The Embarrassments of Ideology

https://amgreatness.com/2025/11/20/the-embarrassments-of-ideology/

Rigid ideologies like DEI, climate dogma, and anti-Trump obsession keep collapsing under their own contradictions, leaving their loudest champions looking increasingly absurd.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is a euphemism for a rigid racialist theology.

It deductively postulates that a large percentage of the population is oppressed by racism and sexism, mostly by white males.

DEI makes no allowance for the class or wealth of the alleged victims or their supposed victimizers.

So once that rigid party line is set, it cannot account for tens of millions of affluent and privileged non-white Americans or like numbers of poor and non-privileged whites.

Absurdities and ridicule must then follow.

One example is the spectacle of former First Lady Michelle Obama on her current book tour.

Mrs. Obama cannot finish an interview without whining about the racism she allegedly encountered as the once most influential and powerful woman in the United States.

According to Michelle, she was not given the exemptions that other white first ladies received.

She did not get enough free stuff for the First Family.

She had to hire three stylists daily to straighten her hair to meet “white” expectations—as if also Asians and Hispanics do not have straight hair, or many whites do not have hard-to-comb curly hair.

Indeed, she now claims blacks cannot even swim because of white-induced pressures to maintain dry and straight hair.

Because her DEI creed ignores class and wealth, Michelle has no idea how absurd she sounds.

She and husband Barack Obama own three estates in addition to their former Chicago home, together valued somewhere around $40 million.

Their net worth is estimated at between $70 and $100 million. They fly private, surrounded by a throng of Secret Service guardians.

The more Michelle clings to the fossilized dogma of unchanging racial victimization, the more she becomes ridiculous or offensive.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is another rigid ideology that deductively mandates that Trump is evil and thus must be exposed as such by any means necessary.

Sometimes, such Pavlovian hatred so blinds the left to evidence that it becomes oblivious to its own suicidal choices.

Take the “Epstein files.”

For four years, the Biden administration had no desire to release any names that appeared in the thousands of the infamous Jeffrey Epstein’s emails and text messages under its control.

To the extent that Trump’s name leaked out of the files, most had agreed on the mostly innocuous circumstances of the references.

There was not just a lack of evidence that Trump was ever entrapped by the spider-like Epstein’s blackmail webs.

In fact, eventually, Trump ostracized Epstein well before he was convicted and jailed.

Had he been compromised, the Democrats—who raided the Trump home, tried to de-ballot him, and used lawfare to drag him into five different local, state, and federal courtrooms—would have released the files in a nanosecond.

So when Trump continued the prior Biden policy of keeping the files private, the left mindlessly shouted that the hated Trump must be hiding his own culpability.

They shrilly demanded that he release all the files—without a second thought about the reasons why their fellow Democrats had previously kept them private.

So a compliant but cagey Trump has begun releasing the trove of documents.

The evidence does not reveal any new Trump bombshells. Instead, there are lots of new references to the Democrats, like the former Harvard President Larry Summers.

A Democratic member of Congress, Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, is exposed in the files as a partisan, compliant tool of the predator Epstein.

In her hatred of Trump, the files show Plaskett texting for live prompts from the odious Epstein as he tutors her on how best to coax a congressional witness to demonize none other than Donald Trump.

Was there not a single cool Democratic head who could have seen where the party’s obsessions with Trump were headed?

Similarly, Democrats embrace climate-change orthodoxy—regardless of the obvious contradictions and paradoxes that follow.

Climate change religion exposes Democratic grandees like the shore-residing Obamas, the jet-setting Al Gore and John Kerry, and the multi-estate-owning Nancy Pelosi.

All fly on private jets. They heat and cool with fossil fuels their various energy-guzzling huge homes—while demanding hoi polloi turn down their air conditioners or give up their diesel pickups.

But even green guru billionaire Bill Gates has become conflicted and a climate apostate. Why?

Wind and solar “renewables” will never supply left-wing techies like Gates the additional 100 gigawatts of electrical generation per year that they need to fulfill their lucrative artificial intelligence dreams.

Nor does climate orthodoxy make allowances for vastly more U.S. oil and gas production to supply a left-wing, but energy-short Europe, or to flood the world with cheap energy to bankrupt Putin’s oil and gas exporting Russia.

The problem with a party line is that it is deductive, not inductive.

Ideology makes facts fit dogmas, rather than evidence leading empirically to conclusions.

So inflexible cults like climate-change orthodoxy, DEI, and Trump Derangement Syndrome make their adherents look utterly ridiculous.

By Victor Davis Hanson

November 20, 2025