Fed-up voters say ‘no thanks’ to the ultimate DEI hire

Most people don’t need another Donald Trump victory to realise that the ‘progressive’ left has gone too far in its modern-day project to mould society to suit its personal cultural cravings. But it can’t hurt.

Democrats couldn’t knock back Kamala Harris as presidential candidate when Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign for re-election imploded. Picture: AFP

Kamala Harris scored her last job opportunity by topping the world’s most notorious female-only candidate list. So how did that work out for the Democrats?

When spruiking himself for president before 2020, Joe Biden committed to picking not only a woman but one of colour to be his vice-president.

Faced with an exquisite DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – dilemma of their own making, Democrats couldn’t knock back Harris as presidential candidate when Biden’s 2024 campaign for re-election imploded. Much of the legacy media slotted in like soldiers, outdoing their previous partisanship. Shilling for a Democrat woman of colour for president was simply irresistible.

The 2024 presidential race was many things. Among them, here was the ultimate DEI election. And DEI bombed.

Barely two years ago, the New York Post ran this headline mocking Donald Trump’s decision to enter the 2024 presidential race: “Florida Man Makes Announcement.” The left’s dogmatic embrace of DEI merely worked to ensure the outcome they most loathed: Florida man trounced the woman of colour. DEI lost.

The incompetent woman running for president was whupped; the DEI Democrats were crushed, too, in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the end, American voters didn’t give a toss about Harris’s gender or race.

They most certainly didn’t care for DEI. If they did, a woman of colour would be the 47th president. Instead, they cared about the economy, the rising cost of living, the border. Americans wanted change. How could that come from a candidate who, when asked how a Harris administration would be different from that of her boss, said it wouldn’t?

The incompetent woman running for president was whupped. Picture: AFP

But no one should mistake what happened across America this week as simply the convulsing of the nation’s hip-pocket nerve. Nor was it a warm embrace of Trump. A man with major-league foibles and profound human flaws such as Trump doesn’t win twice, this week in a landslide, without the left’s help.

Even a narcissist such as Trump will know that his stunning victory tells a story bigger than him. This was a landslide rejection of the progressive left’s determination over a few decades to mould our culture in ways that are an affront to millions of people, and to common sense too.

On one front, in particular, the meaning of Trump’s win struck with the sound and speed of lightning. DEI has been rejected as a crock.

It wasn’t Trump who drilled a giant-sized nail in the coffin of DEI. The secular commissars of culture on the left did that. They talk among themselves about the righteousness of the diversity, equity and inclusion project, convincing only themselves that they are doing the work of God. They brook no disagreement. They mistake silence for consensus.

Those who disagree with the left’s cultural colonisation of society do what makes sense: they stay quiet. They wait. And when the right opportunity arises, they react. Trump gave people licence to say “enough”.

Even a narcissist such as Donald Trump will know that his stunning victory tells a story bigger than him. Picture: AFP

When any idea becomes fundamentalist, when it’s cocooned from debate, untethered from reality, imposed by compunction, it will soon enough come a cropper.

Before this election, doctrinaire diversity policies were already on the nose. The US Supreme Court rejected affirmative-action policies at universities. More and more companies are dismantling DEI departments and directives. The US election gave millions of ordinary people a chance to deliver DEI the two-finger salute.

Democrats trashed the DEI project when they settled on Harris. It’s hard to overstate her underperformance. Pick a county, a state, a demographic, Harris underperformed just about everywhere, including among women. While Biden won women over Trump by 15 points in 2020, Harris managed only 10 per cent.

The media’s narrative of a gender election, of female voters disgusted with Trump propelling Harris into the White House, didn’t materialise.

Where does that leave the party of DEI, and the left’s chorus line of media cheerleaders in the US and abroad? Humbled? Keen to learn from the deeper causes of this election? Not likely. So far, they’ve been picking at political crumbs – her dumb decision to pick Tim Walz as her VP running mate, what questions she botched, how she dodged and weaved when it came to her views on fracking. How she shunned podcaster Joe Rogan.

All of that is true. But they are symptoms of a deep malaise on the political left. The Democrats settled on Harris for the wrong reasons. Her flaws were well known. Her performance in the 2020 primaries was underwhelming and her failure to address immigration as VP was abysmal.

The Democrats’ blind obsession meant they preferred gender and race to proven performance, even at lower levels of government. Had Democrats focused on merit, not DEI, the 2024 presidential race might have been tighter. They might even have their man – or woman – in the Oval Office. Voters rejected the left’s obsession with DEI for good reason: because the DEI malaise has spread far beyond the political realm, into workplaces and schools, universities and publishing houses, bureaucracies, arts organisations, legal firms, their representative bodies, in courts and the media too.

Especially over the past decade or so, DEI ideology has been embedded systemically by people who don’t do anything productive. The purpose of a university, for example, is to teach and encourage research. DEI administrators do neither. It’s the same in myriad other institutions. Like workplace parasites, DEI commissars, whether they work in “people and culture” departments or evangelise elsewhere, live off others.

They burrow down deep into an institution, embedding themselves in senior ranks too, making the organisation less productive, mandating “cultural” training sessions, ensuring that hiring, firing and promotions adhere to DEI policies.

In July, Republican consultant and adviser Karl Rove wrote that referring to Harris as a “DEI hire … is stupid and ugly and alienates voters”. As it transpired, what alienated voters was the fact Harris was the real DEI deal – as in “didn’t earn it”.

DEI ideology is stupid and ugly. Harris didn’t have to fight for the presidential nomination; Democrats handed it to her. Peddling DEI sanctimony, the party and its media lackeys assumed a woman of colour would score a slam-dunk win against an old white guy with a foul mouth.

The more they promoted an incompetent black woman while daily bashing her white male counterpart, they more they reminded voters of why gender and race are lousy reasons for a promotion. With not a skerrick of shame, this same mob takes no responsibility for what transpired this week.

It wasn’t just men who rejected Harris in large numbers. Women did too. Because DEI is not just an affront to mothers with sons, it disrespects women. DEI is patronising – and counter-productive.

DEI acolytes took a nice idea and turned it on its head. DEI ideology doesn’t encourage diversity, equity and inclusion; it stokes a new form of homogeneity, oppression and division. DEI doesn’t foster excellence. The boards of large companies, for example, have become breeding grounds for the sort of mediocrity guaranteed by DEI.

It takes a determined effort to miss the big cultural trends that explain Trump’s victory. Hand-in-hand with DEI has been the feminisation of modern Western societies. Too often, a desirable effort to ensure that women get their just desserts has meant treating feminine traits as superior and steadily chipping away at masculinity. Redefining even mainstream masculinity to be toxic may excite big-city elites, but it’s not earning applause in the suburbs where most people live.

Most people don’t need another Trump victory to realise that the poorly labelled progressive left has gone too far in its modern-day project to mould society to suit its personal cultural cravings. But it can’t hurt.

The meaning of Trump’s thumping, historic second win – after all that we know about him in 2024 – can be ignored only if you’re a cultural ideologue, part of the cultural rent-seeking class that uses institutions as breeding grounds for political agendas, or members of their feckless cheer squad in the media.

What happened in America this week was the political equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion, that fundamental principle of physics that states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Trump was the left’s creation in 2016. His win in 2024 is down to them, too.