Op-Ed

The Left’s Rejection Of Diversity…In Thought

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J.T. Young Former Treasury Department and OMB Official
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Despite the left’s deification of diversity, they reject its most important area: thought. Without variety in human beings’ defining trait, diversity’s other manifestations are rendered facile. Yet the left’s rejection is not just a current characteristic, but a constant. Just as thought defines human beings, a rejection of diversity in thought defines the left.

Liberals’ embrace of diversity borders on suffocation. The list of variables by which the left defines it continues to expand. And there is virtually no area where they do not demand diversity.

Diversity in race: Check. Diversity in gender: Yes. Diversity in ethnicity: Of course. Diversity in age: Indubitably. Diversity in sexual orientation: Naturally. However there is one trait by which the left do not measure diversity: Thought.

Blaise Pascal said: “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.” Simply: Thought is the definitive element of the human condition. It is our most powerful attribute and separates us from every other species.

Every major advancement of the human condition has come through it. It has spread us across the planet and beyond. Whatever challenges we as a species encounter, we can rely on only this attribute to save us.

The absence of thought in the left’s demands for diversity is therefore no minor omission. So careful to define people by every outward criteria, the left’s failure to do so by the most fundamental human trait reduces the rest, just as these other traits are minimalized when compared to thought.

Nor is the absence of thought in the left’s diversity demands an ellipsis. Examine where the left dominates. On college campuses, in mainstream news media, in entertainment, liberal thought not only dominates, it is practically universal. Despite all these areas ostensibly claiming otherwise, there is no shorter or surer road to political correctness perdition than to be an agent of thought diversity here.

Far from ignoring thought’s importance when it comes to diversity, the left actively reject it. Its absence is no more an accident, than it is a recent phenomenon.

Oneness of thought has long been a hallmark of the left. Just as the areas where the left dominates prove it in America, the left’s states prove it across the world and history. As strangling as America’s political correctness can be to reasoned discourse, it pales in comparison to Europe’s, where the left is even more dominant and often succeed in reducing the continent to caricature.

States where the left fully controls the government are even clearer proof. Indoctrination of thought is one of the first aims of any communist state, preceded only by removal of groups embodying diversity of thought. Communications are completely controlled and the state’s greatest crime is anti-revolutionary thought.

Being an enemy of these leftist states means chiefly being guilty of subversive — i.e., diverse — thought. The Soviet Union’s gulags were filled with such political prisoners; undoubtedly those in China, Cuba, and North Korea are still.

Even within its own narrowly accepted thought parameters, diversity is condemned. If anything, the Trotskyite is more loathed than any anti-revolutionary. The left do not simply demand similarity of thought, they demand it absolutely.

A virtual continuum exists for the left and thought diversity: The more they dominate, the less diversity of thought exists. The reason is simple: Real world experience only coincidentally follows their world view.

Thus if the left’s thought is to prevail, it must be enforced. Just as the closed shop is the greatest advantage in union organizing, diversity of thought’s absence is the greatest – if not only –guarantee that the left’s thought prevails.

Of course without diversity of thought, diversity’s other elements are neutralized. Surface differences are reduced to meaninglessness in its absence. What difference does it make if we look differently, yet think alike?

Imagine a company that seemingly sold a wide selection of soups. Yet despite a wide variety of labels, each can’s contents were identical. The labels would quickly become irrelevant to all but those who affixed the labels.

This fundamental point does not escape the left. They diversify the symbol, while homogenizing the substance, on their own terms. By doing so with such insistence, they aim to obscure their rejection of diversity’s most important element. It is precisely what the left wants; they know to obtain it, they must first obscure it and then enforce it. In the left’s house, diversity is only for the window-dressing, not the interior — let alone the occupants.

J.T. Young served under President George W. Bush as the director of communications in the Office of Management and Budget and as deputy assistant secretary in legislative affairs for tax and budget at the Treasury Department. He served as a congressional staffer from 1987-2000.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.