The entire history in Europe of the past 2,000 years is precisely this - the preference for equality over excellence.
See: Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche.
See: Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche.
This is a familiar critique that seems to conflate the modern self-esteem craze, communism, and the utopian "equality of outcome" with the traditional religiously based idea of equality, which is that every soul is made in the image of and has equal responsibility before God and that's it. The Lockean idea of human rights is cladistically derived from this.