The intellectually inferior left

 Lewis M. Andrews:

If a recent Scientific American opinion piece purporting to explain how growing opposition to critical race theory damages public education reveals anything, it is that the real problem with today’s left goes much deeper than its progressive ideology. The co-authors assert that resistance to CRT is based on white supremacy, a refusal to acknowledge history, a rebirth of ‘50s-style anti-communism, and the conservative desire to harden racial divisions. These stunning inaccuracies raise questions not just about the validity of their argument but the competence of the supposed experts making it.

While American news outlets — as well as universities, museums, non-profits, federal government agencies, and most other cultural institutions — have often leaned left, there was a time when the views they advanced were at least well-documented and even thought-provoking. It wasn’t that long ago when readers across the political spectrum looked forward to the latest articles by John Kenneth Galbraith, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Norman Mailer.

That so much of what we now hear from left-leaning sources is not just predictable but sloppily concocted indicates just how much ground their best and brightest have yielded to an intellectually inferior second string. It’s a sad decline and there are three main reasons for it.

The most obvious is the left’s post-’60s focus on workplace diversity, which ended up compromising the quality of its own institutional staffing. Instead of pursuing equal opportunity by reforming K-12 education so that students from all backgrounds could fully develop their talents, early social justice warriors simply bent the employment requirements for open positions.

Not unlike its current approach to climate change — shut down fossil fuel utilities even before there’s anything to replace them with — the left equated the mere appearance of an integrated organization with the real thing. As both Gallup and Harvard Business Review studies would later describe it, a “mere diversity of backgrounds” was naively conflated with “mutual respect, a sense of belonging, and genuine collegiality.”

The result at universities and other institutions was a generation of left-wing professionals comprised of hasty employers and those promoted beyond their competence. Both were sympathetic to the budding progressive critique of high academic standards and made it a lasting feature of their own organizations’ cultures.
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There is more.

This is consistent with the argument I have been making that hiring decisions should be made on merit and not on the basis of some racist scorecard.  Diversity is not a cure-all for a lack of talent and incompetence.  None of the sports teams in this country select their players under the DEI rubric.  The teams would be much less competitive if they did.  From universities to corporations DEI is making America less competitive. 

Calling people who disagree with DEI "white supremacists" is a racial slur and ill-informed.  Merit is not limited by race the way DEI is.  Would a DEI-selected NBA team be even marginally competitive?  Of course not.  Those teams are selected on talent and merit.