This week I explore the conflict that seems to be at the core of so much tension in modern America: The relationship between equality and freedom. For the past 50 years, there has been a concerted effort --initially begun as an economic movement -- to place freedom above equality. Milton Friedman said that putting equality before freedom leads to a society with neither, while putting freedom before equality leads to a society with a high degree of both. That kind of thinking led to the neoliberal movement that has dominated American economic and political society for almost 50 years, and it seems to be demonstrably false. Without fundamental equality, true freedom is only available to a subset of the population. And we're seeing the results of that in the potentially existential threats to democracy that we're currently experiencing.
