Anti-DEI v. Meritocracy

One very inclusive way that conservatives could have pressed their agenda in opposition to "woke" culture in the American establishment could have been to push meritocracy and race blindness in opposition to racially sensitive affirmative action in areas like employment and higher education admissions.

But, they didn't. Donald Trump's MAGA movement has instead taken an "anti-DEI" and nearly synonymous "anti-DEI" (DEI is an acronym meaning "diversity, equality, and inclusion" and many institutions have bureaucrats charged with advancing these ends in order to comply with civil rights laws), even though MAGA can claim (not very credibly given his actions) that this is what it is doing.

Some of the actions that make this not credible are the administration's installation of large numbers of manifestly unqualified political appointees, the way it has tried to freeze and defund scientific and academic research and high education (and even K-12 education), and its purge of references to minorities or women or non-straight people to the point where even "female" was on a list of banned words in government websites and sponsored grants, and references to the "Enola Gay" (the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb) was removed from government websites because it had the word "gay" in it.

Basically, rather than arguing rhetorically for color blind, meritocratic neutrality, the anti-DEI push has been a declaration of war on everyone who isn't a white, non-disabled, straight, Christian male, and on cultural recognition of people who don't fit that mold. It is seeking to activate and legitimatize racism, misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia, rather than to take the much more moderate stance of trying to tame excess discouragement and penalization of white, non-disabled, straight, Christian men. It is seeking to accentuate tribalism rather than seeking to end it, and to undo the entire civil rights movement. 

The fact that Trump's movement is overtly pro-racist makes it particularly problematic that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to apply Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to allow states like Colorado to disqualify him from the Presidential ballot, contrary to its clear language and the structure and history of the U.S. Constitution and 14th Amendment jurisprudence in particular.

This tactic is probably a good one for mobilizing an aggrieved base that feels persecuted politically. But it profoundly undermines the popularity of the administration's actions with the larger population and the legal system, which have deeply internalized the important of meritocracy in lieu of on the basis of race, ethnicity, sex (including subjective gender), nationality, religion, or sexual orientation. Crossing those lines comes across to a large swath of voters and judges as unAmerican.