Time and resources are inherently limited, even for the President of the United States. By reelecting Donald J. Trump, American voters have spoken with clarion resolve about what ideals they want to guide America. One of the first agenda items on President Trump’s to-undo list should be dismantling the inapt DEI construct through all of our federal government, signaling it has no place in America. For the past four years DEI has been elevated to a dangerous level, infecting all federal agencies; individual merit has been all but excluded in America’s decision-making processes.
The DEI Construct
DEI, the Discrimination, Equity and Inclusion construct was injected into the academy from leftist American politics. It is a one-sided construct about what is wrong with America and how to fix it, first introduced into American politics by Barack Obama in 2011 with executive order 13583. It was designed to be the amelioration of affirmative action.
To this day, Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains the law of the land. It prohibits any discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Ironically, DEI every year penalizes Americans simply for being white or Asian, but rewards millions of undeserving people in Federal and many state governments.
DEI, The Progressive Holy Grail
Since the beginning of the Biden presidency, DEI has become the new holy grail of government and corporate purpose--the Progressive penultimate construct. As Christopher Rufo states, “The answer to left-wing racialism is not right-wing racialism—it is the equal treatment of individuals under law, according to their talents and virtues, rather than their ancestry and anatomy.” In other words, you don’t favor someone because of the color of their skin or ancestry, but because they are the most meritorious fit for the job.
Sadly, this is no longer the case, in workplaces throughout America, the Federal government and the academy. Fortunately, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis saw this twisted reverse discrimination in the Florida State University System and appointed Rufo to study each of the twelve state universities, with more than 60,000 faculty and staff, and an annual operating budget of more than $8.5 billion. In a series of findings published in CitiJournal, Rufo discovered that DEI had metastasized rampantly across Florida’s state university system. What he found resembled The View television show more than serious places of higher learning.
Elsewhere I have shown that one of the downsides of DEI and affirmative action has been its oversized effect on academic dishonesty (plagiarism) in many of America’s first tier colleges and universities. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action as a basis of college admissions in 2023, progressives were forced to look elsewhere for an abiding antidiscrimination construct. DEI became the “politically correct” substitute for affirmative action and its impact has grown even worse, not only in universities, but in government agencies and even corporations across America. The idea that people should receive special treatment (employment, advancement, money, admission) based on nothing more that the color of their skin, ethnicity or background stands directly against what has long been held as the American Dream. The only thing holding someone back in America is their own personal limitations and initiative.
DEI and Personal Merit are Oxymoronic
The American dream was founded on the idea of individual, not collective merit. It was and should continue to be the apotheosis of the Marxist ideal of “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Renu Murkergee, a person of color stipulates that “racial and ethnic diversity exacts serious costs…a fact known to serious social analysts, though many multiculturalists would rather ignore it.” Ironically, DEI meets out its own discrimination and will continue to do so as long as it is used as the progressive raison d'être.
DEI’s Antithetical Effect on the American Dream
The essayist, C.S. Lewis argued against Socialist collectivism in 1947 (decades before the DEI collectivism of today’s Democrat party) saying: “Collectivism reduces the value of the individual and only speaks of the value of the group to which the individual belongs, while the concept we should embrace states both the value of the group as a whole entity and yet keeps the importance of each individual member within that specific group.” The woke Democrat Party has elevated personal identity above the collective whole.
Trump stands head and shoulders above the aspiring, but profoundly unqualified, Kamala Harris. Bruce Thornton goes further, deriding Harris as a fifth-columnist with imaginary foreign policy prowess, despite nearly four years of Biden’s and her abject failures at home and abroad. Trump says Israel’s security depends on America’s undying support. Harris gave a synthetic pledge simply to safeguard our alliance.
Now that Harris has been relegated by America’s electorate to the dustbin of history, we can move forward to finally rid the American experiment of DEI and replace it with individual merit and drive, regardless of race or ethnicity. This should be at the top of Trump’s agenda in his first 90 days in office. Onward!