On his first day in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order targeting “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs in the federal government. A day later, the President signed an executive order entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity.” Together, these executive orders have been used to justify an across the board targeting of all federal programs, grants, and contracts, essentially a targeting of the entire federal bureaucracy. For example, very quickly, thousands of federal web pages have been taken down, with vast amounts of data from Alzheimer’s research to clinical trials being removed.
The Trump administration has taken as its chief target DEI - Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The Executive Orders Trump signed on his first two days in office have been used to justify targeting federal agencies and other institutions, and to threaten the jobs of those suspected to be less than completely loyal to the new regime, on the grounds that they embody the ideology of DEI.
In the vocabulary of America’s new regime, meritocracy is meant to replace diversity in hiring. But what the administration means by “meritocracy” is distant from its original meaning. The original meaning of “meritocracy” is a system based on competence and excellence. Based on its actions, we can see that the sole metric of this regime’s judgements of merit is loyalty to the regime. The attack on DEI is thus Orwellian double-speak. But, if anything, the true danger of the attack on DEI has been overlooked and underestimated.
In the Republican “Southern Strategy”, enacted most clearly and powerfully under Reagan, federal programs that wealthy individuals supported eliminating in order to make way for tax cuts were described as “welfare.” By describing such programs as “welfare”, Republicans intended to communicate that these programs were there to take money away from “hard working” white Americans and directed to benefit Black Americans, who, according to longstanding US anti-Black racist ideology, were associating with criminality, laziness, and corruption (there are of course far more white Americans on programs aimed to help the poor than there are Black Americans on such programs). Scientists have repeatedly found, at least as recently as 2018, that this strategy was successful. Research has shown that almost half of white Americans regard Black Americans as lazier than whites, and almost as large a percentage regard Black Americans as less intelligent. By describing certain government programs as “welfare”, politicians can easily decrease their popularity among this group of Americans.
The original version of the Republican Southern Strategy was necessarily limited – it was, after all, hard to describe all federal grant-making as welfare, or all federal bureaucracy as welfare. We are now witnessing a radical broadening of the Republican Southern Strategy, drawing on the same underlying racist attitudes towards Black Americans. The idea behind the mechanism of extending the Republican Southern Strategy to all public institutions was due to Christopher Rufo, who realized that, in the expression “Critical Race Theory”, lay a potent weapon:
“Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American.” Most perfect of all, Rufo continued, critical race theory is not “an externally applied pejorative.” Instead, “it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”
By connecting all of federal bureaucracy to “Critical Race Theory”, Rufo could create negative attitudes towards the entire federal system.
There is, however, an obvious problem with radically extending the Southern Strategy by replacing “welfare” with “Critical Race Theory.” The argument that the ideology of the federal government was Critical Race Theory was impossible to make. Critical Race Theory is a small academic subdiscipline, and the expression “Critical Race Theory” occurs almost nowhere in federal documents. To argue that Critical Race Theory was somehow guiding the funding of (for example) Alzheimer’s research at Harvard and Yale would always sound like a conspiracy theory on the level of QAnon. Even when Rufo argued that Critical Race Theory was guiding public schools, for example, his opponents could simply challenge him by asking for evidence that this academic theory had so much power. And it was evidence that, even in the much narrower range of education, was difficult to provide.
In short, “Critical Race Theory” could be deployed as an effective political weapon, for the reasons Rufo so clearly explains. But it was impossible to argue with any force that it was an ideology that governed the entire federal government.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs are there to help ensure that workplaces are free from discrimination, and accessible (for example to the disabled). These programs are ubiquitous across federal agencies. Unlike Critical Race Theory, then, it is trivial to show that DEI is present across all federal agencies as well as institutions that the Trump administration deems hostile, such as universities.
The term “Welfare” was such a potent political weapon in the Republican Southern Strategy, as it was a useful shorthand for the deeply embedded racist attitude that Black Americans were lazier and less competent than whites. Rufo and others quickly realized that “DEI” could also be used to evoke the same racist attitudes, that Black Americans needed special help to compete with white Americans, positions that they could only obtain through cheating because of their supposed lesser competence and intelligence. We know that calling programs “welfare” made many Americans think less of them. The anti-DEI campaign is the Republican Southern Strategy on steroids, as “DEI” marshals racist attitudes as effectively as “welfare”, but against a vastly broader target.
The Republican Southern Strategy was a devastatingly effective weapon against America’s social safety net. By arguing that social programs were “welfare”, and benefitted supposedly undeserving Black Americans, Republican politicians could argue that funding to these programs should be slashed, and the savings handed over to the wealthy in new tax cuts. The new version of the Southern Strategy is directed not just against the social safety net, but against the entire federal government, and all the programs it supports, from health research to foreign aid to basic science. Right now, America’s legacy of racism is being now directed as a weapon against America itself.
Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and the author Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Change the Future
