Today, Yascha Mounk and Christopher Rufo debate the origins of DEI and the right way to fight the illiberal orthodoxy that has consumed our schools and institutions.
Christopher is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a board member at New College of Florida, and maybe the country’s most influential conservative activist. He thinks that using the power of the law to stop DEI is essential.
Yascha is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an international affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University. He thinks that while DEI—and woke ideology more broadly—is concerning, he doesn’t think the answer to its illiberalism should come in the form of bans and legislation.
They both recently published books that investigate the changing cultural trends of the American left. Yascha is the author of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. And Christopher’s book is America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I went in expecting to be more convinced by Christopher but ended up, I think, a bit more on Yascha’s side of things, at least in terms of how we should proceed. What rang particularly true to me were Yascha’s closing remarks explaining how DEI got so powerful so quickly by basically exploiting the good will of the center left that instinctually agreed with how this ideology was packaged without really examining it. I think more ppl like me (ie, the center left) are slowly waking up to what DEI actually means. I see it in my own life with my own center left friends. I see in the NYTimes comments on DEI topics, which tend to be highly critical of it. I see the slow and relatively unpublicized downsizing of these departments in corporate America. It’s a slow, perhaps unsatisfying lurch back to the center, but I think it’s undeniably happening.
I appreciate what Christopher is doing. It takes commitment and a lot of competence to accomplish the things he’s done. My fear though in using state power to combat this is that, just like the center left was deceived and ultimately steamrolled by the critical theory ideologues of the far left, I can easily see the well-intentioned middle again being taken advantage of by the far right on this issue in ways that, if implemented into law, could be just as deleterious to a free society as DEI.
That all said, if we can go about this by winning hearts and minds, that’d certainly be my preference. However, like both men pointed out, the absolutely massive DEI bureaucracy isn’t going to give up their 6 figure gigs without a fight. So no chance this doesn’t get ugly.
Listening to this reminded of why I chose to study accounting, taking 20 credits each semester so I could get out of college in 3 years. College is an ungodly mess. We need trade schools so there's an exit ramp from all of this bullshit.