The Communist Precursors of DEI

The Communist Precursors of DEI

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant hat only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” (Thomas Sowell)

It was the late summer of 1968. My grandfather was exiled by the communist government to a poverty-stricken village for one year, without permission to see his family.

His “crime” was expressing disapproval of Czechoslovakia’s brutal invasion by Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks, which concluded the aborted attempt for liberalization and democratization known as the Prague Spring. My grandfather was speaking privately, sotto voce, to a trusted friend in a café, who shared his indignation at the ruthless crushing of a sovereign nation’s quest for freedom. An informant, lurking at a nearby table—as was later discovered—recorded the conversation on a reel-to-reel concealed in his briefcase, and my grandfather vanished shortly thereafter.

My mother had just graduated high school and applied to university. She had high hopes of studying languages and literature and becoming a writer. Despite her excellent grades, she was denied acceptance at her college of choice and only allowed to pursue a major in an ideologically approved field. When she inquired about the decision, the university officials admonished her that she should be grateful she was permitted to study at all, given her family history and the need to accommodate the “underprivileged.”

Communist countries had special educational accommodations for those they considered “underprivileged,” based on class and ideological fealty. These accommodations included the so-called “workers’ faculty,” where “proletarian” students received accelerated college degrees while meeting much lower standards than the general population. Intelligent and talented children from families that suffered persecution by the regime were frequently denied college admission.

Furthermore, universities offered sizable acceptance quotas for the offspring of the so-called “active fighters against fascism and capitalism,” a/k/a communist nomenklatura, whose admission took precedence over that of regular students. The preferential quota students were secretly dubbed “paratroopers,” in reference to being “dropped” at universities from above, as though by parachutes, instead of passing the rigorous entrance examinations.

Needless to say, such practices engendered cynicism, hostility, and an exacerbated sense of unfairness. The government’s excuse, was, of course, correcting past “injustices” and providing opportunities for the “working class.” This was accomplished by creating new, much more severe forms of discrimination, exclusion, and injustice.

Leftist ideologues aspire to transform America into some feel-good socialist utopia, despite the horrendous track record of socialism. They learn from communist theory and practice and constantly adapt various failed concepts to present reality, in order to achieve their radical goals of dismantling Western tradition. They try to “divide and conquer” by producing ever-changing categories of social “victimhood.” The class quotas and discriminatory practices of communist universities were reimagined as DEI policies in the West.

Over the past 30 years, I have had the distinct pleasure and honor of teaching and supervising numerous brilliant students and interns, who happened to be of extremely diverse backgrounds. Invariably, the best predictor of their success was their work ethic, values, and character—not the ethnic or social category they belonged to.

In addition to the legal and moral problems presented by DEI discrimination, such policies take a grave psychological toll. Those who are labeled “DEI hires” often resent being treated as insufficiently capable. They wish to be judged based on individual merits, not on some unearned collective virtue. On the other hand, those excluded from the newly privileged “victim” groups, as designated by intersectionality ideologues, suffer the psychological damages of racial and social discrimination despite their hard work and skills.

Trying to enforce utopian perfection can only lead to misery and violence. Churchill aptly defined socialism as “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy,” whose “inherent virtue” was the “equal sharing of miseries.” As Alan Kors, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania remarked, “No cause, ever, in the history of all mankind, has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than socialism with power.” And furthermore,

Socialism, wherever it actually had the means to plan a society, to pursue efficaciously its vision of the abolition of private property, economic inequality, and the allocation of capital and goods by free markets, culminated in the crushing of individual, economic, religious, associational, and political liberty…. We know that voluntary exchange among individuals held morally responsible under the rule of law creates both prosperity and an unparalleled diversity of human choices.

Human nature is flawed, and so are governments. Even the best societies in the history of mankind are not impervious to evil practices. Yet such systems strive to correct their errors, since they are based on universally humane values. Western democracies today have achieved remarkable success in providing abundant opportunities for upward mobility. The blueprint of the American founding does not need to be re-drawn—it simply needs to be observed. President Lincoln immortally described America as “the last best hope on Earth.” It is up to us to preserve it.

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