By Rob Meyne
- Feb. 4, 2024
- 3-min read
The names of many contemporary movements, organizations, and legislation are focused-grouped tested to ensure they sound as appealing as possible. Nomenclature has a lot to do with the ability to successfully market something.
Terms like Black Lives Matter, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), or the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to generate support for policies that do not reflect what their name suggests.
No reasonable person questions that black lives matter. Nor do they oppose the ideas of inclusion or inflation reduction. Yet frequently a majority of reasonable people oppose the specific actions being taken in pursuit of those objections. The devil is always in the details.
Years ago, you may recall there was opposition to harvesting tuna, because marine mammals were often killed in the process. Accordingly, there was a suggestion that tuna operators should form an alliance and call it “Friends of the Dolphin.” No doubt you could have generated cash contributions to such a group from a lot of people who would have been horrified to find out what it really was.
If you’ve paid attention to the dumpster fire that is also known as the Biden Administration, you will remember they tried to enact components of the “Green New Deal” (AKA, the Green New Steal). These were radical revisions to the way we use and generate energy, manufacture and distribute products, and to whom we give huge taxpayer-funded subsidies. It was politically unpopular and economically devastating. The bill went nowhere. So, they just called it the Inflation Reduction Act. Members of Congress had only a few days to read the thousand page bill, and team Biden just put most of the elements of the Green New Steal into it.
The voters don’t like it? Simple: change its name and pass it anyway.
If you said you were opposed to the Inflation Reduction Act people thought you were in favor of inflation. Sadly, this kind of disingenuousness, and outright lying, drives much of the political process.
Monikers like DEI are crafted to sound like a commitment to a laudable goal but do nothing to tell you the nuts and bolts of the proposals. You can certainly favor the concepts of DEI without favoring the methods leftist elites use to make them happen. The left routinely disguises their true intentions – their actual policies – by labeling them in a misleading way.
It has often been said the left succeeds when the people are not informed but conservatives succeed when they are.
Consider this: any policy that treats people differently based on their skin color or national heritage is racist. That is the definition of racism; treating people differently because of the amount of melanin in their skin. Yet that is exactly what most DEI programs require.
Equity, in fact, is the polar opposite of equal opportunity. Equity requires the allocation of benefits and opportunities based on race. Management by equity requires that merit be a secondary consideration. That is an uncomfortable reality, but until we come to grips with it, we will continue to struggle to find answers to some of our most important problems.
For as long as I can remember, I have been astonished at how people on the left look at everything through the lens of race. Leftist leaders simply don’t believe race isn’t the first thing conservatives think about when they begin their day. Most Democratic leaders assume we are all obsessed with race because they are.
Perhaps more than anything, solutions to problems of race will elude us as long as half the nation assumes the other half shares their obsession with race. Saying that out loud is not likely to make you friends among Democratic leaders.
More to come.
