Pseudo-progressive verbiage
Trump’s DEI and affirmative action ban has received at least partially positive reviews not only from the MAGA right and the anti-woke commentariat but from liberal centrists like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith (“an idea whose time has probably come”) and even some leftists who regard DEI as feelgood corporate flimflam.
These reactions reflect the fact that diversity programs in the workplace and on campus have come under intensive criticism in recent years, both for enforcing progressive groupthink and for substituting pseudo-progressive verbiage for meaningful change.
That’s an interesting point. Verbiage is such a convenient alternative to actually doing something. It’s also a necessary first step, but still – there is a lot of all talk and no action, aka all hat and no cattle, in political controversies. (I doubt that applies solely to the left.)
The New York Times, which the Trumpian right regards as the Pravda of the Democratic left, reported a year ago that many companies were backing away from more controversial DEI initiatives such as mandatory anti-bias trainings that can turn into hectoring and struggle sessions. More recently, the Times also ran a long investigative article on the polarizing and demoralizing effects of an aggressive DEI initiative at the University of Michigan.
Adds to reading list
Academic, writer, and podcaster John McWhorter, a longtime critic of the progressive antiracism model who has also been scathingly critical of Trump, told me by email, “With reluctance, I find myself agreeing with Trump on this one, including the idea that imposing it on the government will set a model/mood for the rest of the country including private institutions to follow.”
While McWhorter once believed that race and gender preferences in the corporate world (though not in academia) had value as a way to offset traditional biases, he now thinks that in practice, DEI amounts to lowering standards and overfocusing on skin color: “It’s the way it comes out too often to be ignored.” He also thinks that “general awareness of the value of looking beyond white men has settled in over the past thirty years enough that we need not fear that the end of DEI programs will return us to Mad Men.”
Ah, Mad Men. I only saw a few episodes of that, but I think I get the drift. Sometime last year I watched The Apartment for the first time in decades, and yeah – the race thing simply staggered me. It’s not a surprise in Gone With the Wind, but The Apartment is not 1939, it’s 1960.
What race thing? This: there are precisely two Black characters in the entire movie. The first one we see is a man crouching on the floor shining a white boss’s shoes while the boss has an important conversation. At the end of the chat the boss (Fred McMurray) throws a coin at the guy crouching on the floor. The second one we see is a janitor pushing a cart; a white-collar white guy who has just quit (Jack Lemmon) takes off his office-drudge fedora and puts it on the janitor’s head, yanking it down hard.
In short both appearances are absolutely cringe territory, and there are no others.
It’s a Billy Wilder film. Wilder of course fled the Nazis, and yet…
It was a salutary wake-up call, I guess.
Back to Cathy Young’s piece later.
H/t Sackbut
Seems I heard that recently. ;)
Good to see that she mentioned the anti-woke Stasi element (which I figured she would). Now that we’re doing everything on merit 90% of the government will be staffed by people of East/South East Asians, Ashkenazi, and Ethiopian descent, right?
Somewhat off topic, but an addition to the list of good things that the Trump adminstration has done:
They’ve just dismissed the prosecution of Ethan Haim, the whistle-blowing doctor who revealed sex-change surgery going on in the Texas Children’s Hospital.
The Biden administration then went after him with a “lawfare” punishment of trumped-up charges.
Well that at least is straightforward and unlikely to be a smokescreen for nefarious actions. Or rather, I don’t know how that could be misused. Certainly a positive.
Somewhat off topic, but some additions to the growing list of good things that the Trump administration has done (I think Coel is underestimating things):
After the confirmation of the unqualified Pete Hegseth, a sexual abuser and alcoholic, as head of the Department of Defence, the summary sacking of 12 Inspector-Generals of various agencies, etc. The withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords (that’s one in the eye for Newscum & the Dems in California!). Withdrawal from the World Health Organisation. Pardons for all the Jan 6 hostages so that dangerous thugs walk free. An immediate pause on public communications from federal health agencies like the CDC, FDA, and NIH. Etc, etc. Wonderful stuff, innit?
And, of course, Coel resorts to the lie that it was the ‘Biden Administration’, conducting ‘lawfare’, that went after Ethan Haim, just as, I suppose, he believes that the trials of Trump were ‘lawfare’ conducted by the ‘BIden Administration’. The hospital almost certainly brought the complaint that Haim had unlawfully accessed records that he was not allowed access to, and that resulted in the investigation and the charges. I should say here, I suppose, that I welcome the fact that attention was drawn to the fact that the Texas hospital was inflicting puberty blockers on children. But I doubt that Coel, in his constant oscillation between crowing about owning the Libs and crawling ingratiation when he realises that has gone too far and revealed his true colours, will object to any ‘lawfare’ if it is the Trump administration doing it .
On the suggestion that:
People can read an account such as this one and make up their own mind whether the prosecution of Haim by the Federal DOJ while Biden was president was an example of “lawfare”.
[Note: It’s “Eithan”, not “Ethan”, my mistake.]
Because National Review is a completely unbiased source, right?