What DEI Has Wrought

All too often the firsts come in last

How did we get stuck with this guy…?

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Diversity! Equity! Inclusion! Those Three Stooges of postmodern progressivism have been with us for some time now, and it seems fair to ask: How’s that been working out?

America has, it is true, been deluged with firsts. There was our first black chief executive: Barack Obama, The Greatest President Who Absolutely Ever Was, along with our first black First Lady. There was the first nonbinary national nuclear waste janitor. There was the first black female vice president. There was the first gay Secretary of Transportation. There was the first black female Supreme Court justice, joining another judicial first, the Wise Latina. There was the first trans female Assistant Secretary for Health. There was the first black Secretary of Defense. There was the first black female president of Harvard. There were the first black female mayors of big cities. And then there was that DEI hat trick: our first black female lesbian White House Press Secretary. So the numbers are there, all right.

But alas, the return on America’s investment in firsts has been disappointing.

Karin Jean-Pierre, the DEI hat trick referred to above, proved to be so inept at the podium that fifty percent of her responsibilities had to be outsourced to a white guy over at the National Security Council. Pete Buttigieg’s tenure as Secretary of Transportation commenced with an extended parental leave at the height of a supply chain crisis. Asked during her Senate confirmation hearing for a definition of woman, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t say because, you know, she’s not a biologist. Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, lowered his profile to new depths by taking a few sick days without bothering to tell his boss, President Biden—this during a dangerous Middle East crisis.

You may say that I’m being unfair. Surely there are plenty of dumb, lazy, incompetent, heterosexual white males in American public life! Yes, certainly, but nobody’s pretending that they’re trailblazing heroes of DEI, whose glittering credentials and formidable intelligence are only exceeded by their secular saintliness. There are many reasons to deplore DEI, foremost among them the amount of lying that accompanies it.

When Claudine Gay, the now-former President of Harvard University, was appointed to that post, the news was greeted with hosannas and waving palm fronds. She was described by Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation as “a remarkable leader who is profoundly devoted to sustaining and enhancing Harvard’s academic excellence, to championing both the value and the values of higher education and research, to expanding opportunity, and to strengthening Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world.” No accolade was too fulsome for Harvard’s first black female president. The thrill of a first ran up the metaphorical leg of American academia.

It turned out, however, that Gay was not a remarkable leader, not profoundly devoted to academic excellence, not a champion of values, not a force for good. Her scholarly credentials were meager, questionable to the point of fraudulence, and riddled with plagiarism. Behind the glittering facade of a trailblazing first there lurked a bureaucrat, an apparatchik, a member of the DEI nomenklatura, a con artist. Her total unfitness for the office she held was exposed in the wake of October 7, when an explosion of antisemitic rage convulsed Harvard and she testified to a congressional committee that calls for genocide might be protected speech. The scandal was too much even for Harvard, long since corrupted by postmodern progressive dogma. Gay was sacked.

There can be no doubt that the people who selected Gay for the presidency of Harvard, and the people who cheered her appointment, knew the truth about her. The plagiarism charges that helped to bring her down had been circulating for some time. The meagerness of her scholarly output was, so to speak, an open book. Her Wikipedia entry is a major tell: It covers her entire academic career in two brief, none-too-informative paragraphs. All this was known, and nobody cared. The point of a first is its firstness.

Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister in 1979, but she was not a first in the current sense of the term. Probably some people did vote for her with the idea that the time had come to give a woman a shot at the top job, but many more did so despite that fact that she was a woman. Sexism was a much stronger force in 1979 than it is now, but thanks to political talent and a forceful, no-nonsense persona, Thatcher won anyway.

Even today not all firsts are bad, as the performance of women in the armed forces attests. But American public life has been poisoned by a toxic ideology of firstness grounded in racism and sexism. It’s more than a little condescending, after all, to assume that a person’s race or ethnicity, in and of itself, confers virtue, or that women’s “different understanding” is a precious asset. These things may be true in individual cases, but mostly they’re either untrue or simply irrelevant. Corporate CEOs, white or black, male or female, straight or gay, confront the same challenges and in nine cases out of ten deal with them in the same manner. “My truth” is no help when you’re solving for x. But DEI assumes the reverse, and that’s why it so often saddles us with the likes of Kamala Harris.