Is Wokery Ending?

New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters deserves extra credit. Before the election made clear to everyone who can see, he wrote an article explaining that wokeness had outlived its usefulness. People were turning against the scolds and the thought police. The rest is history.

Wokery assumes that the only truly salient problem in America today is prejudice and discrimination. It adds that the only way to win the war against bigotry is to police thought.

You might think that men and women are not the same thing. You might think that males should not be competing against females in volleyball. And you might want to hire and promote on the basis of merit, not in order to fulfill a diversity quota.

If you belong to the Democratic Party you are not allowed to say so. If you say so, you will be denounced as a bigot and shunned.

Wokesters want to own your mind. If wealth is distributed unevenly or unequally that can only mean that you have indulged in wrongthink. So, you are obliged to hand out credentials to people who have not earned them and to give jobs to people who cannot do them. Because then the workplace, the marketplace and the neighborhood will look like America.

Fundamentally, it’s cosmetic. It’s all about appearance. If you need more encouragement you need to turn on television shows, movie and advertising. There you will see the world as the radical left wishes it were. You may recall that Peggy Noonan once called it moral harassment.

The Kamala Harris candidacy was the last volley. She was the reductio ad absurdum of wokery. A woman who had no real qualifications, who lacked the ability to do the job, who was subliterate, was elevated to the role of presidential candidate without having earned it. 

That was the key. Harris was imposed on the populace. She was a triple diversity candidate so she did not need to be vetted. She did not need to compete for the honor.

So, the mainstream media flooded the zone with encomia about the greatness of Kamala. If you accept the premise, namely that being a black female counts as a qualification for office, then she ran a flawless, perfect campaign. If you did not see it, you were a bigot.

Keep in mind, thinking makes it so. Saying makes it so. There is no reality against which we need to judge qualifications or records. 

For those who had based their careers on their ability to fulfill diversity quotas, Kamala Harris was the test case. For those who doubted their own qualifications or even their own ability to do a job, the Harris candidacy was the acid test. 

They could not accept that Harris lost because she was inept and incompetent, that she had no business running for the presidency-- because then they would be putting their own ersatz achievements in question.

I am not going to name names here, but how many of the talking heads on television were obviously hired to fulfill diversity quotas. And how many of them refuse to accept that they are fundamentally incompetent and unqualified for what they are doing.

Obviously, the nation’s governmental and media and academic jobs are chock full of diversity hires. Reimposing meritocracy is not going to happen any time soon. 

Worse yet, as Shelby Steele pointed out decades ago, once you introduce diversity quotas into hiring and firing you discover that the achievements of anyone who falls within the protected class are subtly disrespected. 

It’s a sad state of affairs. It shows the problems with human engineering, even when undertaken for the most noble of intentions.

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