“DEI exists” isn’t an argument.
Imagine a world where us intellectual types hadn’t given the right this kind of talking point on a silver platter. Election might have gone differently.
I mean that genuinely. It's unclear reality matters at all. People just make up things to be mad about now.
I largely agree but I doubt other issues would be such massive free wins for Republicans. The Republican base has become rabid over DEI and trans issues and it has been really obvious for a while now that it was going to be a massive problem for Democrats. Sadly these issues have become more divisive than even gun control.
They were able to make a massive issue out of the existence of less than a percent of the population, if the can do that how can you say they wouldn't have made issues of literally anything?
You have to realize some of these issues didn't used to be as divisive. They made them divisive. Abortion being the most obvious. If you need an issue to rally around, you create one.
They will continue inventing issues until they find one that sticks.
* YMMV
Maybe the real issue is people don’t actually know what DEI is.
But it is. DEI indicates ideological capture. Whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, it's not germane to the purported goals of "advancing science/health/military readiness/etc". At best it's tangential.
If we were a robust and wealthy country, then perhaps we could engage in these sorts of boutique social experiments. But we are not. We've got serious problems on multiple fronts. Fixing it before it all goes blooey means serious disruption, and we're now well into 30 years of positive reinforcement on the ideological capture. You're not going to get the results you need from the people who benefitted from the previous mismanagement. Trump learned that lesson quite directly the last time he was in office.
I know it's not easy when times are urgent and feelings understandably run high, but those are the times when the rules need to count the most (as the site guidelines say: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.")