I think this fantastic piece by Jacob Savage in Compact Magazine really gets to the heart of the Oedipal conflict of the matter - between boomer fathers and millennial sons - that seems to have had such an outsize effect on the world at large. Viewed in this context, DEI was merely a pervasive form of accelerated tokenism concocted by a generation of powerful men, many of them guilty (and fully aware) of the mediocrity they accused younger men of - but as always more than willing to throw them under the bus to save themselves - and putatively (but very much as an afterthought) to assuage their historical ‘guilt’ over racism.

What it doesn’t really address is how affirmative action (‘good racism?’ - anyway, a uniquely American phenomenon) translates when it is adopted in other parts of the American Empire - when it often sheds all pretence of fairness and redress and the naked ideological power brokerage of the whole enterprise comes to the fore. Adhering to that sea shift by certain vassal states took the form of only mimicking certain poses to signal loyalty to the imperial centre. It was very much a Global phenomenon.

Those who were elevated were not only those most willing to trade identity for opportunity - but who, cynically or otherwise, were seen to buy completely into the whole ideological Cathecism of the political theology of America racial politics, and its attendant theatrics, passion plays etc.

I’m not convinced it was a ‘leftist’ phenomenon, it is (like much else described this way by Americans) - a liberal centrist elite strategy of preservation and re-production. The people that advanced the quickest were those already used to intra-elite power brokerage within that class, because they already belonged to it through education, family background etc. They just happened to also tick other identitarian boxes.

I remember a few years ago being part of a British academic committee where all the other members were surprised by my comments on a boilerplate statement about race and ‘representation’ that they wanted to publish, which I didn’t think had much to say about the UK specifically. Some were almost visibly offended when I said we should also think about mentioning the results of a Government report that said that 39% of the top positions across the board in the UK went to people who were privately educated or went to Oxbridge despite it only reflecting 7% and 1% of the general population.

I went to state school and grew up in that sort of working class environment where almost no one went to uni, so I felt this was just as important. But I still remember the palpable shift when most of the others realised I wasn’t completely onboard with their current facile messaging. This implicated them directly so it made them uncomfortable, almost hostile. Most of them are only interested in symbolic actions that don’t pose a direct threat to themselves, and flatters their sense of righteousness.

So what Jacob doesn’t really acknowledge is that if you were someone who wasn’t cynical enough, who rejected the entire premise of that enterprise and thought it absurd on principle - perhaps even pushed back against it, you could be also be left out just as much as the ‘white men’ were.

I think ultimately it has less to do with race, than the (perhaps irreversible) catabolic breakdown of institutional legitimacy within the liberal bureaucratic state, and its increasingly desperate acts of self preservation.