Marxism, Islamism and Americanism

The Center for Human Equality exists to advance a simple discipline: encounter every human being as a unique individual of equal worth, never as a specimen of a group. Ethical Individualism is not a top-down design for society. It begins with the person who is actually there.

That starting point, as Arthur Herman’s contrast of Plato and Aristotle helps us see, is Aristotelian rather than Platonic. Plato begins with an ideal order and then sorts living people into the types the order requires. Aristotle begins with particular human beings in the world that exists.

In American public life today, three political philosophies compete for authority. Two of them are Platonic in structure. One is not. The first two engage in group judgmentalism and classism. The third, at its founding core, does not.

The first is a form of leftist Marxist collectivism now familiar in campaigns, universities, corporations, and public administration. It is organized by identity politics and DEI-style group accounting: people are first classified by race, sex, sexuality, or historic role; moral worth and institutional treatment are then assigned by category; equal individual standing is replaced by the management of group outcomes.

In its more ambitious form, this politics still carries the Marxist demand of a designed future in which property, production, and distribution are rearranged so that each contributes according to ability and receives according to need.

That slogan, popularized by Marx in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, is a picture of a completed social Form. Persons become functions in a planned whole. The individual is not the starting point. The pattern is. This is Platonic in method even when it is atheistic in theology.

The cave wall shows classes, identities, and historic sins. The shadows are treated as more real than the never-repeatable person. “Equity,” in this usage, often means treating groups differently in order to produce a preferred pattern of results.

That is the opposite of Ethical Individualism’s horizontal line of equality. EI holds that we are one species and that equal value is a human recognition of shared status, not a moral ranking of tribes. Group judgmentalism—whether it flatters a group or condemns it—is still group judgmentalism. It violates truth because no group is a uniform moral substance. It violates dignity because it uses the person as a representative.

A philosophy that begins with categories cannot end in genuine respect for individuals.

The second philosophy is Islamism. It must be distinguished, at the outset, from Islam as the faith of millions of individual Muslims. Islamism is not prayer, charity, or private devotion. It is a political ideology that treats Islam as a comprehensive public order—din wa dawla, religion and state together—and seeks an Islamic legal-political regime whose final authority is Sharia as interpreted by those who claim guardianship of it.

In that project, the decisive question is often not who you are as a person, but whether you belong to the community of belief. Non-Muslims are not merely neighbors with different convictions; they occupy a lower civic and sometimes legal status in the desired order.

The same ranking is applied to sex. In classical legal traditions that Islamist movements seek to restore as public law, men and women are not equal persons before a neutral constitution. They are assigned different rights, authorities, testimonies, inheritances, and powers. That is group judgmentalism written into the architecture of the state.

Islamist utopianism is also Platonic. The ideal is a completed religious-political Form: a society in which the law of God, as a movement defines it, dominates public life, and in the most ambitious versions claims a right of supremacy beyond any particular country, including the United States. Sayyid Qutb and related modern ideologues treated non-Islamic systems as jahiliyya—ignorance to be overcome—so that a comprehensive Islamic order might be established.

Not every Islamist is a terrorist, and Islamism itself is a spectrum. What the spectrum shares is the refusal, in principle, of a secular civic plane on which the individual is first a rights-bearing person and only second a believer. The person is fitted to the sacred pattern. The pattern is not limited by the person.

Ethical Individualism cannot accept that ranking. A Muslim, like every other human being, is a unique individual of equal worth. A woman, like every other human being, is a unique individual of equal worth. EI does not assign value by faith or by sex.

The third philosophy is Americanism as the country was founded to practice it, not as every generation has succeeded in practicing it. Its charter sentence is still the clearest statement of the alternative: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Those are individual rights. They are not group rights, government rights, or religious rights. Government is instituted to secure them, and it draws just powers only from the consent of the governed. Equality here does not mean sameness of talent, virtue, or outcome. It means that no one is born the rightful owner of another, and that no official caste—racial, ecclesiastical, or ideological—is entitled to rank human worth. Jefferson’s earlier draft was even more explicit: men are created “equal and independent.”

The rights are inherent in persons. They cannot be surrendered to a collective, a church, or a state as if those bodies were the real bearers of dignity.

This is Aristotelian in the sense that matters for Ethical Individualism. It starts with the particular human being, not with a completed utopia. It does not require a philosopher-king, a vanguard party, or a clerical guardian to assign each soul its place. It assumes a world of distinct individuals who may worship differently, succeed unevenly, and remain mysteries to one another, yet who meet on one civic plane of equal standing.

The American founding was stained by the contradiction of slavery and by other group exclusions. Those were betrayals of the principle, not proofs that the principle was a group theory. The later struggle to make the promise real—Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration, the Civil War amendments, the civil-rights insistence that persons be judged by character rather than color—was a struggle to apply individual equality against group ranking.

That is the same direction Ethical Individualism takes.

The contrast can be stated without euphemism. Left collectivism of the identity-and-need type designs society from a theory of groups and then fits persons into the design. Islamism designs society from a theory of sacred community and sexual hierarchy and then fits persons into that design. Both say, in different languages: the pattern first, the individual second.

American founding liberalism says the reverse: the person first, the state as a limited instrument, religion free but not sovereign over other people’s rights. Individual rights are supreme. Group rights are not. Government rights are not. Religious rights, meaning the right of a faith to dominate those outside it, are not.

Ethical Individualism is the relational ethic that makes this third philosophy livable in ordinary encounters. It adds what a constitution alone cannot supply: the refusal to carry group judgmentalism into daily life.

We are one species. Equal value is a human judgment about that fact, not a moral trophy awarded to the correct tribe. No one is a shadow on a cave wall—not “the oppressor class,” not “the unbeliever,” not “the woman as lesser,” not “the identity as destiny.” Each is an unrepeatable individual.

The Center for Human Equality does not ask Americans to choose a party. It asks them to recognize which of these three philosophies begins with the unique human being and which begin with a designed whole. The first two are caves with different murals. The third, at its best, is the light of a civic world in which every person already stands equal—and in which Ethical Individualism teaches us how to meet them there.