curtailed the ability of universities to use race as a factor in admissions. Many American universities have employed affirmative action not only as a specific recipe for diverse student bodies, but in an effort to bolster equality more generally in a stubbornly unequal America. The court’s Republican majority decided that such programs violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The court ruled, in effect, that more equal is less fair.

Equality has always been a fraught concept. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had the temerity to declare that “all men are created equal,” a statement that the enslaver from Virginia neither believed nor pretended to — at least not outside the rhetorical borders of the Declaration. Stanford University historian Jack Rakove maintains that Jefferson meant that the colonists “as a people” had a right to self-government that was equal to the right of other peoples. But given the scarcity of self-government circa 1776, even that seems a curiously expansive framework.

In the run-up to revolt, “equality,” however carefully hedged, was no doubt a useful rallying cry for diverse colonists seeking to jettison a king, who ruled over them from divinely inspired heights, and his troops, who exercised more proximate controls. A decade later, when the war was won and the king and soldiers tossed, the statement’s utility seemed to have expired; it found no purchase in the nation’s slavery-drenched Constitution.

Much of the American history that followed can be viewed as a contest between rising demands for equality and entrenched defenses of hierarchy — racial hierarchy very much included. Much of present politics follows suit. MAGA frequently casts itself as a populist movement against elites — academics, scientists, culture leaders and the kind of condescending, educated, affluent liberals who occupy cosmopolitan cities and conservative imaginations. But the quotidian reality of MAGA politics is not assault on hierarchy: It’s defense of it. MAGA’s fiercest commitments are to a veritable sprawl of privilege, elevating White over Black and Brown, male over female, straight over LGBTQ, native over migrant, rich over poor, rural over urban, Christian over other, conservative over all.

Across the country, policies that reinforce hierarchy are Republican signatures: work requirements for poor parents combined with tax cuts for the wealthy; abortion prohibitions that undermine female autonomy; Florida’s “don’t say gay” agenda, which effectively sends LGBTQ Floridians to the back of the school bus; gerrymanders, like Alabama’s, which deny Black citizens political representation.

The frenzied assault on trans kids and adults is nothing short of an effort to deny the pursuit of happiness to a marginalized class. Similarly, it’s telling that the long conservative war on affirmative action that ended at the Supreme Court this week targeted race-conscious admissions facilitating the entry of minorities into elite institutions. Legacy admissions and donor-influenced admissions, which help cement the hold of a permanent elite, never animated conservatives in the same way.

In his brilliant 1992 book, “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” Garry Wills documented what he called the “giant (if benign) swindle” that Abraham Lincoln accomplished in November 1863 with an economical 272 words. The scam takes place in the very first sentence of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, when he re-christens the U.S. as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

This was news to millions of hardened racists; not everyone was fooled. “How dare he,” wailed the editors of the Chicago Times. The paper recognized Lincoln’s sleight of hand, in which, the newspaper said, he misstated the cause for which the Union dead gave their lives and simultaneously slandered the Founders. “They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that Negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges,” the Times noted.

Reverence for the Founders, the wealthy White men who set the constitutional machine in motion, has always offered a convenient guise in which to perpetuate the brutally hierarchical and racist world in which they thrived. Lincoln, Wills writes, had to “sneak around the frontal defenses of prejudice and find a back way into agreement with bigots.”

This explains, at the level of tactics, the usefulness of the Declaration of Independence for Lincoln. That revered document was antimonarchical in the common perception, and, so far as that took the reader, unchallengeable. But because it indicted King George III in terms of the equality of men, the Declaration committed Americans to claims even more at odds with slavery than with kingship. …”

At Gettysburg, Lincoln laid the foundation for the war after the war, when a new birth of freedom would challenge old structures and prejudices. The project failed. Instead, a vicious reaction delayed the dawn of equality for a century.

Lincoln mostly succeeded, however, in changing the meaning of “equality” in the Declaration, dragooning the Founders into a moral battle that continues today. Many Americans now understand “all men are created equal” as a quintessentially American fact. But if all are created equal, why are some born into stifling deprivation while others enjoy boundless privilege? Who should surrender privilege, in service to equality, and who should acquire more?

That’s what affirmative action was all about, and what the court’s ruling was about, too. Indeed, the portioning of privilege remains the stuff of American politics in 2023. The dead hand of reaction isn’t lifted. The demand for equality isn’t met. Yet the slaveholder’s Declaration, repurposed by the Great Emancipator, still offers escape from the straitjacket of the past.

Francis Wilkinson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. politics and policy. Previously, he was an editor for the Week, a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.

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