Jonathan Chait’s Identity-Politics Flip-Flop

O nly two years ago, Jonathan Chait proposed that race-based hiring decisions — which categorically exclude certain individuals from consideration based on immutable characteristics — were essential for the very realization of the American promise. As he wrote then:

Policies like promising to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court (or other political bodies with a public representative function) strike me as obviously sensible. I support typical hiring preferences — it’s difficult to attract underrepresented minorities to a workplace or school if it doesn’t already have a critical mass.

He continued:

Liberals used to speculate about some grand bargain that would trade away affirmative action for some other, more effective way to close the scandalous gap between white and Black America; I don’t believe any such trade is possible. Ending affirmative action will probably just mean less social equality, period.

Chait was hardly an outlier. The entire leftist ecosystem, in the aftermath of the summer 2020 riots, had adopted a framework in which the United States was and is plagued by systemic racism that could only be cured by deliberate, conscious racial discrimination.

Apparently, Chait thinks we live in an entirely different country today. On Sunday, referencing the notion that Kamala Harris ought to be the presumptive replacement should Joe Biden drop out of the presidential race, he denounced on X “the threat of weaponized bad faith identity politics.” And in his New York magazine column out the same day, he elaborated on that point, claiming it was somehow “strange” for Biden to have even considered race when choosing Harris as his running mate in the first place:

Biden selected her anyway, due to a strange combination of factors. Early on, he promised to appoint a female vice-presidential nominee. And after winning the nomination, the murder of George Floyd led activists to pressure him to choose someone who was Black.

The combination of those two requirements functionally narrowed the candidate pool to a single person. Biden considered Karen Bass and Val Demings, who were both members of the House of Representatives, and even Susan Rice, who had never held elective office. But the traditional bar for vice presidents is a governor or senator, and Harris was literally the only Black woman who met that bar.

He lamented that “a more sure-footed Biden campaign would have been able to resist demands that had boxed in their options to such an extreme degree.” But was not Harris’s selection motivated by exactly the same, “obviously sensible” principle that led Chait to support “policies like promising to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court” in 2022?

To be sure, minds change. Perhaps Chait undertook a reassessment. But it’s quite the development when a policy moves from “obviously sensible” to “cartoonish,” which is how Chait describes the possibility that Harris’s race should be a positive factor in the considerations to select a Biden replacement:

It may or may not be the case that Democrats are so deeply enmeshed in the most cartoonish form of identity politics discourse that they can’t make clear-headed political choices, even with the highest possible stakes. . . .

Democrats have a choice about how they conduct their public debates over their nominees. When political actors use charges of bias to position their favored candidate for power, they can subject these claims to the appropriate level of skepticism rather than treat them as nuclear weapons aimed at their base. Submitting to this form of extortion is a choice, as is, potentially, ignoring or resisting it.

As Chait sees it, the replacement for Biden should be the best candidate — without regard to race: “My choice would be Gretchen Whitmer, who’s displayed a repeated talent at appealing to swing voters.” Simple, right? He suggests she “could be paired with a Black running mate like Cory Booker.” Wait, has Chait’s position evolved again mid-sentence?

This is getting hard to follow, so a recap of where things stand: According to Chait, race-based hiring was good up until 2020, bad in 2020 itself (when Harris was selected as Biden’s running mate), good in 2022 (when Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court), apparently bad from then on until Chait was midway through typing the third sentence of the third-to-last paragraph in his Sunday column, and good again from that moment on. Got that?

Chait offers an unconvincing justification for his “evolution”: Choosing a presidential nominee is simply too important a task to be bogged down by DEI principles. But if these principles are true, why should anything be so important as to evade them? If race-based hiring and appointments are essential to achieving racial equality, shouldn’t we intensify our commitment to these practices in matters of great public import?

Chait’s absurd game of intellectual gymnastics reveals the DEI frenzy of the past half decade for what it always was: simply a mechanism for achieving left-wing results. If race-based hiring can be employed to that end, use it. If not, denounce it as “strange,” “bad faith,” and “weaponized.”

If leftists want to be taken seriously, they ought to stop proposing that their own principles be abandoned when the situation becomes too important. It’s a dead giveaway that those principles were never real in the first place. When claims of “systemic racism” inevitably make a comeback — soon, should Trump be elected; later, if not — they should be treated for what they often are: “weaponized bad faith identity politics.” And Chait is actually right about something. As he puts it, being constrained by these fake principles “is a choice, not a destiny.”