THE EQUITY MESS: DESPITE THEIR PROFESSED GOALS, DEMOCRATS' PANDEMIC POLICIES HAVE WIDENED DISPARITIES BETWEEN RACES, CLASSES, AND GENDERS.

• Author: Welch, Matt

TWO DAYS BEFORE the 2020 election, Kamala Harris could have picked from any number of campaign themes. The number of COVID-19 cases had doubled over the previous month. At home, violent crime was up; abroad, negotiations with the Taliban over U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan had bogged down. And ominously, Harris' opponent, Vice President Mike Pence, was refusing to state clearly whether Donald Trump would accept the results of the election.

Instead of any of those closing arguments, Harris and her campaign team chose to emphasize, in a tweet, speech, and animated video, a single portentous word that in a remarkably short time has escaped the laboratory of academe, spread through newsrooms and human resources departments, and now lodged itself firmly inside the White House: equity.

"There's a big difference between equality and equity," a slightly bemused, slightly exasperated-sounding Harris explained over the image of an animated young white man vaulting his way confidently through a rock-climbing course after having started out in a more advanced position than his discouraged black counterpart. "Equitable treatment means"-the two hikers, now joined in success after the disadvantaged one was given a boost up, gaze confidently at the horizon from atop the summit--"we all end up at the same place."

For decades, these two divergent philosophical and public policy concepts were represented by a battle over adjectival phrases. Should we strive for equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome? Though intellectual and political enthusiasm for the outcomes-based approach did have some high-water moments in the 1970s, the long twilight struggle against 20th century totalitarianism produced a rough if sometimes reluctant governing consensus that states powerful enough to promise economic and racial parity were far more likely to produce mass immiseration. Striving for equality under the law--removing legal discrimination by government--was less ambitious, but more doable.

That laudable goal, particularly in the United States, is being elbowed aside. The 21st century rebranding of equality of outcome into the shinier and more malleable term equity, with its redolence of ownership and fairness, gave activists a linguistic workaround to what had previously been a public relations obstacle of Utopian unattainability. You can't and probably shouldn't just wave a magic wand to erase observed inequality. But inequity? That sounds to the ear more like an immediate and surmountable wrong, deserving of intervention.

The incendiary racial and gender politics of the past seven years--from Ferguson, Missouri, to George Floyd; #MeToo to Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump to Andrew Cuomo--has only increased demand for (and reaction against) identity-based analysis and activism. Democratic politicians have learned that embracing equity is now a campaign prerequisite. And though Joe Biden among the 2020 presidential primary field was arguably the least fluent in the language of identitarianism (notably clashing with his future vice president over their respective views on court-ordered school busing to achieve racial integration), his administration nonetheless codified the e-word into policy literally on Day 1, with an executive order titled "Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government."

"I believe this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue of racial equal--equity," the president said five days later, while signing some follow-on orders. It was a revealing slip of the tongue. The customary aspiration of leveling the playing field is being supplanted by a more ambitious promise to audit the validity of the final score. The administrative state is being explicitly tasked with rooting out the "unbearable human costs of systemic racism" by subjecting all regulations, federal agencies, and spending initiatives to the test of whether their impacts are spread equitably across populations.

But if we are indeed now assessing government activity not just by the flowery rhetoric of the salesman but by the bloodless exactitude of the auditor, then the Biden/Harris White House, along with Democratic-run states and big cities, may find themselves among the first against the wall. That's because no category of policies since the beginning of 2020 has failed that test worse than the government's attempts to cope with COVID-19. Donald Trump zig-zagged ham-fistedly on both policy and messaging, and his Food and Drug Administration threw up disastrous early obstacles to testing and vaccines. These mistakes cost lives. But Democrats are now in charge in Washington and have been mishandling the response elsewhere.

The very name of Biden's signature legislation, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, is an attempt to elevate purported intent over actual content. (Most of the funds will be disbursed long after the pandemic is over.) With their pivot to equity, administration officials are inviting all of us to judge them by their works, not their words. We should take them up on the offer. After all, the results of government COVID exertions to date, particularly for traditionally disfavored communities in Democratic-governed polities, have been demonstrably brutal.

UNEQUAL UNEMPLOYMENT

ON FEBRUARY 12, Vice President Harris took to the pages of The Washington Post to sound the alarm about a clear and present crisis. "About 2.5 million women have lost their jobs or dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic," she lamented. "That's enough to fill 40 football stadiums. This mass exodus of women from the workforce is a national emergency, and it demands a national solution."

Indeed, the share of adult women in the workforce had just hit 57 percent, a 33-year low, erasing hard-fought gains particularly for black mothers of minor children. Prior economic calamities, including the Great Recession of 2008-09, had primarily hurt men, but the COVID contraction was overwhelmingly female. As the headline on a November 2020 Dallas Federal Reserve study put it, "Pandemic Disproportionately Affects Women, Minority Labor Force Participation."

For Harris, the economic wreckage from this borderless virus was self-evidently a federal issue. "The American Rescue Plan addresses these urgent challenges," she tweeted February 16. "It's time for Congress to act."

But a closer look at state-by-state unemployment numbers reveals not uniform damage but striking variation. And the determining factor seems to have less to do with the pathogen and more to do with politics.

From February 1, 2020, when the pandemic really started to hit the United States, through the end of December, the net number of jobs decreased in 48 out of 50 states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But when you sort the results by the drop in the percentage of employment, a startling pattern emerges.

Each and every one of the 18 states that suffered the worst job losses during that span, ranging from Hawaii's 13.6 percent to Nevada's 6.9 percent, voted in November for Joe Biden. In 11 of those, Democrats control the statehouse and both chambers of the legislature.

Meanwhile, the 18 states with the lowest rates of employment change, ranging from Oklahoma's 4.4 percent loss to Utah's 0.3 percent gain, share their own anomalous political characteristic: They each feature unified Republican executive and legislative control of government. Only two of those 18, Arizona and Georgia...