How DEI Hurts America, Part Three

Victor Davis Hanson

5. Why is DEI dying?

Like all commissariats, DEI is expensive. It requires legions of drone commissars to monitor and audit ideology—in this case, tribal essentialism.

How many nonproductive auditors as overhead can a society afford? Go back into time and ask the former Soviet Union or Mao’s failed Cultural Revolutionaries?

And who qualifies as the oppressed—the 1/4 Latino, the bisexual, the 1/16 Native American, the blond-and-blue-eyed Chilean who trills his R’s and accents his name, the multimillionaire Indian-American whose father owns 5,000 acres, or the grandchildren of Barack Obama?

Do we wear DNA badges, like yellow stars on our coats to prove our racially qualifying lineage?

And do we all lie that there is no DEI, like good soldiers in the revolution? Do we take loyalty DEI oaths as good McCarthyites to get jobs and promotions, professing our loyalty to the oppressed of America as we try to leverage our way into the spoils of the oppressors?

DEI is also a socialist/communist/equality of result ideology contrary to human nature. All people wish to be individuals and be rewarded on the basis of their achievements and talents. Equality is fairness of opportunity; equity is an equality of mandated result. 

Promoting someone who has not earned that position requires an ideology that is ultimately contrary to human nature. Thus, DEI requires lies to support the unsupportable, such as there is no bias in DEI; or every DEI recipient has legitimate claims against society; or to suggest DEI appointees are more likely to be less qualified, since merit has played less of a role in their advancement, is racist!

Ultimately, the house of lies collapses under the weight of its own untruth. Harvard President Claudine Gay was a known plagiarist and never had a publication record to warrant a full professorship at Harvard. But she was savvy enough to know the rules that she would enforce against the oppressor class would never fully apply to herself.

To claim she was not a plagiarist and warranted such a position and ultimately a presidency was to suggest Harvard itself had few standards left and was thus a university that lived by lies. But ultimately, when someone is promoted to a presidency on the basis of gender and race, then, equally ultimately, in Sophoclean fashion, such hubris earns nemesis. And President Gay ends up on the national stage before Congress, making a tragic fool of herself in a fated rendezvous with the fraud of DEI.