You may recall that I gave Harvard undergraduate Sandra Y.L. Korn an Error Has No Rights Award for her column demanding the end of academic freedom at Harvard when the exercise of that freedom aids and abets “oppression” — defined, of course, by whatever offends the progressive sensibilities of Miss Sandra Y.L. Korn (“racism, sexism, and heterosexism”). Some of you complained that I shouldn’t take crazy things college students say as typical of a broader progressive mindset.

But in his column today, Harvard alumnus Ross Douthat points out that Korn really is, in fact, typical of a broader progressive mindset — one that, unlike Korn, lies to itself about what it really believes. Excerpt:

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

Douthat goes on to say that as a pluralist, he can respect progressive institutions that believe in a certain vision of the good, even if it excludes people like him. But he finds it hard to respect institutions that deny that they are doing what they obviously are doing — e.g., post-Eich Mozilla claiming that they are open to all ideas, fully embracing of diversity, etc. Says Douthat:

I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

Amen to that. This is precisely the kind of lying, and self-deception, on which the Law Of Merited Impossibility depends. They lie (even to themselves) about what progressivism intends to do to those who don’t share its goals, and then when progressivism in power behaves illiberally toward its opponents, it claims that those opponents had it coming all along. There are true liberals on the left, I concede (e.g., our own Franklin Evans). But mostly, I think they can be divided into two camps: Those who, like Korn, are on the “had it coming all along” side, and those who have not yet admitted to themselves that this is what they believe, despite their rhetoric.

I mean, look: when institutions, both corporate and academic, claim to value diversity, check to see if they make any attempt to achieve ideological or religious diversity in their ranks. I’ve known this diversity thing was a racket since getting into it with the diversity director at a newspaper I used to work for. She was mighty proud of the company’s commitment to diversity. I pointed out that we did, in fact, have a diverse workforce, if by “diverse” you meant sex, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. But judging by a metric of point of view — something you would think should matter to a newspaper, whose mission involves reporting on the world as it is, not as they would like it to be — we were hopelessly non-diverse. We had in that readership market, for example, a significant number of Pentecostals. Far as I could tell, the only Pentecostals in our newsroom were the black female secretaries.

Newspaper management routinely agonizes over the relative lack of racial minorities in the journalism business. Here, for example, is a press release announcing the 2013 American Society of Newspaper Editors’ annual census of newsrooms, which once again found out that the proportion of minorities in newsrooms doesn’t match that in society at large. Handwringing all around!:

ASNE’s goal is to have the percentage of minorities working in newsrooms nationwide to reflect the percentage of minorities in the nation’s population by 2025. Currently, minorities make up 37.02 percent of the U.S. population; that number will increase to 42.39 percent by 2025, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“It’s terribly disappointing to learn that diversity in newsrooms remains stagnant despite the rapidly changing landscape of America,” said Karen Magnuson, editor and vice president/news at the Democrat and Chronicle Media Group, Rochester, and co-chair of the ASNE Diversity Committee. “If we are to accurately reflect and authentically cover the communities we serve, we must do much better as an industry or we risk becoming irrelevant to news consumers of the future.”

This is a perfect example of how the journalism managerial class lies to itself in the way Douthat identifies. If they really believed this “accurately reflect and authentically cover the communities we serve” business, they would work to identify and hire at least some conservatives and people of faith. But they don’t, because they really don’t care about these demographic groups. Some people are more diverse than others.

According to Pew studies, the relative percentages of newspaper readers by ethnicity has remained fairly constant, even as the overall number of newspaper readers has steeply declined. What’s interesting to me is that Pew doesn’t measure newspaper readership by political or religious orientation. How many conservatives read the newspaper every day? How many people who consider themselves religious believers? If it were important to the managerial class in journalism, they would want to know, so they could direct their newsroom diversity efforts toward creating a newsroom that — try to say this without snickering — “looks like America.” But they don’t want to know the answer, because they don’t really believe in diversity. They want the moralistic comfort of telling themselves that they believe in diversity, without having to actually practice it when it makes them uncomfortable. They are practitioners of Moralistic Therapeutic Diversity.

Like Douthat says, when it comes to my profession, I can live with the progressivism; it’s the lying that gets toxic.

UPDATE: Has a white liberal diversocratic manager ever resigned from his job for the sake of social justice — that is, to enable the hiring of someone more Diverse than himself? The diversity credo of white liberals in management is a gloss on Gen. George S. Patton’s acid remark on dying for one’s country. I give you the Patton Principle of Diversocratic Workplace Warfare:

No white liberal managerial bastard ever achieved diversity by giving up his own job. He achieved diversity by denying some other poor, dumb insufficiently diverse bastard a job.