With DEI ingrained in their political DNA, even as great swathes of America are having second thoughts about diversity dogma, the Democrats can’t risk choosing anyone else to face off against Donald Trump in November – even if another candidate was more likely to win. That’s why, if Democrats stick to their DEI religion, their convention next month must be a coronation, not an open contest.
Back in February, when it was clear to many that Joe Biden was too infirm to be President, let alone up for another four years in the White House, New York Times journalist Ross Douthat was way ahead of the pack: “If (Biden) drops out and doesn’t endorse his own number two, he’d be opening himself to a narrative of identitarian betrayal – ageing white president knifes first woman-of-colour veep – and setting his party up for months of bloodletting and betrayal, a constant churn of personal and ideological drama.”
Having been dragged out of the race, Biden has done what all good DEI Democrats do: endorse a person as the next US commander-in-chief in large part because she ticked the two top boxes on the identitarian checklist.
This is not some wacky partisan myth. Biden was open about his reasons for picking Harris as his VP. “If I’m elected president … I commit that I will, in fact, appoint a, pick a woman to be vice-president,” he said in March 2020. Biden told a room full of black journalists in August 2019 that he would prefer as his running mate someone “of colour and/or a different gender”.
Harris looks set to get another DEI nod for the top job.
The dilemma for the Democrats – and their progressive boosters in the media – is doubly exquisite. Having been exposed as liars about Biden’s competence to run for a second term, they will now likely be complicit in a second big lie – that Harris, if chosen as the new candidate, was picked because she is the most competent Democrat to lead the next administration.
Harris is a Californian liberal, most comfortable campaigning on abortion rights and rallying black, young and progressive voters. How well will she resonate with voters in rust-belt swing states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio where cost-of-living struggles feature ahead of progressive shibboleths? Especially with Trump’s running mate JD Vance hailing from Ohio.
On paper, Harris has notched up an inspiring list of firsts. Even as a diversity pick, one might reasonably have expected her to pick up requisite experience and skills along the way. Not so much. Even some on Harris’s own side of politics have remarked on how underwhelming she has been as Biden’s understudy. The failure at the southern border is her biggest legacy as VP.
But in Democrat-land, Harris remains the perfect DEI pick for president.
This can end in one of three ways for Harris and the diversity project. Harris fails in November because she’s not the best candidate to win the swing seats needed to land the White House. Harris wins the November ballot and flunks as president, exposing, at the highest level, that DEI is a woeful measurement for promotion. Harris wins the looming presidential race, proves to be a brilliant president, putting to rest concerns that she was a DEI pick without sufficient skills for the job.
The last scenario is the least likely. Even if Harris proves herself as president, it won’t put to bed concerns that DEI has led us down a merry path where good people who lack DEI credentials are overlooked and discriminated against.
There is a growing backlash against DEI for two reasons. Sidelining merit is a dumb idea, no matter how fine the intentions behind giving the less competent a leg up. Once upon a time, at least, DEI advocates argued that if you define merit broadly enough, you could meet quotas without worrying whether the pool of available DEI candidates with the requisite skills was big enough. Not now. Quotas and targets are all-consuming.
DEI is patently bad for those it aims to help, too. Witness questions being asked about the role gender played in Biden’s 2022 appointment of Kimberly Cheatle as head of the Secret Service. Appointed by Biden in 2022, Cheatle is ultimately responsible for one of the biggest failures in the history of the American secret service, when a 20-year-old man tried to assassinate Trump, leaving one man dead and others, along with the former president, injured.
Prominent conservatives are calling Cheatle a “DEI hire”. “Somebody really dropped the ball,” Tim Burchett, a Republican from Tennessee, said. “You’ve got basically a DEI initiative person who heads up our Secret Service. This is what happens when you don’t put the best players in.”
There are questions, too, as to whether a female Secret Service agent on stage with Trump was the right pick to protect the former president.
Meghan McCain, daughter of former senator and Republican presidential nominee John McCain, pointed to a video spreading across social media from Trump’s Pennsylvania rally where the female agent appears to fumble with her gun.
“You need to be taller than the candidate to protect them with your body,” McCain said on X. “Why do they have these short women – one who can’t holster a gun apparently – guarding Trump? This is embarrassing and dangerous.”
Questions about the role DEI played in this catastrophic fiasco should depend on the circumstances. No wet-behind-the-ears rookie, Cheatle has been with the Secret Service for a couple of decades. But when DEI takes centre stage, as the Democrats have ensured, it’s open season to question the competency of anyone who ticks DEI’s favoured identity boxes. It may not be fair but it is inevitable. Worse, it’s logical, even if the DEI faithful struggle to see reason.
Take, as another example, Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who, by the way, told us last year that “80 is the new 40” when asked about her boss’s competence to lead.
Was Jean-Pierre appointed because she’s a gun press secretary – or because putting another black woman out front for the Biden administration would boost the President’s DEI cred?
The Democrats’ entanglement with DEI is happening at a time when the diversity project is unravelling elsewhere. There are now almost daily reports that companies and other institutions are done with DEI.
Last month it was Tractor Supply, a rural retailer that sells animal feed and workwear. The company announced it’s getting rid of DEI jobs. Last week came reports of Microsoft laying off staff in charge of DEI initiatives. Goldman Sachs has tweaked its admissions policies for something called its Possibilities Summit. Previously for black college kids only, now whites are welcome. How about that?
This growing anti-DEI push received help from the highest place when the US Supreme Court last year pointed out the bleeding obvious – that permanently entrenching positive discrimination was unfair. Though that case concerned university admission policies, the logic that unravels DEI applies everywhere. Except, it seems, in progressive quarters where DEI remains a religious sacrament.
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