The progressive left likes to tout the idea that diversity is our greatest strength. Another word for diversity is difference – or inequality, if you wish. However, the left tells us that inequality is our greatest injustice. On the surface, this sounds like a blatant contradiction but once you understand how the left thinks, it all makes perfect sense. The moral DNA of progressivism says that differences are evil because they lead to discrimination, which is oppressive.
The former leftist Evan Sayet explains this mode of thinking in his book The Kindergarden of Eden. Progressives don’t really believe that diversity is a strength, but instead a source of great evil. You can catch a glimpse of this conviction when someone proclaims the existence of human biodiversity – racial differences. It then does not take long for some Antifa mob to descend upon the poor fellow and declare him to be a racist, white supremacist, and otherwise horrible human being.
The idea is that if human biodiversity exists, it must lead to discrimination, oppression, slavery, and another Holocaust. How do the progressives handle this form of inequality?
Forced Equalization
During the progressive era of the 1890s to the 1920s, the solution was equalization through forced eugenics. That is, by sterilizing the criminal and disabled, inequality could be reduced. Among the pioneers of this project were the Democratic Socialists of Sweden, who did not discontinue their forced sterilization program until 1979.
However, eugenics was largely abandoned by the progressives after the atrocities of the National Socialists in Germany were fully uncovered after World War II. It was based on this trauma that the notion of diversity as a strength was born.
Rather than equalizing biodiversity through sterilization, progressives found that they could achieve the same outcome by removing the concept from biology books and the public discourse. Whether, for example, racial differences exist or not is irrelevant to the progressive; the conviction is that a widespread belief in such divergence leads to slavery, Jim Crow laws, and genocide. “Diversity is a strength” is not a declaration of the leftist’s personal feelings, but a warning to be heeded, a moral imperative; equalization by decree. Accept it, or else…
Diaforetikophobia
Progressives denounce private property because they fear it will lead to economic inequality. They reject the nation-state because they fear it will lead to war and imperialism. And, finally, they demonize human biodiversity, both in sex and race, because they think it results in oppression and ultimately mass murder.
Is it true that unless men and women are identical in every respect, women are doomed to subjugation? Will secure borders between sovereign nation-states inevitably lead to war? Will a meritocratic free market necessarily lead to oppressive hierarchies? Are statistical differences between ethnic groups bound to result in ideologies of racial supremacy? Or, in general: Does diversity always have harmful consequences?
Tempered and balanced thinkers will recognize that such a generalization is not warranted. Some differences are valuable, others are problematic, but most make no difference. One could, therefore, argue that, despite their insistence to the contrary, progressives suffer from diaforetikophobia – the irrational fear of diversity.
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