DIVERSITY ABOVE ALL

Joe Biden’s Cabinet of Diversity 

 

By Daniel  Henninger

The Wall Street Journal

December 16, 2020

Clevelanders got a truckload of coal dumped on them this holiday season when the city’s baseball team announced that after next year they will no longer be called the Indians. Owner Paul Dolan’s oxymoronic explanation is that this will “unify our community.”

We had our say here several months ago about the inanity of team-name political correctness. How the White Sox and Red Sox survive is beyond me. More noteworthy in this country’s experience since the word multiculturalism entered its political dialogues is President-elect Joe Biden’s public commitment to filling his cabinet on the basis of diversity.

It began as he might have hoped, with the press appending “first” before the names of early appointees—the first Hispanic head of homeland security, the first woman as Treasury secretary, the first African-American defense chief, the first Hispanic health secretary, the first openly gay cabinet secretary, the first woman of color to run the Office of Management and Budget, the first woman as director of national intelligence.

The website HybridParenting.org explains that “in a multicultural world, people accept and embrace the differences of others into their lives.” That acceptance is the ideal. The Biden appointment process reminds us that diversity in practice is preponderantly political, which is to say, divisive. 

Shortly after Mr. Biden’s early nomination of firsts appeared, Politico reported that some Democrats were unhappy. Texas Rep. Vicente Gonzalez wanted at least five Latinos in cabinet-level positions. Then representatives of AAPI complained. AAPI stands for Asian-American and Pacific Islanders. They noted that Barack Obama’s cabinet had three Asian-Americans.

Bel Leong-Hong, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee’s AAPI caucus, said, “We don’t see too many Asian-Americans there, do we?” As we went to press, it was reported that Mr. Biden’s interior secretary likely will be Native-American Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe on her mother’s side.

Despite the nominal idealism of multiculturalism, this looks like a diversity spoils system, whose proliferating claimants will become impossible to satisfy.

When the idea of multiculturalism emerged years ago, many saw it as a step toward extending the original American idea of openness to the new wave of non-European immigrants arriving from Asia and elsewhere. And indeed, the U.S. was evolving toward incorporating them, as it had before.

Then multicultural diversity made its inevitable appearance in academia, which subdivided itself into departments of study based on ethnicity. The academics displaced the goal of incorporation with the idea of “differences.” Rather than a pathway to deepening social integration, diversity was redefined as an instrument of political struggle.

Since late May, Black Lives Matter has become a proxy for diversity. BLM put in play the intraparty tensions evident in the criticism of Mr. Biden’s cabinet appointments.

The media’s elevation of BLM and its notion of systemic racism made its political claims for black Americans pre-eminent and by default reduced those of Hispanics and Asians. Naturally they noticed. Now they are demanding what has come to be called equity in Mr. Biden’s cabinet.

Several months ago, diversity reached a comic apotheosis when Trader Joe’s was criticized as racist for selling brands such as Trader José and Trader Ming. Some might see Trader Joe’s as the reductio ad absurdum of this movement’s political demands. The selection of the Biden cabinet, a serious matter, has become an almost absurdist exercise in box-checking appeasement.

All politics may be local, but one may ask whether politics in our time has become overwhelmingly about apportioning power and money via these multiplying progressive categories or whether it still has a broader purpose.

Mr. Biden’s 81 million votes and his presidency are undeniably an aggregation of diverse voters in the U.S., and yes, he tailored appeals to them. The question now is whether he or any American president should be able to assemble a government whose goal is to give the country the best possible execution of policy, or whether the presidency should be first of all a vessel through which competing factions receive appointment based on who or what they are.

A pragmatic argument could be made that appointments by diversity aren’t much different than the old urban political machines, whose patronage kept the peace among factions. That is the benign explanation.

A less benign view is that diversity has become most of all a weapon to silence opposition and suppress dissent. Political satire, one of history’s most effective weapons of opposition, including of the future first lady’s doctorate, is forbidden.

Allowable criticism exists only inside the movement. So someone like Gen. Lloyd Austin, the African-American nominated by Mr. Biden to be defense secretary, is fair game because his personal status is subordinate to the larger political goal of devaluing the military. As happened as well to the black police chiefs forced out during the post-May 25 defund-the-police protests.

Diversity has high intentions. But politics is a low art. Joe Biden’s presidency will be a revealing case study in trying to take the high road and the low road at the same time.