Vox populi isn’t vox DEI

In case you’ve been living on a faraway planet, DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, a triad distinctly different from the Trinity.

This encapsulation of wokery is officially defined as organisational frameworks seeking to promote “the fair treatment and full participation of all people”, particularly those “who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination on the basis of identity or disability.”

If you are fluent in modern, you know that ‘fair’ actually means ‘unfair’. In this context it stands for the preferential, which is to say unfair, treatment of anyone able to claim a minority or victimhood status, no matter how tenuous or ancient. In Britain this sort of thing is otherwise called ‘positive discrimination’; in America, it’s ‘affirmative action’. Everywhere it’s an outrage.

And everywhere it’s jolly expensive. The global DEI market, that is the cost of ramming that perversion down our collective throat, is projected to hit $17.2 billion within three years, half of it in the US. That’s the price tag we can see. The less visible cost is paid by social balance, tranquillity, freedom and indeed justice (when it’s modified with the adjective ‘social’, it means ‘injustice’).

Yesterday I wrote about one product of the DEI craze, Claudine Gay, who, in the absence of any appreciable scholarship, climbed to the top rung of the academic ladder on the strength of her race and adroit wielding of DEI platitudes.

In fact, about half of all sizeable US universities apply DEI criteria to their tenure standards. The more ‘progressive’ universities put such criteria before all others. For example, in 2018-2019 my son’s alma mater, Berkeley, rejected three-quarters of applicants for faculty positions in the life sciences exclusively on the basis of their diversity tests.

Since DEI is an aggressive ideology, its proponents feel justified to use it as an offensive weapon against traditional Western polity and civility. For example, freedom of speech, that constitutional cornerstone of the Western edifice, is routinely crushed in the name of DEI.

Speakers who dissent, or are even suspected of being capable of dissenting, are cancelled all over the West. Professors who suggest, however meekly, that it’s only men who have penises lose their jobs. Those who, like Thomas Sowell, prove figures in hand that no racial discrimination in the workplace exists, get death threats.

My own modest experience is similar. When I dared suggest in a Mail article a dozen years ago that religious groups should be allowed to put their own rebuttal posters on buses after homosexual activists had done so, I received countless death threats. (Boris Johnson, London mayor at the time, ruled in favour of the homosexual activists.)

Threats kept coming for a long time because PinkNews had helpfully published my photograph and contact details. Someone even recorded a YouTube song about me, which upset me because of its sloppy rhyming: my surname doesn’t naturally rhyme with the colloquial word for female genitalia.

In all Western countries freedom of speech means freedom of woke speech only, which constitutional aberration is increasingly enforced by policing based on a burgeoning corpus of laws. The devastating damage to our culture is hard to estimate, but it’s not just culture that suffers.

Rather than promoting unity and cohesion, DEI drives a wedge between classes, sexes and races. Thus, like all revolutions, it produces results that are diametrically opposite to the proclaimed desiderata.

Indeed, DEI is the slogan on the banners of a sweeping cultural revolution and, like all revolutions, it is perpetrated by the educated classes in the name of the downtrodden. Also like all revolutions, it uses bien pensant populist phraseology to mask its primary destructive animus.

This is often directed against the very groups supposed to be the beneficiaries of the revolution. I myself have worked with many intelligent, talented blacks, women and black women who resented suggestions that they got ahead in life because of their race or sex. Their white male co-workers refused to give them credit for their superior achievement, instead looking at them askance and exchanging sly whispering comments.

That didn’t foster unity and goodwill in the workplace, let me tell you that. The effect was as deleterious as that of hirings and promotions unmerited by achievement, which, to their discredit, members of the supposedly oppressed groups never turned down.

The net result of DEI that I observed personally – and I haven’t seen the inside of an office for 20 years – was heightened tensions and a lower productivity. And no one in either group took the DEI jargon seriously.

That was in the advertising industry, which traditionally tends to be on the ‘liberal’ side. If you look at other, more conservative, industries, such as oil, motor or finance, there DEI is even less welcome and more destructive.

Vox populi isn’t vox DEI no matter how hard purveyors of that disgrace work to indoctrinate the populace, no matter how insistently they try to equate DEI falsehoods with virtue. These are more like a vice crushing our civilisation with its jaws.