The ongoing saga over who is actually running the White House and who will be the opponent of Donald Trump in the fall is a good example of how the political class lacks second order thinking. When they bumped off Biden, they did not think about what comes next, so they are now stuck with Harris. It also reveals that these people have no institutional memory, so they repeat past errors. In the case of Harris, they seem to have learned nothing from the Obama experience.

Back during the great interregnum, when issues like race, affirmative action, and demographics could be discussed, it was obvious that the main failure of affirmative action programs was not that they did not result in more blacks in the targeted area, but that the blacks themselves often resented it. Everyone just assumed that these people got where they were through affirmative action, rather than merit, so those who thought they earned it hated the stigma that came with affirmative action.

It is an important and overlooked part of race politics. The white saviors who create and implement these race programs are not counting heads looking for the correct number of brown people. They are looking for salvation. That comes, they assume, when the black recipients of their programs are grateful to the people behind them. The “failure” of affirmative action was that it created black resentment, the exact opposite of what the white saviors were expecting.

That aside, there were second and third order effects that no one thought to consider, and they also contained an internal contradiction that could not be covered up with moral language. You cannot have a meritocratic, egalitarian society and at the same time have special rights for certain people based on dubious claims about the suffering of their ancestors. Good intentions and righteous indignation could not obscure this reality nor stop people from acting on it.

Not only do our betters not think past their first move, but they also never learn from their past errors, so affirmative action was rebranded. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, no matter how they frame it, is just another set of lectures about how whites must overlook merit in order to fill the ranks with nonwhites. The libraries full of books soaked in emotive language on this topic delight and confuse the promoters of DIE projects, but the fundamental facts remain. It is affirmative action.

This is why people like Christopher Rufo have found it so easy to anathematize the term DEI and use it as a club to beat the managerial class. The fact that this new branding easily converts to DIE made it even easier. When a company CEO proudly states that his company will replace whites with nonwhites in order to meet the goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in the minds of white people, the “great replacement” move from abstraction to a direct threat.

In other words, the whole DEI program that evolved in response to the moral failure of affirmative action pleased the people behind it, but they never thought about how it would play outside the hothouse of the academy. They never pondered the contradiction between mandatory association and the internal logic of a society that strives to be an egalitarian meritocracy. All they could see was the wonderfulness of their first trick and the assumed ends that must come after it.

This is all coming together with the Kamala Harris campaign. Apparently, not one remembers her 2020 primary run. No one remembers why they carefully groomed and insulated Barak Obama. Instead, they just bumped off Biden and assumed all their dreams would fall into place. Instead, they have the face of DEI as the default option for the Democratic nomination. Kamala Harris is the embodiment of everything the critics of DEI have been saying for a decade.

This is why her polling is terrible, worse than Biden’s, and why she may have to be replaced before the convention. White people see in Kamala Harris the face behind those dreadful diversity seminars at the office. Black people see the patronizing white women behind those same programs. For both races, Harris is what middle-aged cat ladies imagine is the ideal black woman. It is not that she is inauthentic, which is certainly true, but that she is genuinely offensive.

Of course, the people who created this mess are now tasked with finding a remedy to it, which means more obtuse shortsightedness. Reportedly the Obama faction is unhappy with Harris, a member of the Clinton faction, so they are floating the idea of Senator Mark Kelly as her running mate. The problem there is it underscores the fact that Harris is a DEI candidate. Fitting her with a competent white man not only highlights her ineptitude, but confirms what critics say about DEI.

This is why there is a good chance that this scheme falls apart entirely and the Democrats are left with a chaotic scramble at their convention. The thing they hoped to avoid would be made possible by their thumbless attempts to engineer a result that prevents an open convention. They keep stepping on these rakes, because they never think past the first move, and they learn nothing from past errors. The Democrats are now a collection of high time preference amnesiacs.

All of this brings up a larger issue, one that will not go away when this present fiasco has gone down the memory hole. Popular government can only work in an orderly society, and you get an orderly society when the people who make up that society agree that following the rules is of paramount importance. This is not possible in a diverse society, which must devolve into tribal factionalism. This is why the Framers warned about the threat of factionalism to the republic.

The ongoing demographic collapse of America, and the West in general, means the underlying requirement of Western style government is collapsing. The chaotic, big man government we see evolving with the Democrats is simply a product of the people who make up that party’s coalition. In time, this will be the reality of American society, if the demographic trends continue. The real choice behind these election dramas is between order and diversity. You cannot have both.

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