|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
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.
As with so much else, Rush Limbaugh was right in this observation: “Liberalism is a mental disease.”
Liberalisms comes from a Strict Vegan Diet watching or Reading the Fake News depending upon the Daily Fake News donating to PETA and Greenpeace and parade around on Earth Day as a Tree Spotted Owl of as a Coho Salmon or making total pest of yourself Blocking Roads Highways and the Meat Isle of the Stores trying to force everyone to live your stupid simpleton Lifestyles of Total Idiots
You left out public masturbation….. labelled as “performance art” …
Brilliant insight. Was just reading about similar detribalization during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Led to tribal war and other disasters.
History is repeating itself. The tribalists here will never willingly give up their special privileges.
Excellent point.
Of course not. My readings today in Exodus had the Egyptians pursing their Israelite slaves. It is nice to live upon the labor of others, right?
Heritage Americans are now enslaved by their own government to support and empower alien peoples in our own land, where they are being deracinated and disinherited. This has been the effect of sustained liberal policy for generations, and the idea that western nationalist / tribal feeling had to be destroyed to avoid another world war.
I actually heard a sermon that caused me to abruptly leave a church. The pastor taught when all the world became a uniform shade of brown skin colors, peace would be possible. No effort the exegete Acts 17:26 or Deuteronomy 32:8 or Revelation 7:9.
You really have to twist the Scriptures to avoid concluding the LORD is not an ethno-nationalist.
That sermon sounds remarkably similar to the Islamic view that when they have conquered the world, then there will be peace.
I am reminded of the preacher who assured us that the Canaanite woman had taught Jesus a much needed lesson about racism!
Oh, now history is repeating itself? Remind us Jeff of your comment about history and the Trump tariffs. The lessons of Smoot-Hawley are not relevant, right? I guess what Adam Smith wrote about the logic of the trade deficit arguments in The Wealth of Nations in 1776 is irrelevant now, right?
To detribalize, we must acknowledge, know and stop our Disembodied Language (DL), so that we can have Embodied Language (EL), which is the language of individual freedom. Why don’t you talk about that?
The stupidity advanced to the inevitable terminally absurd stage. Unfortunately, DEI/Woke will likely linger on in some muted fashion until it has become just a bad memory for most people; and then like all idiotic commie ideas, some retarded leftists morph it once again and try to force their sheer lunacy on the general population.
That’s why I was so stoked to see that Hegseth ordered all DEI material to be archived..
I’m hoping it all goes into the Museum of Marxism and is laid out in chronological order showing the massive attacks on every institution in America, including death tolls, destroyed cities, destroyed livelihoods, astronomical crime and newly created homeless.
They’ll have to expand their wing of failed experiments.
Excellent as always, but… One critical tool the DEI purveyors found to be handy was the “self-feeding extortion loop.”
And it paid out in the BILLIONS from every major corporate entity, as well as entrenched gov’t dungeon of fraud, waste and abuse.
Pay up, or we’ll burn down your cities, we’ll trash your big-box stores, and we’ll publicly shame you online as a racist, sexist bla,bla,bla.
It’s almost as if in the anti-DEI-ification of the So. Cal fire zone was meant for Governor Mel Gibson’s many “Uncle Argyles” to show up and explain how to remedy the situation.
I watch too many movies.
It will be interesting to see the TOTAL WA$TE of US TAXPAYERS’ money on the dei/crt crap. I imagine that will be almost as much as the PURE GRIFT that is traced DIRECTLY back to the DEMOcrats! I’m sure there are some R’s feeding at USTP’s teats, but I’d bet my life savings that DEMOcrats have reaped the bigger share of the “bounty”!
We’ve seen for a LONG time that the INTENT of the DEMOcrats is to tear Our Nation apart – to DESTROY anything and anyone good and decent! Hopefully it STOPS now!
Sometimes I have to fight the thought, often expressed here, that Daniel Greenfield should be president. His thinking is always so tight, clean and beautiful. But Mr. Greenfield’s great talent is perfect for what he does now. And it seems that both his and FPM’s platform is growing in influence!
If Mr. Greenfield were magically transported into politics, he would be a top-level advisor. But then, not only would he be subject to much lobbying and intrigue, he would not have the bandwidth and freedom to write for all Americans and even the world as he does now.
And so I pray for Daniel Greenfield’s continued growth in influence, knowing he is the inveterate enemy of evil and lies and will therefore be subject to much attack about which we neither see nor know. And I invite others also to pray for him Psalm 90: 17: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon [him], and establish the work of [his] hands upon [him];
yes, establish the work of [his] hands!
Need coffee. To avoid concluding the LORD absolutely IS an ethno-nationalist.
Sub-Saharan Africa (no idle prefix there) is full of tribalism, with members of each tribe working for their tribe and themselves over the country as a whole. How is that working out? Why do Africans want to move to Europe or anywhere but their own country?
For free stuff not available in any sub Saharan African country, of course.
Not just sub-Saharan Africa – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan – basically the whole non-western world is tribal. Tribalism is actually natural to human beings. The Marxist progressives have worked very hard over generations to get European and American peoples to abandon family and community ties and to get us to do the work of eliminating ourselves. None of the tribal societies coming here are doing that, but celebrate our demise.
Tribalization means that DEI works as intended. Create a complex and constantly mutating hierarchy of degrees of oppression which entitle the designated oppressed to property redistributed by the state, which performs theological calculations to allocate the loot. . . after the administrative expenses are raked off for the true believers and their opportunistic collaborators.
The divisiveness and slow motion looting are meant by the true believers to bring down a society that they hate.
Race, sex, being gender fluid, non binary, or whatever (who can keep up) is not a talent or qualification for any job or political office.
This is so obvious I can’t believe it is even debatable.