One of the big questions that has plagued American politics for the last decade and a half is: What the hell is going on? In order to understand what the hell is going on, I think we need to understand the transformation that happened around 2014. In 2012, we had what I consider to be the most consequential election of my lifetime, the one that everybody forgets. That’s the one that I think was really important. Why? Because in 2008, Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was elected on the platform of unifying Americans around race. Racial optimism in the country was at an all-time high, according to the polling data. And then, in 2012, Barack Obama, who had been a very progressive and left-wing president, who had pushed Obamacare through, lost popularity. So he decided that the best way to win reelection was not to broadcast a unifying message, but to divide Americans by race and then to cobble together enough racial coalitions in order to win a victory. He defeated Mitt Romney, the most milquetoast candidate in the history of American politics, in what was a fairly solid victory.  And that seemed to change everything, because by 2014, race relations in the United States were on the decline. Barack Obama — who had made a lot of promises to a lot of people — needed to fulfill those promises, particularly on issues of race. He claimed Trayvon Martin could have been his son. That was a racial claim because what he was saying was that any black person would have been subjected to the same treatment as Trayvon Martin, that circumstances did not matter. He said the same thing with regard to Ferguson, Missouri, where he claimed that nobody would make up the kinds of experiences that Michael Brown had undergone. Of course, it turned out that in Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown’s acolytes, people who were pseudo-witnesses, actually did make up the story about Michael Brown claiming that he had raised his hands: Hands up, don’t shoot! and all of the rest. Thus, by 2014, race relations were on a steep decline in the United States, and have never recovered. That is because so much of this attitude is racially divisive. The attitude was then baked into American politics. There’s a fascinating and important piece in Compact magazine by Jacob Savage, talking about the realities of hiring and firing in the elite institutions of the United States, which became explicitly race-based around 2014. He writes:  The doors seemed to close everywhere and all at once. In 2011, the year I moved to Los Angeles, white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023. In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.  There are people who are DEI advocates who will claim that this is the natural state of things, that white people were being artificially elevated. And when that ended, thanks to DEI, white people fell out of positions of power.  But the reality is the opposite: America had been, for at least a couple of generations, generally a meritocracy, particularly on issues of race. For example, when you go back to how hiring was done in TV studios, some of the most Left-leaning areas in American life in 2011, it wasn’t that the heads of the writers’ room were selecting for white people; it was that they were selecting for the funniest people.  And then they decided to radically shift how they did hiring and firing, thus dispossessing people of the positions that they had earned in favor of other people based on group characteristics. I’m 41. People of my generation were brought up in the 1990s, and we were taught from a very, very early age that Martin Luther King Jr.’s exhortation to judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, was morally correct. That’s because it is morally correct. And then an entire cadre of elite institutional professionals decided not to do that anymore. Not only that, they decided, in many cases, that the majority of potential employees in a potential applicant pool were bad because of the immutable characteristics, the color of their skin, or their maleness. The idea was that these people were somehow lesser, that they had participated in systemic discrimination, and even if they themselves were not racist, the system was racist and thus these people had to be dispossessed.  They took the most tolerant cohort of people, people who had been trained in the idea of a colorblind meritocracy, and told them that colorblind meritocracy was for them, but it wasn’t for anyone else. These people were told that they should continue to adhere to an idea of colorblind meritocracy because it was morally correct, but they were the beneficiaries of racialist systems, and therefore, they had to pay. Christmas Sale – Get 40% off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships That is unsustainable. There’s one system for everyone. And if you are told that colorblind meritocracy is something that you should morally accept — which is true — and then you are told it doesn’t apply to you, it only applies to everyone else, you are likely to get a generation of people who start to reject a colorblind meritocracy and start to look at race relations as a zero sum game rather than an additive bonus. They start to see everything as a question of who gets the job based on immutable characteristics, and start to view themselves as a put-upon identity group, because they are a put-upon identity group. If a group is determined to be lesser on the basis of immutable characteristics, they’re going to start seeing themselves in identitarian ways. That doesn’t mean that they are right to do so. It does mean, however, that the only way to destroy all of this, this new identitarian moment we are living in, where there’s an identitarianism of the Left that adheres to the idea that group identity is really, really good except if you’re talking about white Christian men, and an identitarian Right that is formed in counter-response that says, “Fine, you want to play that game? We’ll play that game, too,” is to go back to a system that we were all taught as kids, and that was natural to us: Colorblind meritocracy. Colorblind meritocracy is good. It is right. Why? Because meritocracy is the only system of human relations ever devised that has positive externalities. When the people who are best at the job, get the job, you get greater efficiency, you get better job performance, you get better innovation, better products. People are able to expend their best abilities to the benefit of everyone else. Every other system, every other anti-meritocratic system has negative externalities. They help the people who are inside the system and hurt the people who are outside the system. Meritocracy benefits everyone because even if you didn’t get the job — let’s say you lost the job to a person who is better qualified than you, better at the job than you — that means that the person who filled the job is going to perform the job better than you would have, and so that company will do better. They will perform better, the prices will be better, and the products will be better. Moreover, you will end up in a job where you are most meritorious. If you want a happier human society, meritocracy is the way. We were told by the leftists that meritocracy is inherently bad. Why? Because people looked at the outcome numbers and they judged for themselves that if outcomes were not equal, the system was unequal and bad. But if you don’t use meritocracy, then you have to prejudge. Either you are going to judge a system based on the effect of the system, or you’re going to prejudge a system based on your perception of fairness between groups. There is nothing just or fair about the idea that a person should be hampered in their capacity to succeed because of their immutable characteristics. That is just wrong. Grievance-based politics need to end. Yes, white male American millennials, Christians do have reason for grievance. But the solution to that grievance is meritocracy. It is not, in fact, reversed grievance. Otherwise, we’re just going to ping-pong between grievances. It will become a question of who grabs the government gun and crams down their preferred solution. That is not what America was built on. And it is not what is going to cause America to succeed. The negative externalities of the DEI system have been felt everywhere from the social sphere to the job sphere to the governmental sphere. And that spiral will keep on swirling in the drain unless we reverse it and go back to what we all taught our kids and what we were taught as kids: to treat every individual human being as an individual, and not on the basis of some sort of immutable characteristic. What happened over the course of the last decade was a sin against decency, and the fact that so many people are still invested in that sin, or who now want to pursue the same sin, but with a different color at the top, will not make for a successful America.