It’s official: Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign is little more than a pandering parade meant to endear her to woke Twitter.
The Massachusetts Democrat and her advisers have already embraced radical positions such as housing transgender women in prisons with biological women. As she slips in the polls, she is going to ever-greater pains to virtue-signal — for example, listing her preferred gender pronouns in her Twitter bio. But even given the insufferably woke tone that Warren has struck thus far in her struggling presidential campaign, her latest comments take her addiction to identity politics to a new level.
The senator apparently wants to abolish not just all private health insurance but also merit-based cabinet and administration appointments. As reported by the Washington Examiner, Warren promised Wednesday that “at least 50% of Cabinet positions [will be] filled by women and non-binary people.”
Elizabeth Warren promises to fill her cabinet with “50% with women & non-binary people.”
In other words: IDENTITY POLITICS.
This is so insulting to women & non-binary people. As if Warren sees them ONLY for their gender & not for resume. Gross.https://t.co/nudWeXyFik
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) January 22, 2020
There’s something so blatantly tokenistic about this statement that it’s almost insulting. As if women and people with alternative gender identities are just trophies, their presence simply fulfilling statistical boxes that a President Warren could check off to brag about.
Of course, we should all want women and people of all backgrounds to have equal opportunity to serve in government on the basis of their merit. But to have a quota of 50% specifically implies that you will use sex as a defining factor in decision-making, when, in fact, people’s chromosomes and gender identity really should have nothing to do with whether or not they are appointed to an administration.
Still, Warren’s promise to make sure her cabinet is at least 50% women is fairly standard liberal feminist tripe. It’s a bit cringy and certainly insulting to women — I, for one, think women are capable of competing on their merits — but it’s also nothing particularly new or shocking.
The candidate’s decision to include nonbinary people, though, strays into newer territory. It’s another instance of Warren tripping all over herself to appeal to woke Twitter with a stance or statement that’s probably off-putting to the average voter. Who is advising Warren on this? Who could possibly think that nonbinary virtue-signaling is the key to winning over New Hampshire swing voters? It might impress “blue check” liberals online, but it’s hard to see this going over well with the voters who actually matter.
It’s also just impractical. How many nonbinary people are qualified for top administration jobs? Surely there must be some, but there can’t be many. It’s almost impossible to quantify the nonbinary population in our country accurately, yet there’s no disputing that it’s a very, very, very small number of people. To get a rough estimate, consider that just roughly 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as transgender, and, within that group, only 35% of them identify as nonbinary.
So, Warren is basically saying that she’s so obsessed with identity politics she will go to extremes to find the few members of a tiny subpopulation that might be able to serve in her administration. In fact, if there were 200 cabinet positions and Warren filled just one of them with a nonbinary person, they would be drastically overrepresented relative to their share of the population.
Here’s the correct approach: Simply say that you’ll hire the best people for the job and that you don’t care whether they are male, female, nonbinary, or transgender. This would undoubtedly still result in some, if not many, members of these groups getting the job. For instance, free-market economist Deirdre McCloskey happens to be transgender and would be a great pick for any administration as an economic adviser.
Yet Warren would never even consider appointing McCloskey because her economic beliefs aren’t socialist enough. Warren simultaneously manages to be both tokenistic and reductionist with her professed, surface-level support for identity-based quotas.
Sadly, we now know that a President Warren would not take a merit-based approach to presidential appointments. It’s not surprising to see Warren openly rejecting meritocracy in favor of identity politics, though. Anything else wouldn’t go over well with woke Twitter.
