The Biden team will be 'diverse'. That doesn't mean it will help struggling people

Joe Biden is inheriting a mess of a country. The pandemic has killed 290,000 people and threatens many more; another 853,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims last month; and stores are reporting spikes in shoplifting for food and baby formula.

If Biden has any answers for us, Americans are keen to hear it.

Related: Talk of Rahm Emanuel in Biden cabinet outrages his Chicago critics

Instead, the Biden team and its media allies have talked up one rather specific aspect of the Biden administration: diversity. Over the past few weeks, Biden has announced the White House team he wants to help lead us out of crisis. Yet instead of touting the skills of those selected or what they’ll do concretely to improve working people’s lives, we’ve been hearing about their “lived experiences”.

It started with an unlikely subject, Antony Blinken. Blinken is Biden’s nominee for secretary of state and, for what it’s worth, a white guy. A white guy who happened to support the Iraq war and played a key role lobbying his boss to do the same. A white guy who founded a “strategic advisory firm” that works with defense companies the world over. There’s not much to get excited about, right?

Not so fast. As one article put it: “Antony Blinken has two toddlers. This is good for fathers everywhere.” Well, maybe not for fathers in the Middle East – but at least we’ll finally have “a dad-rocker in the state department”. Dads of the world, unite!

Some of the other expected senior Biden positions are actually from historically oppressed groups. But these announcements seem to follow the same pattern: foreground identity to the expense of real policy.

Progressives, for example, have long argued that the Department of Homeland Security should never have been created by the George W Bush administration to begin with. But why abolish a department that makes us less safe and violates our civil liberties when you can just put a person of color in charge of it?

When the Biden team announced that Alejandro Mayorkas had been picked to do just that, they cut to the chase. Instead of explaining their plans to remedy some of the horrors of American immigration policy, the Biden team reminded us that “Mayorkas will be the first Latino and immigrant nominated to serve as DHS secretary”.

Just one minute later came the breaking news that “Avril Haines will be nominated to serve as national intelligence director, which would make her the first woman to lead the intelligence community”. Haines was deputy CIA director and one of the primary architects of Obama’s drone program. When out of public service, she found time to defend torture and work for both Palantir and Blinken’s firm. All that and Haines is “a bookstore owner/community activist”.

On 30 November, Politico reported that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was putting pressure on the Biden administration. They weren’t pushing him to take stronger action on black unemployment, poverty, or the scourge of mass incarceration – they wanted a black secretary of defense. The campaign seemed to be working. “At the end of the day I would say that it’s going to be hard for Biden not to pick the first female secretary of defense, but Jeh Johnson would be the first Black secretary of defense and there are a lot of white faces,” a former senior defense official told Politico.

It wasn’t Johnson, but on Tuesday Biden announced that Lloyd Austin was his pick. Lloyd Austin is African American and has served 41 years in the military. His appointment, and those of other former army brass, has alarmed those concerned about the decline of civil control of the military. Also alarming is the fact that last year alone Austin earned more than $350,000 for serving on the board of directors of the military contractor Raytheon.

What the CBC thinks about all of this is not clear. Their sole interest seems to be about Austin’s racial identity.

At the same time, others were celebrating Biden’s selection of an all-female senior communications staff and the appointment of Neera Tanden as budget director. Sure, Tanden is a woman and south Asian; she’s also someone who’s advocated cuts to social security and the looting of Libyan oil to pay for the US bombing of Libya.

Some picks are better than others. Janet Yellen, for example, is a center-left economist who, as Ryan Grim notes, has a mixed record but seems to be a genuine step up from Obama-era appointments like Tim Geithner. When announcing Yellen, though, Biden didn’t mention her Keynesian background or any of her academic work about full employment. But he did joke that he “might have to ask Lin-Manuel Miranda to write another musical about the first woman secretary of the Treasury”.

If it’s not clear, I’m not thrilled about these appointments, but beyond their substance, it’s very telling how they were rolled out. The Democrats are continuing their steady rebrand from the party of FDR’s New Deal and economic redistribution to the party of diversity and cultural posturing.

Racial minorities, women and LGBT people better like what they see, because that’s all they’ll get. Would any of the establishment figures touting the incoming White House’s composition tell a recently laid-off white person not to worry, because a member of “their community” will be in the Biden administration? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. Yet the minority base of the Democratic party is expected to subsist off scraps of representation.

It’s a PR trick no different than that one we’ve been recently seeing in corporate America, where your boss will ask you read White Fragility and contemplate your privilege before laying you off. Or where a listing like Nasdaq doesn’t care what unethical stuff you have to do to make money, as long as you’re doing it with a diverse board of directors.

Related: Susan Rice tapped for top domestic policy role in Biden administration

This vague touting of backgrounds isn’t just irrelevant to most of our lives, it distracts us from how simple the policy solutions to the crises facing poor and working-class Americans are. If people don’t have healthcare, we can give them comprehensive healthcare through Medicare for All. If they’re struggling financially to raise children, we can provide them with free childcare and universal pre-K. If they’re dealing with housing insecurity, we can expand section 8 vouchers and build affordable housing units. If they don’t have good-paying jobs, we can sturdy up the union movement and create guarantees of public employment.

But instead of Democratic leaders actually nourishing the tired, poor and huddled masses with a robust welfare state, we’re told to eat diversity instead.

• Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality