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The great objective of DEI was to tribalize our institutions, recruiting government and corporate employees into affinity groups based on their race, sex, sexuality and other factors, and then defining institutional goals around the ‘right’ tribal mix through selective hiring and promotions.
The complete inversion of civil rights, from race-neutral to race-conscious, also transformed the intended purpose of government and all lesser institutions, from tribal neutrality to tribal partisanship, and it was impossible to achieve this without tribalizing government.
Government and other institutions stopped being merit-based or democratic, and came to reflect the tribal coalition politics that had come to define the Democratic Party’s urban machines. Tammany Hall’s old corrupt apportionment of government offices based on political favors was smoothly supplemented with racial and ethnic coalition quotas in major cities.
The old corrupt system that traded votes for jobs, bloc votes for political influence, was layered over with the language of civil rights and academic verbiage to make handing out jobs based on quotas seem progressive rather than the worst kind of machine politics progressives once decried. Graft became diversity. Networks of community groups swapping votes for money and jobs stopped being criminal and was celebrated as a step forward for those same machines.
Tribalized blocs were embedded not only in elected government but within the bureaucracies whose employees became activists, promoting and rewarding ‘their own kind’ to broker votes. The shakedown politics of Jesse Jackson’s PUSH movement and imitators like Al Sharpton began the process of embedding the same system within major corporations. Corporate lobbying from Comcast’s NBC deal to Philip Morris’ tobacco business to Enron’s shady finances came to depend on recruiting some of those same minority organizations to defend them.
Corporate DEI finished the job by modeling government and university systems with top DEI officers and affinity groups that employees were strongly encouraged to join for the sake of their careers. Soon corporate life had become equally tribalized with blocs of employees that saw it as their mission to defend and promote members of the same group above their stated jobs.
That is why it’s not enough to kill DEI, to tear it out of governments and universities, and to closely scrutinize corporate misuse of DEI, but we must ‘detribalize’ the system.
As we have already seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is no easy job. It’s a good deal easier to tribalize a society, to make people see themselves foremost in terms of clan and tribe, and to advance those interests above those of the larger society, than to convince them to pull together.
In a few generations, Democrats largely reversed the premises of the American Experiment and reasserted the tribal norm in most of the rest of the world. They bolstered this destruction of Americanism with ideological indoctrination through the media, the entertainment industry and academia, through government regulations, workplace training and an entire workplace culture.
Outlawing DEI and treating its presence in as many workplaces as possible as a civil rights violation is vital, but it is vital to push back against the tribal culture that it has created.
The civil rights movement was correct in arguing that it was difficult to police discrimination. Getting rid of official DEI will not change the reality that an entire corporate culture now exists whose leaders have been indoctrinated with DEI, that finding an HR office untainted by DEI in any major institution is all but impossible and that a generation of workers was taught that sticking to their own kind and showing hostility to white people in the workplace was a virtue.
Even while lecturing us about “systemic racism”, wokeness created an actual systemic racism.
DEI bans are being met with institutional resistance as government offices, universities and corporations change those three letters to some others while changing absolutely nothing else. After the Supreme Court banned racial discrimination in college admissions, universities quickly turned to ‘legal’ ways to discriminate by finding ways to get the same admissions numbers using other factors that would not technically put them in violation of lawsuits and court orders.
Expect universities as well as corporations to turn to some of these methods to lock in DEI.
The Justice Department as well as state enforcement will have to be alert to evidence of stealth DEI and stealth metrics being adopted to intentionally discriminate against ‘unfavored’ groups.
And Americans will need to be ‘detribalized’. While most Americans are not bigoted, a sizable minority, especially among college graduates, have been taught that discrimination is praiseworthy, and once a vice comes to be seen as a virtue, and a moral goal that ought to be pursued regardless of rules and regulations, many will continue to covertly discriminate.
In the larger sense we will need to undo the original sin of the civil rights movement which was corrupted by later leaders into believing that the government needed to tribalize to fight racism.
Tribalism over merit, no matter whether it’s dressed up in progressive colors, as affirmative action did, or reparations for past wrongs, is racist and makes it impossible to end racism. Tribalism can only advance the interests of a certain group and while there are settings where tribalism is natural and healthy, tribalism when applied to larger institutions is corrosive.
The world is filled with nations that apportion jobs, housing and government positions based on tribe and clan in the name of social harmony. And those places are always one bad day away from riots, civil wars and genocide. That is not what we want the United States to be.
Tribal neutrality would return us to the original liberal bargain. Under tribal neutrality, government would cease to be partial to any group, it would instead maintain public spaces as a neutral space in which no one would be prioritized and therefore no one would be discriminated against. Much as France’s Laïcité secularism separated religion and state, America needs an identity ‘secularism’ that would prevent any mixing of personal identity and position.
Americans have already seen that the alternative to government tribal neutrality is tribal warfare.