In this sharp article for the American Institute for Economic Research, Barry Brownstein draws a parallel between the way the party enforced its discipline in the Soviet Union and the way we now have similar officials (most prominently in our colleges and universities, but also in government agencies, businesses, and cultural institutions) who oversee compliance with the DEI ideology.
Brownstein writes:
In his book The New Puritans, Andrew Doyle observed, “We have seen the evangelists of ‘social justice’ take control of our major cultural, political, educational and corporate institutions, thirsty for opportunities to be seen to vanquish devils, be they real or imagined.” Doyle warned, “these illiberal trends . . . threaten to sabotage all the progress we have made since the civil rights movements of the 1960s.”
How true. The heart of DEI is the idea that government power must be used to help the supposedly downtrodden groups at the expense of their imagined oppressors. This creates the enemies that those who crave power always need to build support while giving “jobs” to lots of small-minded people who’d otherwise struggle to find productive work.
The DEI offensive is sweeping all before it, crushing the concepts of individualism and the rule of law. Hayek predicted exactly that in his Law, Legislation, and Liberty.
The DEI enforcers are just like the Soviet commissars, Brownstein argues:
In the former Soviet Union, a commissar was a bureaucrat embedded in the military or other government organizations to ensure that decisions were true to the spirit of the communist party. Their job was to maintain ideological purity.
In the Soviet Union, purity with Marxist dogma was the foremost concern, even if it meant turning away more competent people. We see something disturbingly similar in the U.S. these days.
Read the whole thing.