A country that picks its leader on DEI grounds is doomed - Washington Examiner

Civilizations, Arnold Toynbee said, die from suicide, not murder. The United States has chosen to commit seppuku through the unusual method of identity politics and has picked Vice President Kamala Harris as its sharpened blade.

Harris’s disqualifications are so obvious that they should not need adumbrating. She is slow, vacuous, and superficial. She talks in cliché because she thinks in cliché. She cackles, not because she has some sardonic take on life that eludes the rest of us but because she cannot think what to say. Almost every political office she has occupied has been handed to her on grounds of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Up against any Republican except one, she would be pulverized. But the GOP has nominated the only candidate she has any chance of beating, a convicted felon damned by his vanity, disloyalty, petulance, boastfulness, neediness, fickleness, and greed.

President Joe Biden’s resignation came as no surprise to me. I always assumed that the Democrats would carry out a bait and switch, waiting until the Republicans had lumbered themselves with the candidate who had been a drag on their ticket in 2016 and 2020, and who had single-handedly lost them control of the Senate by his intervention in Georgia, before replacing Rip Van Biden with someone more alert.

What did surprise me was their choice of candidate, for Harris is not simply dimwitted and plodding. She is also, in an unthinking and virtue-signaling way, extremely left-wing, even by the standards of today’s radical Democrats.

Cast an eye over her short career in politics. During the pandemic, she wanted everyone to get $2,000 a month until three months after the emergency ended, a policy that would have whacked the national debt up by an almost unbelievable $21 trillion. She suggested that employees get family and medical leave without having to work a minimum number of hours first and also wanted them to get a $15 minimum wage (presumably more now).

She backed Medicare for All and the abolition of private medical insurance. She opposed fracking and called for rent controls. She was one of only a handful of senators to vote against the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, arguing that it was insufficiently environmentally demanding. She backed the Green New Deal that would add yet more trillions more to the national debt.

Unsurprisingly, Harris loves DEI and has called for a Climate and Environmental Equity Office within the Congressional Budget Office and an Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability within the Office of Management and Budget. She even moved a bill to force the Federal Reserve to interview at least one woman and one person from an ethnic minority for its top positions.

Lefties go mad when you call Harris a diversity hire, but it’s far from clear what they are getting cross about. Biden himself was clear about what he was doing when he picked her and has repeated it several times since. “To me, the values of diversity, equality, inclusion are literally — this is not kidding — the core strengths of America. That’s why I’m pleased to have the most diverse administration in history, and it starts at the top with the vice president.”

Note how different this is from the appointment of, say, Condoleezza Rice or, indeed, the election of Barack Obama, who no one suggested was there on DEI grounds. Like them or loathe them, both plainly succeeded on their own merits.

Perhaps you feel that my point about civilizational suicide was over the top, but it is difficult to see how else to describe the end of meritocracy even when allocating the top positions in the land. Conservatives used to respond to silly DEI policies by saying things like “Imagine if we picked our brain surgeons that way.” Yet here is one of the two big parties literally proposing to appoint the leader of the free world on grounds of melanin levels and X chromosomes.

Democrats tell us that Donald Trump is a threat to the Constitution, that if he loses, he will refuse to concede and that if he wins, he will create an authoritarian state. They might very well be right. But if they really think that way, do they not have a duty to find the best and most electable candidate in order to save democracy?

Something has gone horribly wrong when one party picks a wannabe dictator and the other a hectoring halfwit. The mechanisms that are supposed to mediate between politicians and public — primaries, conventions, and, yes, an occasional smoke-filled room — have failed. In consequence, American democracy itself is failing. There are no good outcomes from here.