The Trump admin schlonging DEI is a welcome relief from the Democrats' knee-jerk praise of this useless program. Racial quotas that promote mediocrities don't really help anyone, let alone minorities themselves (who remain dirt-poor, aside from the lucky 0.1% who land elite jobs). It's patronizing to ethnic minorities to suggest that they can only accomplish things through hand-outs and quotas. It's also insulting to the public to promote incompetent people, who on top of that are just puppets and mouthpieces for those in charge. However, I don't think we should fool ourselves into thinking that this is the only problem facing America or that it'll somehow be back to the glory days once DEI is gone.
The rot in the US military, and in other institutions, is much greater than hiring the wrong individuals, so it won't be fixed by hiring and firing individuals. That may restore a certain amount of functionality and dignity to the affected institutions, but it won't solve the core problem. It's fundamentally about bloated budgets, parasitic contracts, malinvestment (pouring billions into programs that are of dubious benefit to the public, technologies that are outdated, etc etc etc), overextension across the globe combined with lack of domestic security, unwinnable wars and delusional belief in victory (especially when defeat is beyond obvious and guaranteed by now— Taiwan vs China, Israel vs Iran, Ukraine vs Russia, and on and on).
Same thing with the rot in the finance sector. The fact that they openly hire mediocrities according to racial quotas is not helping them of course, but they were descending into oblivion long before they instituted those programs in the 2010s— so eliminating them will not prevent the ship from sinking. There it's also about fundamentally wrong ideas: namely, printing up trillions of dollars and distributing the fake money only to the rich. This project has created perverse incentives for corporations, who now have government subsidized growth without having to do any work, dramatically increased wealth inequality (and destabilized America), while also accomplishing nothing— we're now headed into a financial crisis worse than 2008, suffer from sky-high inflation, and everyone is downwardly mobile. Replacing idiot DEI hires with high IQ competent people will not, in and of itself, change things because the incentives and internal structure and focus of these institutions has been compromised.
This is like obsessively cleaning the kitchen, while the house burns down.
In general, I think the aim of the future populist movement, or whatever successor movement arises to pick up the pieces of America, will have to be eliminating all of this accumulated toxic waste in the various institutions. Some of them will have to be shut down permanently, while others will only heal through purges, cutting jobs, slashing budgets, and so on. We may even need to make whole new ones, while abandoning the existing ones, given that they're incapable of delivering the goods.
ReplyDeleteI would like to add that the Trump admin is acting in true neocon fashion, not peace-makers, not anti-establishment. They're turning things up to 11, heading even further down the path of doomed wars. They're trying to one-up Biden's impotent failures with their own devastating failures, only with Trump / GOP branding attached.
This goes for the Iran / Yemen / M-E situation, which has the potential to bring the whole global economy down, as well as the Ukraine war. WORTH REMEMBERING: whenever Ukraine does something (or whichever proxy-of-the-week is escalating), it's obeying an order given by America, greenlit by the current admin / DoD / Washington. None of these proxy nations are strong enough to support themselves on their own, or to pursue their own independent objectives. They are tools in the hands of the Pentagon.