Democrats Need Their Own DEI Purge

The woke brigades in the Democratic Party aren't merely annoying. They have undermined Democrats' appeal to the same minority communities they are supposedly so focused on 'including.'

Dear readers,

At The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics this week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent DNC meeting — where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for non-binary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion” but, as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very non-representative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch — a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as a vice chair of the party — wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: former State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun control advocate who has urged Democrats to run on “Defund the Police” and who (speaking of things that look like they came out of Portlandia) believes that the gun control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and non-binary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

And yet Pete pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road toward being off-putting and unpopular.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke, irritatedly, about diversity trainings, on a panel at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics on Wednesday, February 19. (YouTube)

These people don’t have good intentions — they have a worldview that is wrong and bad, and they need to be stopped. And while DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Pete rightly complains about — and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify — is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments, which have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many non-white voters perceive these positions, correctly, as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them on how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are due to those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences among the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent — that is, they decide some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what the Democratic Party has to offer to Asian voters — or, as a Democratic National Committee member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants — and much higher bars than black and Hispanic applicants — to win admission to top schools. Selective public K-12 education programs are also too Asian, in many Democrats’ view, so they fight to change that. In New York, they responded to the fact that the city’s most prestigious magnet schools have become majority-Asian by seeking to abolish the SHSAT admission exam that Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, they actually did away with the exam for the city’s magnet high school, for a time; and in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they oppose tracking and fight to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the most advanced students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, and so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community!

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans — in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party — have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are literally the party of official discrimination against Asians.

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Democrats’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. Democrats have grown increasingly skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de-facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances like public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately non-white, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on non-white voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate from rising crime and disorder.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats have been excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation — foreign migrants — even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden Administration presided over the entry of millions and millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. They did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Hispanic Americans. But the broader population of Hispanic Americans reacted — surprise! — quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Hispanic counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity than the “Hispanic” part — as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the ten-dollar words. Consider the term “BIPOC.” This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword — which means either “black and indigenous people of color” or “black, indigenous, and people of color,” depending on who you ask — contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: black Americans and Native Americans outrank Hispanics and Asians. It seems the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Hispanics and Asians.¹ But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping “BIPOC” from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of its citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason that you should be admitted to the U.S. and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch — you get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk — you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took these toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Unfortunately for Democrats, this hemorrhaging wasn’t offset by gains among black or indigenous voters, probably because Democrats incorrectly assess how voters in these groups feel about policy issues even when they try to prioritize them.