What Comes After DEI?
Perry Bacon suggests PFJ -- Power, Freedom, and Justice
I’ve often written on here about conservative attempts to dismantle DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — from the American landscape. These attempts, whose advocates admit they haven’t defined, have been devastating to higher education attempts at improving both access and persistence for underserved populations.
Even though the terms remain undefined, the Trump administration is demanding that universities, law firms, and even stores like Target eliminate their DEI initiatives. He undid the LBJ era executive order on differential hiring. Not to be outdone, the Secretary of Defense ordered all DEI related webpages in the Defense Department to be removed, resulting in Jackie Robinson and Tuskegee Airmen gone from webpages for a brief period.
The right’s DEI mythology is three-fold. First, they will argue that anyone who gets a position through DEI efforts is, by definition, relatively unqualified. That’s why DEI gets blamed for the Potomac air disaster. The myth goes that if these pilots had been white men, this wouldn’t have happened. The second component is related. DEI hires discriminate against white men. (That’s why so few white men are in the government or are CEOs of top companies.) Third, DEI initiatives require politically correct speech and unnecessary paperwork (like diversity statements).
I believe in DEI initiatives as part of our concern for the Common Good (or the General Welfare, as the Constitution’s preamble puts it). But these conservative myths have become so ingrained in the popular imagination that any attempt to defend DEI opens one up to the critiques of opposing merit and qualifications.
This relates to the critiques offered up about the current state of the Democratic Party. They are, it is argued, too tied to protecting the status quo. So if conservatives attack DEI, progressives like me are inclined to defend it, which lets them argue that I don’t favor merit. We need another approach.
Today, Perry Bacon of The Washington Post wrote a persuasive piece arguing that the solution is to shift the rhetoric from DEI to PFJ —Power, Justice, and Freedom. It’s a very good article and he illustrates his points well. I’m going use some selected definitional quotes from his piece.
By power, I mean autonomy and sufficient resources to use that autonomy effectively.
We usually think of freedom in terms of individual and civil rights. And that framing is important, particularly as the Trump administration keeps adopting new restrictions on transgender Americans. But greater economic freedom is also critical for disadvantaged groups. People of color in the United States often work in jobs that pay low wages, have unpredictable hours and don’t offer the opportunity to join a union or otherwise be involved in setting workplace policies.
Justice nods at the idea of equity but is a superior concept. Equity is often treated as a synonym of equality, and the words obviously sound similar. In contrast, justice evokes the idea of fairness and morally correct outcomes.
But in my lifetime, I’ve watched affirmative action, diversity and then DEI be fairly ineffective in achieving large-scale change and still generate enough opposition to be dismantled. Liberals should name our true goals — and then fight hard to achieve them.
I think that Bacon’s characterization has a lot of promise. If the negation of DEI meant that White men were suffering undue harm, what about PFJ? The negation of PFJ would mean people who had no power — not over rent, jobs, or the whims of a political administration. It would be people who are always on the short end of the stick, required by circumstance to live in areas that are unsafe due to crime or pollution. It would be people who have no representation in courts, in schools, or in congress.
There have been many valid complaints about Democrats ignoring the working class. Even the standard rhetoric about “building the middle class” seems like a halfway effort (perhaps due to fears of being labeled socialists by being concerned with lower classes). But PFJ would ask the question, why do those at the bottom suffer while those at the top (or even close to it) do not?
Bacon’s analysis lines up nicely with the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. They were in Denver on Friday speaking to a crowd of 34,000.
I didn’t go down, but several members of my church did. They reported on the enthusiasm of the crowd even if they were nowhere near the speakers.
From what I have read, Bernie railed against “the Billionaires and members of the 1%” that has been his go-to line for over a decade. But Bernie’s strategy depends on us being mad at those at the top economically and calling for change.
AOC, on the other hand, is pursuing a strategy that seems much closer to the PFJ focus Bacon described. Consider this New York Times story about her speech on the Las Vegas leg of the tour.
As she kicked off a Western tour with Mr. Sanders on Thursday in North Las Vegas, Nev., she introduced herself by name — which he never does — and used her experience waitressing to explain her politics to a crowd of several thousand people.
“I don’t believe in health care, labor and human dignity because I’m a Marxist — I believe it because I was a waitress,” she said. “Because I worked double shifts to keep the lights on and because on my worst day, I know what it feels like to feel left behind. And I know that we don’t have to live like this.”
Mr. Sanders, by contrast, delivered a version of the same speech he has given since before Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was born, railing against corporate greed. “Eat the rich,” someone yelled.
“I know what it feels like to feel left behind.” That’s a statement about Fairness. Why should she work double shifts to afford utilities? Who had the power to set her wages at the bar? A commitment to Justice means that we focus on the “health care, labor [rights], and human dignity” of all people and not those at the top.
Bernie’s point is still well-taken, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick observed last week when he argued that his 94 year old mother in law could easily manage missing her social security check. First, Lutnick and his wife are wealthy. His wife’s parents, according to the Lutnicks’ 1994 wedding announcement, were both successful business people (I couldn’t find more recent info on them). Third, she lives with Lutnick and his wife in their Manhattan townhouse (previously owned by Jeffrey Epstein!). So, yes, she could probably forego a social security check.
But a commitment to the proper exercise of personal power, a celebration of economic freedom, and a belief in justice would quickly shift the conversation from the top of the economic ladder downward. And that would be a good thing.
One more point: the number of people signing up for Amanda Littman’s “Run for Something” is remarkable. Primaries are on the horizon for House members. Look for themes of PFJ to be central to those campaigns as the Democratic party moves away from business as usual.