I've devised a term, MRF, to refer to a social policy which I believe is an improved successor to DEI. It has somewhat similar goals, but is designed to be less toxic or controversarial, in actual practice, and therefore has the potential to win the support of a higher percentage of society. It might help lead to a more stable democracy precisely *because* it is harder to hate and demonize than DEI. It should be harder for adversarial propagandists to falsely weaponize when trying to influence the majority of US voters into voting for self-sabotaging ends.
My acronym MRF stands for these critical elements:
- Meritocracy
- Reality: We anchor ourselves always to the *actual* reality of the world, to physical facts, and the ground truth, despite any subjective opinion or personal tastes, or private/nearterm "tribal" interest.
- Fairness: We strive to treat everyone equally as a basic curtesy, out of compassion, and therefore we institute no planned discrimination against any individual based solely on their ethnicity, skin color, gender, or sexuality. Note that these protections *do* include (but are not limited to) people who are white, male, or hetero. This last point is important to satisfy critics (and victims) of DEI programs.
These core principles can be viewed as the 3 corners of a triangle: each needed, each dependent on the others, and self-reinforcing.