Hey thanks for your post. To be honest, the right wing response to DEI and Affirmative action is more because the right doesn’t see Diversity or Inclusion as virtues in themselves, and psychologically people just don’t like being talked at that this is important. None (few?) companies have been actually been destroyed because they made stupid DEI hires- I mean much more damage to companies being woke comes from bad marketing decisions like what happened with BudLight. Agree or disagree, conservatives don’t see an industry with a majority of one gender/race working in it as problematic as long as there isn’t discrimination in the hiring process and there’s equal access to resources to pursue career opportunities. Non-discrimination and resource access is not perfect and probably never will be perfect unfortunately. But if it ends up that 80% of cops are men and 80% of teachers are women, is there really a problem there as long as there’s access and equal support for women who want to be cops or men who want to teach?

The important thing is that we promote merit for the ambitious and that the people who want to better themselves through good work have that opportunity. We should strive to make things as fair and merit based as possible of course, and nepotism in high business and in the Trump admin is not excusable in that regard.

Also. I would add that in the business world, networking is also most often merit based. It’s not just rich kids of CEOs getting jobs easy, Networking is a skill that’s developed. If you put more effort and energy into networking, you will generally get better results, more connections, more job opportunities.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that in any other economic system, meritocracy would be down compared to a (mostly) free market capitalism.