Diversity in theory and diversity in practice

There is an editorial in The Nation this morning, How Immigrants Have Changed the Democratic Party illustrating how easy it is for wires to cross.

Reading the headline, I thought that that was an interesting take. One of the striking things in the past year has been both the contrast in diversity between the Democrats (two old white women, one old white male self-declared socialist, and one young white male) with the diversity of the Republican field (one older white male married with an Hispanic American family, two young Hispanics, two Asian Americans, one older white male married to an Asian American, one white female, one black male, etc.). I have not seen this irony much remarked on, or remarked on at all. Democrats appear to be intellectually committed to the theory of diversity but Republicans appear to be actually living diversity in a remarkably thorough way.

So reading the headline, I interpreted it to mean that there was actually a hidden tier of local rising Democrat leadership that is minority and immigrant that had been overlooked. I was unaware of such rising talent and thought that might be interesting and clicked on over. Instead, the body of the editorial is about how the status of illegal immigrants has become a more critical issue for Democrats from a political campaigning perspective. I think the headline to the editorial would more accurately be something like "Immigrant Issues Drive Democratic Party Campaign" or something like that.

Just one of those communication mix-ups but perhaps it augers that commentators will at some point begin to hypothesize about why Republicans seem to be so assimilationist and accommodating of racial, religious and cultural diversity while such diversity seems to be so absent from the leadership of the Democratic party. A puzzling conundrum in some ways though with a ready, but not particularly kind, explanation.