Biden may try to impress the diversity police, but it will never be enough
People are noticing that Biden is staffing his putative Cabinet, not by looking at people's qualifications, but by looking at their race, sex, and sexual orientation. Conservatives think this is no way to run a country. However, the leftists who believe that if they steal Georgia's Senate race, they will achieve perfect political ascendency are already complaining that Biden hasn't gone far enough.
On Monday, Monica Showalter pointed out that even as some leftists crow that with Biden in office, "the adults are back in charge" and science is once again occupying the front row of the administration, the reality is that Biden's Cabinet picks would probably be just as qualified if he chose them by looking at a local high school's class officers. Or as Monica wrote, Biden is "packing his Cabinet with ignorant political cronies and zero-experience morons."
Biden knows that he can get away with this because the media will puff up any credentials these morons might have. For example, Pete Buttigieg is qualified to be head of the Transportation Department because he likes playing train games (no pun intended).
Additionally, Biden's picks have something that's more important than mere ability: they are diverse! Despite being a white male (bad), Buttigieg is gay, which is good, unless you're the amazing Ric Grenell, in which case it's bad because you're not really gay if you're conservative. Leftists have as many nuances about status as France's ancien régime did regarding the nobles' ranks.
Tucker covered this in the first four and a half minutes of his monologue on Monday night:
As the CNN clip showed, the Asian and Pacific Island crowd is worried that it's getting left out and will miss the spoils. Others are worried, too. In Monday's email, I received a missive from Philip Kahn-Pauli of RespectAbility, which describes itself as:
a nonprofit organization that works collaboratively with employers, entertainment leaders, governors, policy makers, educators, self-advocates, non-profits, faith-based organizations, philanthropists [sic] and the media to fight stigmas and advance opportunities. Led by diverse people with disabilities and allies, RespectAbility knows that people with disabilities and their families have the same hopes and dreams as everyone else.
I wholeheartedly agree with the organization's sentiments and mission. A little out-of-the-box thinking can open the world to a person whose perceived inabilities limit his choices. For example, the Israel Defense Forces have a unit made up of autistic people. It turns out that autistic people have extremely useful abilities that non-autistic people lack.
Having said that, I found it disturbing that RespectAbility is demanding a seat at the Cabinet-level table, not because there's a person with skills that would be useful in the service of the United States at the Cabinet level, but because...diversity. Or as Kahn-Pauli wrote:
I am writing to you because 1-in-4 adults have a disability but so far NONE of the top-level people named to serve in the Biden-Administration has a disability or real disability experience. As a disability organization, we'd love to see former Governors Jack Markell and/or Tom Ridge in senior roles.
To digress a moment: One of the earliest — and most delightful — progressive books is Daddy Long Legs, which Jean Webster wrote and published in 1912. The plot is simple: an unknown benefactor sends Judy, an 18-year-old girl raised in an orphanage, to a women's college modeled on Vassar. In exchange, she must write regular letters about her experiences. It is, as I said, a charming book, despite the young woman concluding that she's a Fabian socialist, as Jean Webster herself was.
In one letter, Judy is furiously angry because of the Sunday sermon:
We had a bishop this morning, and WHAT DO YOU THINK HE SAID? 'The most beneficent promise made us in the Bible is this, "The poor ye have always with you." They were put here in order to keep us charitable. The poor, please observe, being a sort of useful domestic animal.
What the budding young socialist objected to is the bishop's dehumanizing view of the poor. Instead of individuals, they were a faceless vehicle for the bishop's own virtue-signaling.
You can see where I'm going here: there's something dehumanizing about this diversity-based push for a place at the Biden table. Individual qualities are irrelevant. People simply must be a "checkmark" in the right diversity box so label-obsessed people are placated, and Biden gets a pass for a Cabinet so incompetently staffed that it exposes America to serious internal and external risks.
The leftists have taken the idea of a nation founded on rugged individualism and turned it on its head, with external group identity becoming the only relevant factor in determining an individual's worth.
Image: CNN mulls Biden's cabinet diversity. YouTube screen grab.