Darren Gee: A Golden Age for American Meritocracy

The inauguration of the 47th President of the United States was a moment that occupied the wild fantasies of millions of Trump supporters since November 2020, when Joe Biden was declared victorious and Trump’s political fortunes had seemingly run dry. All would testify to the surreal spectacle of when fantasy became reality this week, as Donald J. Trump was received by the current President, his Vice President, three former Presidents, the Supreme Court Justices and four of the five wealthiest people on Earth, and took the oath to return to the Presidency.

All present within the US Capitol Rotunda were treated with Trump’s triumphant inaugural speech – an unyielding rebuke of Democrat policies, proposing a scorched-earth path out of the nation’s progressive slump. By vowing to end the federal Government’s efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life” via diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, Trump firmly re-asserted meritocracy as the basis for the nation’s revival. In his shrewd way, Trump fittingly attacked discrimination on the basis of race by channelling Martin Luther King Jr. on his own dedicated public holiday: “We will forge a society that is colour-blind and merit-based.” This sentiment effectively formalised the growing doubts relating to DEI and identity politics in general. Those who formerly cherished and funded (at great expense) race and gender-based DEI programmes have begun to reverse such policies, either in anticipation of the new administration or in recognition of the fact that they are wrong or simply do not work. A growing body of evidence suggests that DEI actually contributes to more racial divisions, whilst elite strongholds of DEI practice – education and journalism – are showing signs of DEI-fatigue. On his very first day in office, President Trump rescinded a litany of Former President Biden’s executive orders made between Jan 21st 2021 and Jan 16th 2025 (no less than 78 to my count), claiming the “injection of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy”.

The format of the succession ceremony ensured that Trump’s opponents, of whom many were admirably present, were confronted with their failures in an unambiguous manner – the likes of which they had to varying degrees been hitherto shielded from. And, if they hadn’t already, many would have been considering how it all went so wrong that Trump’s once-deemed-extreme policies were now receiving standing ovations in the nation’s capital once again. Months on, the corpse has been exhaustively autopsied. Yet the outcome of the 2024 US election continues to have the effect of a Rorschach test on many who are attempting to diagnose how their candidate’s campaign either spectacularly succeeded or ended with an awkward whimper. Defensive campaign advisors for Kamala Harris have perceptively blamed Trump for their loss, while other senior staffers have admitted shortcomings in their ‘cultural strategy’. Expectedly, tone-deaf allegations of sexism, racism and fascism continue to be offered as explanations for Trump’s ‘dirty’ victory and Kamala’s tragic loss.

The Inauthenticity of DEI

An unshakable distrust accompanied Kamala Harris throughout the campaign. Widely stated claims that she was a ‘DEI hire’ were apparently confirmed by her lack of experience and expertise, woefully present in her carefully curated public appearances as Vice President and subsequently as Democratic Presidential nominee. Due to the inherent claim that certain identity characteristics are the primary determinant of social circumstance, DEI is diametrically opposed to meritocracy. It has the potential for profound harm to those of non-white and non-male backgrounds whose genuine talents, skills and merit may be overshadowed by the enduring suspicion that they have been selected simply to satisfy a quota, or to meet some requirement for minority representation.

This distrust is therefore a healthy one – one that is fundamental to the American socio-cultural fabric, but easily disfigured by the effects of DEI. The late cultural critic and jazz historian Stanley Crouch once observed that while there were lingering doubts about Barack Obama’s “authenticity”, there were absolutely no doubts about 50 Cent’s authenticity. Said just before Obama’s historic victory in 2008, Crouch was alluding to a theme he explored for much of his life – the uniquely American role of authenticity at play in the nation’s political culture, and how it has energised the republic for centuries.

Harris, virtually since her ascendancy to Vice President in the 2020 election, has faced accusations of shifting from once-woke opinions to views more ‘acceptable’ to the American public. Glitzy celebrity endorsements (resembling grand award ceremonies in some cases) were not enough to stem the enduring perception that Harris was hiding her true colours. By receiving an unambiguously vast outpouring of support from an industry essentially based on fiction, performativity and deception, Harris revealingly chose apt companions in Hollywood. Her viral ventriloquising of various ethnic speech patterns showed a brazen yet doomed attempt to ‘relate’. In switching on her ‘ebonics‘, Harris brought further attention upon the fact that she is of mixed ethnic heritage – her father African American and her mother of Indian extraction. Yet almost universally, Harris was perceived as black (a black woman by many – which of course scores well in the intersectional calculus). Harris conceded her preferred racial identity in these Cornel West-esque tirades, though not at any point did she also elect to roleplay an Indian-twanged orator in an attempt to better ‘relate’. In 1997 Tiger Woods was simultaneously referred to as the first African American and first Asian American to win the Masters Tournament. There was little effort made by the media or public to profess their preferred racial dimension of Woods, and Woods himself remained admirably uninterested in ethnic allegiance. This is a nuance that has mostly escaped the media’s conception of Kamala Harris, illustrating the sanity-draining effect of ‘woke’ identity politics in recent decades.

2025 – The End of Identity Politics?

As a form of tribalism wholly divorced from traditional human tribal life, race-based identity politics in modern democratic systems serves to herd voters of the same professed or imposed ilk toward a single candidate (or his or her running mate). This is accentuated by the American two-party system (and, again, increasingly so in the ‘multi-culti’ UK), which tends to sharply divide the ethnic vote into supporting the party for ‘racial justice’ and opposing the other party, cast as the enemy of this ‘justice’.

Logically then, straying from this leads to the accusation of racial treachery and expulsion practices similar to those meted out for religious apostasy. Frequently referred to as ‘sell-outs’, those who vote on any basis other than racial and ethnic loyalty are seen to be cynically pursuing self-enrichment or afflicted by an unconscious self-hatred. Coconuts, Oreos and Bountys, depending on one’s sweet tooth, are those who have shunned their ‘true’ racial identity to become a vessel for an ever-seductive ‘whiteness’, which somehow spreads itself successfully by near-perfect stealth, persisting as a spectral presence in ‘the system’. Unconscious as they are unevidenced, the pseudo-scientific claims of ‘internalised racism’ – or ‘internalised misogyny‘ in the case of gender politics – are unsheathed and deployed without hesitation.


Donald Trump, with the exception of black women, has received a gradual term-on-term increase in vote share from all racial minority categories in every election he has stood: 2016 to 2020 to 2024. Additionally, CNN’s exit poll reports a term-on-term increase in vote share from ‘voters of colour’, with or without a college degree. So, either racial minorities in the United States are becoming increasingly infected with the pathogenic power of ‘whiteness’, or they are ditching woke identity politics in search of something else. The Democrats’ steadfast pleading for the minority vote has grown stale and artificial. Now culminating in the hallucinatory claim that Trump is channelling Hitler (or a seemingly unending list of 20th century despots), the pitiful desperation Democrats have lowered themselves to has exposed them as profoundly detached from the prevailing mood across the United States. With the reality of a demographically shifting populous, the Democrats – and all Western politicians by extension – can no longer seek to flatter minorities by employing such contrived, essentialist and circumscribed conceptions of them. Despite innumerable accusations of divisiveness, Trump has built a true rainbow coalition and is now reaping the rewards of his own anti-woke brand of inclusion.

Darren Gee is London-born and based writer and cultural critic. Follow him on Substack.