No reasonable person wants anything other than for the United States to benefit from the diversity of its people. To call diversity a strength is more than a pleasant homily; it is a core civic value embraced by large majorities of our people. But what if we’re doing it wrong? And not merely a few degrees right or left of true north, but completely wrong: up-is-down, Bizarro World wrong? What if our well-intended impulses to make a virtue of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are actually exacerbating the tensions between diverse groups of Americans?

In 2005, Karen Stenner, a political scientist and behavioral economist, published The Authoritarian Dynamic, an eye-opening and sobering work describing the conditions that drive intolerance, including racism and political division. Her work concerns a particular type of person “who cannot treat with natural ease or generosity those who are not his own kindred or kind.” Because of “deep-seated predispositions neither they nor we have much capacity to alter” [emphasis mine] these individuals, who comprise approximately one-third of the population and are predisposed toward authoritarianism. At the opposite pole are those who naturally interact well with all manner of people. “The rest of us fall somewhere in between,” Stenner writes, “not openly averse to other peoples but usually favoring our own.”