This blog reflects on the shift in tone around DEI on social media over the past few years. Where there was once confident, moralizing pressure to prioritize identity-driven outcomes, the conversation now appears more defensive. I recount a recent exchange arguing that DEI faltered not because it “wasn’t in the DNA,” but because the case against merit-based hiring failed to persuade. I conclude that organizational performance and cohesion ultimately depend on clear standards of merit rather than identity.

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Do you remember what LinkedIn looked like just three or four years ago? If you were a business owner or a manager, every other post was a lecture about the impact of systemic racism in hiring. There was a certain “swagger” to the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) movement back then; a relentless, moralizing tone that told you if you weren’t actively prioritizing identity-based outcomes over everything else, you were the problem.

At the time, questioning the logic openly was risky. There was a prevailing sense that the simple idea of hiring the best person for the job was a “tired” or even “problematic” concept. But lately, the air has gone out of the balloon. I saw and responded to a post the other day from a gentleman who has been a vocal proponent of these programs for years. But his tone wasn’t swaggering anymore. It was almost… defeated. He was lamenting that DEI had failed in most organizations because “it was never in the DNA” of the companies.

I had to stop and think about that. In the DNA? What does that actually mean? I believe what he was really saying was that the “identity police” didn’t get their way because the people actually doing the work didn’t believe in the mission hard enough. Telling his followers that they weren’t “good enough” for the utopia he promised because their companies were fundamentally flawed at a genetic level is a tired, and humiliating excuse for a policy failure.

I decided to chime in. Politely, of course, because I do not know this person. I pointed out that perhaps it wasn’t a “DNA” issue so much as the DEI advocates had failed to make their case to the public, and the public chose merit. A few years ago, saying that would have caused faux gasps of horror. You would have been branded as “out of touch” or worse. Today? The response was a pivot. He replied that DEI “wasn’t done properly” and that it “should have been about making merit accessible to everyone.”

It’s a fascinating goalpost-shift, isn’t it? When the results don’t manifest, the excuse is always that “it wasn’t the real version.” But the reality is that the version we all lived through felt very real. It felt like a push to make decisions based on everything except merit. And that’s a hard sell, because most people want to know that they earned their seat because they were the best, not because they helped a department hit a specific identity metric.

In response to that, I told him: “I think that’s where the case wasn’t made. It felt like there was a strong push to suggest we were making decisions based on something other than merit, and that argument just didn’t land for a lot of people.” In the very recent past, as a white American man, making a statement like that would have been an invitation for a public lashing. Logic wouldn’t be debated, and the standard DEI toolkit would have been deployed by quoting my “privilege” back to me, lecturing me on systemic bias, or implying that my desire for merit was merely a mask for something more sinister. It was quite common for strangers to publicly challenge the integrity rather than the argument of people who didn’t toe the line.

Yet this time, that swagger was nowhere to be found.

I think we are starting to see the “why” behind this retreat. We’ve now had several years of this experiment, and many of us have felt the side effects in our daily lives. When you interact with large organizations lately, things often feel… less organized. Less cohesive. There’s a certain lack of competence that used to be the standard. When you prioritize specific identity outcomes over the singular goal of “who is the best person to solve this problem,” the organizational glue starts to dry up. Productivity slips, and common sense and good service gets replaced by mediocrity.

The confidence of the DEI era was built on the idea that merit was a myth. But as it turns out, merit is the only thing that actually keeps the lights on and the gears turning. It’s refreshing to see the swagger disappear and a return to the grounded reality that excellence matters. We’re moving back to a world where “the best person for the job” isn’t a controversial statement anymore. And honestly? It’s about time.

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