The Partial Observer by Don Feinberg

Yes, There Is a DEI Candidate in this Election…JD Vance

His Admission to Yale Law and Book Deal were Classic DEI Decisions

You don’t have to like JD Vance to know he has been described as very bright. But even knowing he graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State and assuming he scored very well on his LSAT, there’s little doubt he was accepted to Yale Law school, which has a class of only 250 students, because he was one of the top 250 students in America. Why do I say that? Because every year more than 50,000 people apply to law school, over 3,000 of them to Yale law. Was JD objectively no less than the 250th smartest person out of the 50,000 that applied the year he did? Unlikely, but even more importantly, unnecessary. Why? Because as Yale Law School says on its own website, “our goal is to enroll a talented, diverse, and engaged entering class.” Hmm, there’s that word “diverse.” While JD Vance may have done well in school, what he definitely added to his Yale Law School class was the diversity of being former military, not from an Ivy League school (the largest source of Yale Law School entrants) and, as he wrote, distinctly not from the middle class. He was, as he put it so eloquently in his book, a “hillbilly.”

And that book deal further burnishes JD’s DEI credentials. Over 150,000 titles are published every year in the U.S., of which several thousand are biographies. Why was “Hillbilly Elegy,” a book written by 32-year-old Vance only three years out of Yale Law School, published? Undoubtedly because the publisher was struck by the diversity of his background (just like Yale Law School) and they wanted to INCLUDE in their biographical offerings to the American public what they saw as a unique, seldom heard perspective and voice.

By describing Vance’s law school admission and publishing deal as DEI one might think I’m saying they are undeserved. But I’m not. Because DEI is as American as apple pie. One might even say that America invented DEI. A few examples in our history make the point. Counting three-fifths of the slave population in slave-holding states so those states could have more Congressional representation and electoral votes was such an extreme act of equity and inclusion on the part of non-slaveholding states that we had to fight the Civil War to reverse it.

The Electoral College is another example, an act of equity, inclusion AND diversity on the part of larger, more urban states to make presidential elections fairer for smaller, more rural ones.

The same for the number of senators per state. To give equal representative power to three million Arkansans as we give to more than 38 million Californians is a DEI gift that should make their Senator Tom Cotton, recipient of fewer than 800,000 votes in his last election, blush. Especially when he talks to his colleague from California, Alex Padilla, who received over 6.5 million votes.

There are so many DEI examples that enumerating them would literally fill thousands of pages. And they do this in our tax code alone. How else to describe why, if you own a house you can deduct the interest on your mortgage, but you can’t deduct your rent if that’s what you have to do because you can’t afford to own? Almost every tax provision is written to ensure one interest group is enumerated separately to ensure Diversity, treated more Equitably or Included advantageously.

And that’s ok. It’s really just what e pluribus unum democracy looks like. The necessary glue for a country as geographically large and ethnically and religiously diverse as we are. Without it, it’s doubtful America would ever have gotten off the ground, let alone become the world power we are. It’s what a pluralistic society needs to do to balance all its competing interests if it wants to live together and prosper.

Our Founding Fathers understood this even if some of their DEI choices were less than ideal. No one group can get everything. There has to be a constant effort to create diversity, equity and inclusion so that everyone feels that the playing field is reasonably, if not perfectly, even.

So, JD Vance, be proud. You are the DEI candidate in this race. I just wish you’d explain to your fellow citizens why that’s such a totally American and fair thing to be. Maybe after you do that you can explain why being woke just means telling the whole truth about our great and complicated history, not just the flattering bits.

Don Feinberg founded Brewery Ommegang, thanks in part to receiving a DEI benefit from the Town of Middlefield, which generously rezoned the property where Ommegang sits from agricultural to light industrial.