DEI Dies with a Whimper

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 23, 2025

 

Donald Trump declared his own inauguration America’s “liberation day.” Among Republicans and Trump-backing independents, it surely was. But it’s reasonable to assume that the American Left had no interest in being liberated from its own policies — most of them, anyway. It is, however, harder to say that when it comes to Trump’s promise to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Insofar as that description applies to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, early indications suggest that mainstream Democrats welcome their emancipation.

 

As our editorial today details, Trump’s executive orders “restoring merit-based opportunity,” shuttering wasteful DEI offices within the executive branch, repealing programs that imposed “affirmative action” on private firms holding government contracts, and doing away with “equity”-based compliance initiatives are both sweeping and salutary. And yet, despite their formerly zealous commitment to the tenets of DEI, Democrats are having a surprisingly muted reaction to this multipronged assault on the citadels of self-righteousness within the federal government.

 

Earlier this week, USA Today attempted to showcase the ways in which Democrats are “fighting back” against Trump’s attack on the DEI worldview. The paper couldn’t come up with much. “More than 30 state elected Democratic officials from around the country signed a letter to Trump, pledging to protect DEI,” its dispatch read. As of today, that open letter has attracted nearly 40 signatures from state-level lawmakers — hardly an impressive showing among America’s 7,386 total state legislators. That measly turnout may be attributable to the diminished purchase that DEI’s faith-based initiatives enjoy among not just Americans broadly but Democrats, too.

 

“In terms of our economy, companies that prioritize diversity outperform those that do not by 36%,” the lawmakers’ letter read. “This leads to higher levels of innovation and better decision making about 87% of the time.” This bizarre nonsense is not rendered any more authoritative by the marshaling of specific and authoritative percentages. (If the alternative to “better decision making” as observed by DEI activists is “non-inclusive decision making,” we’re not discussing replicable social science.)

 

Since early 2023, DEI has been in retreat from the position of prominence it once enjoyed in corporate America. The trend only intensified over the course of the election year, and it wasn’t because companies wished to sacrifice efficiency and profits. Rather, DEI itself became an extortion racket in which private entities felt compelled to ensconce well-placed “equity” advocates in makeshift sinecures to appease the activists who would otherwise take aim at their bottom lines.

 

It’s as though America’s boardrooms suddenly were overrun with born-again Republicans (although Silicon Valley’s theatrically obsequious pivot might fool you). The only thing that changed was that corporate America crafted for itself a permission structure to return to the best practices that DEI activists had forced it to briefly abandon.

 

“Companies spend an average of $8 billion annually on DEI training, according to the Harvard Kennedy School, but shareholders and board members often question the return on investment,” CNBC reported in November. The activist lawmakers have the sequence of events precisely backward. DEI never made business sense. It was a drag on returns but a necessary one if the gun to the head of America’s C-suite executives was going to stay cold. That submission to a menacing network of racketeers just isn’t necessary anymore.

 

“DEI initiatives make academic sectors more representative and competitive by expanding opportunities for advanced degrees,” the letter’s authors continue. “DEI also makes our country’s healthcare better, to ensure that because disease does not discriminate, our treatments and cures should not either.”

 

Once again, the DEI activist class will struggle to support these assertions. Programmatic equity doesn’t produce excellence in education; it seeks to dumb education down with racialized math and grammar programs. It prescribes ending the “apartheid” system in which high-performing students attend high-performance schools, ditching the standardized testing on which those schools rely, or eliminating selective schools altogether. It has led college administrators to attempt to do away with objective metrics for success, like grading — not because grades are inherently unfair but because the demographic ideal to which DEI activists are committed is incompatible with the objective benchmarks that gauge relative merit.

 

And it’s more than a little unwise to suggest that DEI initiatives make “our country’s healthcare better.” DEI’s proponents in health care took that outlook to its logical conclusion during the pandemic, which represented an excellent opportunity to impose misery and hardship on those who were born into the wrong — meaning white — bodies. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer,” said University of Pennsylvania ethicist Harald Schmidt in a 2020 interview with the New York Times in which he ghoulishly mused on the problem of too many old white people in this country. “Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

 

The activist set, which included the Biden administration, toyed with implementing a Covid-vaccine distribution schedule that marginalized the majority of Americans — just to even the cosmic racial scales. The Biden team dropped that idea, but they weren’t above violating the Constitution by implementing racially preferential policies in other realms. It’s no wonder that Democrats and their allies in seemingly every sector of American life are sloughing off this burdensome paradigm, if only to avoid the traps it insists its followers throw themselves into.

 

This is not to say there are no dissenters to Trump’s anti-DEI program. On Thursday, the New York Times cast a spotlight on the “fear and confusion” that corporate America is experiencing today in response to the equity backlash. But “corporate leaders” didn’t provide that quote. You know who did? The “executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at N.Y.U. Law.” Indeed, what the piece lacks in evidence of anxiety among the most productive members of American society it more than makes up for in hand-wringing from professors, lawyers, and compliance advocates.

 

We might expect “fear and confusion” from elements of American society whose stature and livelihoods depend on this discriminatory worldview and the shakedowns on which it once thrived.

 

Trump’s penchant for hyperbole and self-aggrandizing superlatives can sometimes get in the way of the point he’s attempting to make. The president had ample evidence to declare his inauguration a day of “liberation,” but the credit is not his alone. The American people are the authors of their own freedom from DEI’s tyrannical and atavistic policy prescriptions.