Joe Biden will be inaugurated as America’s 46th president next week and, in case you have not heard by now, he is set to have the most diverse administration in American history. Mr Biden’s cabinet will have more women than any before it. And it will have as many non-whites as Barack Obama’s did, tying them for second place just behind Bill Clinton’s. Deb Haaland will be the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. More junior ranks of the incoming administration will be diverse (which is shorthand for not white and not male) too. The Biden-Harris transition team announced with some glee that 60% of the first 100 or so White House employees are women and 54% are non-white. Mr Biden has already let it be known that if he gets to make a Supreme Court pick, he will choose an African-American woman.
All of which invites a question: is prizing diversity for its own sake, and putting so much emphasis on a candidate’s race and gender, a good way to go about staffing such an important organisation? Were Mr Biden running a company, the answer would be: probably not. However, the federal government is not like a company.
To do the governing part, Mr Biden needs to manage divisions within the various factions of the Democratic Party. The Democratic divide that gets the most attention is the one between the party’s left wing, occupied by people like Bernie Sanders, and the mushy centre, which is Mr Biden’s ideological constituency. But that’s not the party’s most important divide, at least when it comes to doling out jobs that come with power attached. In both the administration and in the House of Representatives, achieving the right mix of Hispanics, African-Americans, whites, men and women—so that all the constituent parts of the Democratic coalition feel they are having their say—matters more. (The Senate is different. It still has a rather Japanese culture built around seniority.)
Putting diversity ahead of ideology has interesting consequences for a centrist like Mr Biden. Take the nomination of Lloyd Austin, a retired general and board member of Raytheon. Ordinarily you might have expected a backlash from the party’s left wing, which does not much like the revolving door between the federal government and large defence contractors, and worries about keeping civil-military relations tilted towards the civil end of the hyphen. Yet because Mr Austin is African-American, and will be the first black person to hold this job in American history, the criticism from the Democratic left was muted.
Because the Democratic Party places so much value on diversity, being non-white and/or female can work as a kind of ideological body armour that saves the wearer from friendly fire. This in turn means that the incoming president has been able to pick a team that is more centrist than would otherwise be the case. It helps that African-Americans, to whom Mr Biden owed his victory in the primary, tend to be a moderating force in the party, anchoring Democrats in the ideological centre now in the way that organised labour once did.
Conservatives looking at the process might lament the outbreak of woke, diverse nonsense as an organising principle of the incoming administration, but might also be pleasantly surprised that there are no Democratic socialists anywhere near the levers of executive power. Yet those two things are closely related.
This might be pushing the argument too far, but I sometimes wonder whether diversity, a notion conservatives are meant to loathe, is on its way to becoming a conservative idea. Pretty much all of America’s large companies have embraced it as a core principle in their hiring and promoting, suggesting it is hardly a radical notion. In politics, conservatives have often been concerned with the problem of how to establish order. When a country is as diverse as America, it is hard to see how government retains the consent of the governed, a necessary ingredient in that order, if it looks completely different from the country it is governing. In a place as diverse as America, a diverse government ought to be a stabilising, moderating force.
I almost managed to get through this whole newsletter without mentioning the riot at the Capitol or the intensification of the Republican Party’s civil war. We have coverage of both in this week’s issue, along with thoughts on Texas’s legislature, minor-league baseball, Chicago’s elevated murder rate and the conflict between social-media companies and civil libertarians.
As ever, please send your thoughts on those things, or any other aspect of our coverage to jprideaux@economist.com. I read them all. | 
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