The DEI Time Warp Dividing Democrats

While everyone is fixated on the Republican family feud, they are missing the fight that is happening within the Democratic Party. One faction clings to the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion that helped doom the Democrats in 2024. The other faction admits that the whole project was as insane as the idea that windmills and solar panels would replace fossil fuels. These Democrats are trying to correct course.Just this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced at a press conference his Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan. Speaking as if it were still 2020 when racial sorting was celebrated, the mayor declared that “we cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis without dismantling systemic racial inequity.” He promised — or threatened — to “operationalize racial equity into every aspect of City life.” While the rest of us dismiss the Marxist concept of “equity” as a political goal, the mayor of New York is out there trying to sell its virtues even as he fails to deliver on his promises — like free bus rides for all.Singing the same stale tune is the House minority leader, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who hopes his love affair with DEI will be shared by enough voters this November to make him Speaker. Speaking at the National Action Network annual convention this week he actually tried to wedge DEI directly into the language of the Pledge of Allegiance: “When people say the Pledge of Allegiance… one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, that’s inclusion. So, diversity, equity and inclusion…these aren’t foreign values. These are American values.”Mr. Jeffries doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. Wrapping grievance politics in patriotism is so five years ago: One of the reasons Democrats lost both houses and the presidency in the last elections is because voters — including Hispanics and black and brown Americans to whom Democrats try to pander through DEI — just want a government that will perform basic functions without turning everything into a campus rally laden with moral posturing and race baiting.A former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, lives in the present. He knows it is 2026. Noting that Democrats have spent too much time on trans story hours, defunding the police, and manufacturing pronouns, he is pushing back against the far left’s DEI obsession.“We lost the plot,” Mr. Emanuel said on the Fifth Column podcast last week. “You are worried about bathroom access and locker room access — why don’t you focus on classroom excellence? You have 50 percent of our kids not reading at grade level… we went from acceptance to advocacy. Big difference.”Mr. Emanuel is right: There is a big difference between the kind of Democratic party he wants to see win in November and beyond, and the one the far left has in mind. Democrats may ride their wave of Trump hatred to Congressional victory this fall with their DEI flags still in hand, but once the President leaves office, they will need a vision for America that looks forward, not backward to sell to their “anything but Trump” voters.DEI is pulling Democrats back to a time the country is ashamed of and to which it does not want to return. It was a time when we re-segregated college campuses and called it progress. It was a time when people lost their careers for “misgendering” and when medical research grants were distributed not based on scientific merit but on the diversity of the research team.It was an era in which men stole women’s athletic trophies and ended up on the cover of magazines. Elected officials spent time and resources on these false DEI gods and didn’t bother to do their actual jobs — close borders, educate children, monitor fraud. No one wants to go back there but many, like Mayor Mamdani and Minority Leader Jefferies, built their careers on DEI and have no idea how to govern. So they can’t move on.Democratic voters will have to force them to do so, along with the help of people like Mr. Emanuel, at the voting booth. Blinding hatred of President Trump may get in the way this November but there are many Novembers in the Democrats’ future and if the party refuses to learn from its losses, it will keep delivering them.

The DEI Time Warp Dividing Democrats

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