Trocando o radicalismo pela diversidade, diversidade que talvez esteja a tornar-se uma ideia conservadora

«Putting diversity ahead of ideology has interesting consequences for a centrist like Mr Biden. Take the nomination of Lloyd Austin, a retired general and board member of Raytheon. Ordinarily you might have expected a backlash from the party’s left wing, which does not much like the revolving door between the federal government and large defence contractors, and worries about keeping civil-military relations tilted towards the civil end of the hyphen. Yet because Mr Austin is African-American, and will be the first black person to hold this job in American history, the criticism from the Democratic left was muted.

Because the Democratic Party places so much value on diversity, being non-white and/or female can work as a kind of ideological body armour that saves the wearer from friendly fire. This in turn means that the incoming president has been able to pick a team that is more centrist than would otherwise be the case. It helps that African-Americans, to whom Mr Biden owed his victory in the primary, tend to be a moderating force in the party, anchoring Democrats in the ideological centre now in the way that organised labour once did.

Conservatives looking at the process might lament the outbreak of woke, diverse nonsense as an organising principle of the incoming administration, but might also be pleasantly surprised that there are no Democratic socialists anywhere near the levers of executive power. Yet those two things are closely related.

This might be pushing the argument too far, but I sometimes wonder whether diversity, a notion conservatives are meant to loathe, is on its way to becoming a conservative idea. Pretty much all of America’s large companies have embraced it as a core principle in their hiring and promoting, suggesting it is hardly a radical notion. In politics, conservatives have often been concerned with the problem of how to establish order. When a country is as diverse as America, it is hard to see how government retains the consent of the governed, a necessary ingredient in that order, if it looks completely different from the country it is governing. In a place as diverse as America, a diverse government ought to be a stabilising, moderating force.»

John Prideaux, US editor da Economist na newsletter Checks and Balance: A cabinet that looks like America