Victor Davis Hanson
Once race trumps merit, a public becomes Sovietized; that is, people descend into rank cynicism, distrust, and scorn.
For example, the jaded public now believes that America’s daily systems failures must be due to some incompetency—prompted by hiring, promoting, and rewarding people on the basis of their race, gender, or sexual orientation rather than proven merit.
The country is terrified over the alarming incidences of passenger-jet near misses and go-arounds. And the people in such a climate attribute them to inexperienced pilots and air traffic controllers hired for reasons other than their proven excellence.
Rightly or wrongly, they assume that the shocking ability of an evil 20-year-old to nearly blow off the head of an ex-president was due to an incompetent Secret Service director more devoted to “diversifying” her workforce than saving a president.
The implementation of a Diversity/Equity/Inclusion apparatus suffers from terrible historical precedents.
The Soviet Union imploded largely because huge investments of labor, time, and capital were devoted to the unproductive auditing of the mindsets of Russian citizens.
The state promoted obsequious communist party hacks while placing ideological restrictions on science and research. Millions of brilliant but not obsequious communists died in Siberia, their talents lost to the bankrupt state in dire need of them.
Under fascist systems like Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany, advancement was guided by virtue-signaling devotion to crackpot party orthodoxy and pseudo-scientific adjudication of proper racial lineage.
The inevitable results were wacky fascist leaders, faith-based science, incompetent yes-men, and state violence needed to implement the absurd.
The catastrophe of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution remains the best example of the mass killing needed to ensure “correct” revolutionary thinking—with a toll of 60-70 million dead on the altar of ideology.
DEI, while not murderous, nevertheless commits some of these historic sins through both the omission of ignoring if not ostracizing talent and the commission of wasting a huge amount of resources on nonproductive auditing and monitoring and authenticating.
The United States is currently rejecting thousands of top students from its most elite universities because they do not fit DEI racial quotas.
Post-George Floyd SAT tests were junked to facilitate DEI mandates.
Courses were watered down to accommodate students whom these same universities a few years ago would have deemed unqualified.
Grades were inflated.
Degrees are being rendered nearly meaningless.
The Ivy League, and its satellites like Stanford and Berkeley, are harkening back to their reputations of the early 20th century when they were little more than “gentleman C-student” campuses.
Campuses then were cozy places where admissions were not based on merit (but on race, lineage, money, and connections). And student success was merrily adjudicated by campus activities, clubs, sports, and social life. Graduation in the early 20th-century Ivy League was nearly assured for those of the right race and pedigree and class.
Currently, thousands of ex-military pilots are being passed over by civilian airlines due to their incorrect gender, race, or sexual identity.
Military officers privately acknowledge that promotions hinge on DEI or on loud virtue signaling support for it.
But losing talent is only part of the problem.
The entire mission of an agency, corporation, or university should be to produce the best service, products, or ideas and not to fixate on appearance and dogmas.
Yet once woke orthodoxy guides policy—whether Bud Lite’s disastrous trans ad campaign or the Pentagon’s unicorn search for “white supremacists”—the mission objective becomes muddled and then lost.
Was Anheuser Busch really devoted to ensuring that Bud Lite tasted better for the buck than Coors?
Did the Pentagon, in a humiliating flight from Afghanistan, really worry about securing Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, evacuating allies and employees, and keeping billions of dollars of lethal weapons away from terrorists?
The exorbitant cost of ideological regulation, the overhead of unproductive clerks, and the inherent sloth of fossilized bureaucracies eventually topple states.
This lesson of ideological-based incompetency explains the ossified Versailles-bound Bourbon dynasty in France, the calcified Spanish bureaucracy at the El Escorial—or America’s current politically weaponized, woke, and increasingly incompetent cabinet agencies, along with the nearly discredited EPA, FBI, CIA, DOJ, and Secret Service.
Finally, remember how we slouched here.
The 1960s Civil Rights legislation was aimed at ending racial bias and ensuring merit-based equal opportunity.
The liberal elite gave up on that noble idea as it was too time-consuming and messy. Instead, they chose instantaneous race-based “affirmative action” rather than investing in K-12 charter and parochial schools and rigorous tutoring of inner-city youth and the support for and promotion of neglected black and minority leaders who preached self-reliance, self-confidence, and the need for family cohesion and the value of racial assimilation and integration.
Again, when affirmative action did not always achieve demographic-based proportional representation, the Obama administration introduced a third-wave idea of “diversity.”
No longer were just blacks and Hispanics eligible for preferences. Now anyone who claimed “non-white” status was canonized as victimized/oppressed in the new neo-Marxist binary.
“Victims” now included everyone such as affluent Indian immigrants and foreign-born elites with Hispanic names, all understandably eager to get in on the spoils. The irony? The more affluent, well-connected, and privileged the DEI applicant, the more likely he will be rewarded for articulating his victimhood and cementing his membership in the elite.
Now, we suffer the fourth wave of DEI.
It is best defined as “reparatory” hiring. And it springs from the eerie idea that current “good” racism is needed to address bad past racism.
Translated, that means race and gender groups should be hired in numbers greater than their presence in the general population to make up for past bias.
Such Soviet-like engineering is a doomed project that requires a level of racial and gender prejudice and coercion incompatible with a liberal democracy.
And it is producing a level of cynicism, polarization, and mediocrity that is not only bothersome—but eventually lethal.
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