JAMES PIERESON: Is this the end of the DEI regime?

The “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” regime originated and expanded mostly through executive and judicial power, not by legislative action or electoral mandate. It was never popular: on the few occasions in which voters had a say, the preference regime always lost, which is why advocates typically dialed things back whenever elections were near. There is an irony in the fact that President Trump is attacking the regime by the same means used to institute it: by using his control over the federal bureaucracy and federal spending to stamp it out. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

If Trump can keep the pressure on for four years, or especially if his successors can do so for another four or eight years, then advocates will find it difficult to recreate the regime if and when they regain power. After all, it took them decades to build it up, but it took Trump but a few days to bulldoze it to the ground. By that time, perhaps four or eight years hence, advocates will be out of their jobs and scattered to the four winds, their groups dormant or out of money, and their consulting companies and interest groups bankrupt and drained of funds. When the try to reconstruct the regime at some point in the future, they will have to reckon with the reality that the next Republican administration will once again knock it down with Trump-like executive orders. At that point, everyone may conclude that, after six decades, the old regime is dead once and for all.

It is a good question why opinions about the DEI regime changed so radically in recent years, when up to now corporate leaders and Republican presidents were willing to go along with it, up to a point, while ignoring conservative writers who had built a strong case against it. Republican presidents prior to Trump never made serious efforts to eliminate the diversity regime. Many point out that it originated in the first place under the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. There is little question now that Trump and his advisors view the DEI regime as hostile to their domestic agenda, perhaps as one of the pillars of the administrative state, and as an expensive operation to boot.

In the wake of the George Floyd episode in 2020 and the hysteria it induced around the country regarding race and diversity, advocates went too far in pushing the movement in an increasingly radical direction. They scrapped the concept of diversity in favor of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” an ideological construct that took the movement far beyond ideals of equal opportunity and fair-hiring practices. They imposed ridiculous pronoun rules on employees under their supervision (rules now banned in the federal government by a new executive order). The regime’s transgender advocates insisted that men “transitioning” to women should be allowed to play on female athletic teams. Advocates embraced a new ideological doctrine of DEI from The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which declared that the United States was founded on the basis of racism and slavery, with those original sins embedded in its founding institutions.

Joel Kotkin adds: Trump’s assault on DEI will bring us closer to a post-racial America.

Indeed — which is why the army of grifters such policies enable will not go quietly into the night: Smashing the ‘rice bowls’ — how elites are lashing out at Trump and Musk’s reforms.