DEI’s Die-Hards Still Don’t Get It

‘W hen does he bring back segregated water fountains?” So asked John Harwood, formerly of the New York Times, NBC, CNN, and elsewhere, when informed that President Trump had decided to shut down the federal government’s sprawling archipelago of DEI initiatives. Through the screen, one could almost feel the self-satisfaction. Tweet sent. Box ticked. Virtuous credentials reacquired for the week.

That sort of reaction to criticisms of DEI or affirmative action is typical within a certain corner of elite culture. Nevertheless, it is extremely silly — akin in its triteness and naïvety to that of those who believe the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea must be a democratic people’s republic because those words are included in its name. Certainly, in a vacuum, “diversity” is a nice enough word. So, too, “equality” and “inclusion.” But, as in Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Peace deals with war and the Ministry of Truth with lies, what matters more than the labels is what those who wield them ultimately wish to do with the power they seek. And what those people have done, lo these many years, is establish a network of vicious, illiberal, harshly ideological institutions, whose sole purpose has been to bastardize the quotidian language of the American republic and to impress the warped results into the service of a narrow, intolerant, and censorious form of political progressivism. In practice, diversity, equity, and inclusion has not been diverse, equitable, or inclusive, but uniform, prejudiced, and clannish. Worse still, thanks to its unquenchable obsession with immutable characteristics, it has taken America further away from — not closer to — the core ideas adumbrated in the Declaration of Independence. It is, I will grant, unlikely that any of the architects of DEI desire to restore “segregated water fountains.” And yet, as a matter of unlovely habit, they have proved far more likely to defend segregating people by race than have their classically liberal critics. For their apologists to accuse those who wish to dismantle DEI and affirmative action of being obsessed with dividing people into groups is like accusing Carrie Nation of being a lush: It is about as wrong as one can possibly get before one falls off the edge of the map. Segregation? Sorry, buddy, but that’s the other guys’ jam.

Many topics within our politics are complicated. This one is not. One can either have a legally color-blind society in which we are regarded as equal by the government, or one can have DEI, affirmative action, privilege hierarchies, and the rest. And, in America, it is the former course that is guaranteed. The Declaration insists that “all men are created equal.” The 14th Amendment mandates “the equal protection of the laws.” The Civil Right Act prohibits “discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.” Railing against the failure to uphold his ideals in 1896, Justice Harlan noted trenchantly that, “in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” that “there is no caste here,” and that “our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” More than a century later, Justice John Roberts explained simply that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” One either believes this, or one does not — and, if one does, one can allow no “but” to qualify the affirmation. There is no such thing as good racial discrimination, or salutary legal segregation, or the friendly imposition of caste. If one desires to treat people equally, one must treat people equally and leave it at that.

Donald Trump’s executive order self-evidently pursues that end. By its own terms, it seeks to end the use of “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences”; to “terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements”; and to “enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws.” In this respect, it is the natural heir to the extremely popular Supreme Court decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which in 2023 finally outlawed the consideration of race in college admissions. If Trump’s order is respected, it will lead to less consideration of race in the law, create fewer classes of citizens in the government’s imagination, and reduce the scope for discrimination of all kinds. To look at this development and be reminded of the degradations of the Jim Crow era is so bizarre as to warrant a straitjacket. You’re on the other side of the divide, John — the one that stands against the egalitarian model. Own it.