I point to them as the worst thing that has happened to America in terms of public comity in the past few years, on multiple fronts.
They caused police departments to go more lightly on dangerous areas and avoid ambiguous situations, resulting in more deaths of black people.
It established the precedent that liberals, especially black people, did not need to adhere to Covid masking protocols if they felt they had something more important. This in turn made masking performative for liberals, a way they could show publicly and announce frequently that they were doing it more correctly and cared more than others, regardless of what they were doing in less-observed situations or politically high-profile ones. This increased the sense among conservatives that they were betraying their beliefs - just a little at first, but more strongly as time went on - if they followed protocols or accepted any government advice whatsoever. It became a badge of honor to reject the advice of experts (always in quotes) and sneer that such things could not possibly be true.
It disabled, at least temporarily, much of the meritocratic argument in education, especially higher education. Those may recover simply because gravity continues to work, but there are plenty of examples of countries where bad ideas held on for decades because opposing them was dangerous. For the moment, DEI is ascendant there. The reason we hear about this disproportionately is because these are people who can think and express themselves, so they find platforms. There was a time in the not-too-distant past where you could go to Maggie's or Instapundit and find fresh examples of foolishness in colleges every day. Sure, there are a lot of colleges in America, each with many departments, but every day is um, rather frequent.
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I don't think the riots had much to do with the death of meritocracy in higher education. DEI was already ascendent before they started, though the suspension of ACT and SAT testing during COVID did accelerate their replacement by more subjective admission criteria (though there seems to be a retrenchment as colleges figure out how to use test scores as workarounds to the racial quota ban.) Charles Murray pointed out in Facing Reality that the differential between white and black student's scores on standardized tests stopped closing in the 1980s. I recently read an article that noted while the proportion of black judges is now equal to percentage of the black population in the US, the number of black lawyers is less than half what it should be based on population statistics.
Given that higher education is a credentialing mechanism more than an educating one, I don't expect this to change. The cumulative class sizes at the Ivy+ are small enough that sufficient black students can be found for admission, even if most don't do particularly well (though this has the effect of stratifying class rank by race to the benefit of white students who aren't as qualified as Asian students.) There is now some evidence that motivated students of all races are abandoning the direct to college track for more secure and better paying jobs in skilled trades with plans for obtaining a degree in the future (see this excerpt of a WSJ article at Powerline.}
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