The Phantom Menace of “Equality of Outcome”

The right’s fixation on “equality of outcome” as a specter haunting the Western world is not merely a misunderstanding. It is a deliberate fabrication, a straw man conjured to divert attention from the real issue: inequality. 

No serious progressive, social democrat, or leftist in the modern era is advocating for a world where everyone ends up in the same station in life, regardless of effort or talent. What is being demanded—what social democracies across the world have long recognized as essential—is a baseline of dignity: access to food, shelter, healthcare, and education.

This rhetorical sleight of hand is not new. In the early 20th century, industrialists and reactionary politicians railed against the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, and public education, branding them as steps toward socialism and the end of individual initiative. Today, the right employs the same strategy, distorting policies meant to alleviate inequality—such as universal healthcare or free school meals—by falsely framing them as a socialist plot to impose a dystopian equality of outcome.

Take the example of Finland. It provides all students with free school meals, not out of some utopian drive to equalize outcomes but because a well-fed child learns better. The same logic underpins Norway’s healthcare system, which ensures that no citizen is bankrupted by illness. Meanwhile, in the United States, a country that boasts the highest GDP in the world, children still go hungry, families are crushed by medical debt, and millions sleep on the streets. The right’s rhetorical gymnastics serve to justify these moral failures, recasting any attempt to mitigate suffering as a slippery slope toward totalitarianism.

Elon Musk, among others, has popularized another fiction: the so-called “woke mind virus.” This phrase, repeated ad nauseam in reactionary circles, serves as a catch-all dismissal of any demand for social justice, civil rights, or corporate accountability. Those who critique capitalism’s excesses, advocate for workers, or recognize systemic racism are accused of being infected with an ideological disease. This, too, is a tool of obfuscation. It transforms legitimate grievances into cultural hysteria, branding calls for reform as dangerous radicalism.

The real mind virus is the one gripping the right: a propaganda-fueled paranoia that sees oppression in every attempt to correct injustice. It is an ideology that has taken root in the American psyche through a relentless media ecosystem designed to manufacture outrage.

When Colin Kaepernick knelt in protest against police brutality, he was not calling for equal outcomes—he was demanding equal protection under the law. When activists push for higher wages, they are not demanding that everyone earn the same salary—only that no one working full-time should live in poverty. Yet, in the warped reality of the reactionary right, such calls for justice are cast as existential threats to civilization.

This intellectual dishonesty is not accidental. It is designed to maintain power. By painting even the mildest redistributive policies as creeping Marxism, the right shields billionaires and corporate elites from accountability. It turns struggling workers against each other, convincing them that the true enemy is not the CEO who suppresses wages but the worker who depends on government-funded food assistance to get by.

The reality is far simpler. Most people are not seeking a world where everyone has the same wealth or status. They are seeking fairness. They are demanding that a child’s future not be dictated by their zip code, that an illness not mean financial ruin, that hard work is met with a living wage. If this is radicalism, it is only because we have allowed a predatory system to redefine human decency as dangerous ideology.

The right’s addiction to its own propaganda has left it unable to engage with reality. It has built an alternate universe, a Frankenstein creation of its own making, where school lunches are socialism, living wages are tyranny, and reducing economic inequality is a threat to our freedoms. The tragedy is not just that they believe it. It is that they demand the rest of us believe it too.

Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, an online library for people who want to change the world. He lives in Lawrence, KS.