DEI Detribalization
by Daniel Greenfield • March 18, 2025 at 5:00 am
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.
Even while lecturing us about "systemic racism," wokeness created an actual systemic racism.
Americans have already seen that the alternative to government tribal neutrality is tribal warfare.
The great objective of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) 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.
