Equality itself should not be a primary goal of politics. Social peace, prosperity, and stability are more important for everyone, and are often not well served by the pursuit of equality--especially because true social equality is ultimately an unachievable goal. 

"The idea of forcing every thing to an artificial equality has something, at first view, very captivating in it," Burke writes. "It has all the appearance imaginable of justice and good order; and very many persons, without any sort of partial purposes, have been led to adopt such schemes and to pursue them with great earnestness and warmth." But it is ultimately both misguided and impractical. "Believe me, sir," he writes in the Reflections, "those who attempt to level never equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost." The only question is which element will predominate, and in a society that makes leveling and equalizing its central principle, the great middle will tend to predominate, overpowering both the rich and the poor. But this middle, especially in a society focused on equalizing, will be badly suited to rule. "The levelers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things. They load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation into which, by the worst usurpations, an usurpation of the prerogatives of nature, you attempt to force them."

As this passage demonstrates, for Burke the question of political equality--or of who has the right to rule--is even more important than that of social or economic quality. In a society with an egalitarian idea of rule, there will not be true equality, but rather a disorderly rule by the unfit. Because it will organize itself around an idea of equality that it can never truly achieve, such a society will also always be in disarray and flux. The idea of eliminating all social distinctions in society, Burke argues, is a "monstrous fiction, which by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men designed to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality, which it can never remove . . . 

Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left