Conservatives say DEI replaced the meritocracy. But such a …

Conservatives say DEI replaced the meritocracy.
But such a statement is impossible to compute for people who think that merit is based on your intersectional ranking.
The more intersectional boxes you check, the more merit you have, and therefore DESERVE to be put in lucrative positions.
Whether or not you are qualified for the position is completely irrelevant from that perspective.
It's not that the left is against the meritocracy, it just has a very different idea of what merit is.
When conservatives talk about merit they mean competence, when liberals talk about merit they mean a position in the intersectional hierarchy.
The idea of competence is outright offensive to them. Competence has the white-supremacist, patriarchal, misogynistic tendency to push white men into lucrative positions.
And that can't be right.