By Ezio di Nucci
The British Medical Journal accuses Trump of waging war against equality (1). Why has equality become such cheap political prey? The answer to this question might end up implicating ourselves.
Trump’s decisive political insight has always been, we argue, that basic normative principles such as equality can never be put away for good as progressive achievements need constant renegotiating, unlike smallpox (2). And that the other side had grown so comfortable as to mistake economic development for moral progress, while the purely transactional nature of our societies never actually changed.
While equality has never been part of the underlying economic structure of how our communities are organized, some of us have been profiting off that pretence. This claim must be distinguished from two superficially similar but importantly different alternatives: (i) accepting/denying the principle of equality and (ii) providing an economic argument for/against equality; because neither of those is incompatible with equality’s redundancy.
Equality, then, is not like smallpox (or polio), but rather like abortion (3): another glaring example of how much we have been overestimating the power of being right. Abortion, like equality, was never done. Trump’s shamelessness merely exposed an obvious fact that we should have never forgotten: philosophical ideals like autonomy and equality can never be non-negotiable; that’s just the price we pay for their transcendental nature.
Populists have been exploiting a genuine dilemma left over by the scientific revolution and that the enlightenment couldn’t resolve either between naturalism and relativism. It is a dilemma that still traps left-wing academics and healthcare professionals, oscillating between mandatory vaccinations and alternative therapies: we are all too often succumbing to the temptation of medicalizing value (like in mental health), only surpassed by the even more dangerous relativizing of evidence in the social sciences.
The goal in this short piece is not solving this established dilemma (4), but rather more modestly pointing out the way in which the educated classes have underestimated its persistence, giving populists an open goal in pointing out the obvious: if we spend whole careers between medicalizing value and relativizing fact, we have been lighting up Trump’s torches.
Let Rome finally burn to the ground and when we rebuild (if we rebuild), we will have to finally decide between, on the one hand, economic structures genuinely built around equality or, alternatively, the honesty of shameless transactionism.
Because our posturing and grandstanding have clearly been part of the problem (5); and equality is the business that filled our pockets. And voters without college degrees turned out to be smart enough to notice the irony of the most critical classes also being the richest.
Trump’s instincts for class warfare have allowed him to play right into our insecurities: we are ashamed of having arranged ourselves so comfortably with exploitative economic structures. And in fact, the function of shame hasn’t actually been to stop us, but rather to enable us to continue tolerating injustice, because we could keep telling ourselves that we still had a conscience. And Trump’s shamelessness might just be what we need, for the intolerable to finally also become unsustainable.
References
(1) BMJ 2025;388:r508 http://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.r508
(2) Henderson, D. A. (2011). The eradication of smallpox–an overview of the past, present, and future. Vaccine, 29, D7-D9. (3) https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-ethics/2022/11/14/coney-barretts-juxtaposition-covid-abortion/
(4) Rosen, G. (2001). Nominalism, naturalism, epistemic relativism. Philosophical Perspectives, 15, 69-91.
(5) Di Nucci E. Demoralizing Violence. Palgrave (forthcoming).
About the Author
Ezio Di Nucci is a philosophy professor at the University of Copenhagen.
Competing interests: None declared