DEI another day

Conservatives’ loathing for diversity, equity and inclusion is easy to understand. DEI’s very mission — junking Thomas Jefferson’s natural aristocracy of talents in favor of race- and gender-based advancement — runs against everything the American right is supposed to stand for. They watched with chagrin during the Biden years as DEI offices spread across the nation, into corporate C-suites and government departments and, of course, universities. Conservative heroes in the early 2020s were those like Florida governor Ron DeSantis who pushed back against DEI in their home states.

Then Donald Trump returned and all that seemed to change. Upon taking the Oval Office, he shut down all DEI initiatives throughout the federal government. He went so far as to cancel an Executive Order signed in 1965 by Lyndon Johnson that required affirmative action among government contractors. He even threatened to withhold federal funding from schools if DEI initiatives weren’t cut.

Come early 2025, when Ibram X. Kendi, the most visible woke intellectual, closed his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, it was assumed quickly by many that DEI was now passé. Conservatives told each other that it was just a brief insanity, a product of the strange, race-tinged culture wars of 2020, the “summer of love” when George Floyd was killed and Molotov cocktails sailed towards police stations.

But as conservatives should know, just because the most obvious and prominent proponents of DEI have gone dark, that doesn’t mean it’s over. DEI is a movement with deep roots and the idea of inclusivity as ideology isn’t an aberration, but comes pretty naturally to some Americans.

Andrew F. Puzder wrote a book about the origins of DEI: A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims, the Ugly Truth About Stakeholder Capitalism. In the book, Puzder warns that every successive generation comes up with a new way of selling the same pseudo-ethical snake oil. In the 1980s, it was “socially responsible investing” and by the 1990s it had morphed into “corporate social responsibility.” ESG — environmental, social and governance principles — and DEI are just different flavors of the same Kool-Aid.

The swiftness and eagerness with which US corporations fell into line behind BLM and embraced the new terminology testifies to that. Latinx, for example, which the woke intended to replace “Latino” because it was gender-neutral, was pushed, even though almost no Latino person would ever use the term — other than on an application form because it might help land an office job. That, in a way, is the point.

Woke didn’t happen in a vacuum. For decades, across America, business schools had been specializing in “stakeholder” capitalism, producing generation after generation of students committed to the ideology. Though much has been made of recent U-turns by companies such as Walmart, Boeing, Harley-Davidson, McDonald’s, Meta and Target, the merits of DEI are still taught as fact in business schools, and it’s embedded as a core ideology in institutions across the US.

Generations of students are still emerging from the pipeline of DEI indoctrination, and whatever Trump says, they still absolutely believe the McKinsey myth. In 2023, McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm upstream from too much of corporate America, released the much-anticipated fourth installment in its “Diversity Matters” series. Called “Diversity Matters Even More” (consultants are nothing if not creative), it made the case for why DEI is not just sustainable but profitable for businesses.

The report claimed, for example, that companies in the top quartile for ethnic representation were 39 percent more likely to financially outperform those in the bottom quartile. Similarly, companies that employed more women were likely to do better than those that didn’t.

You could quarrel with these findings all day, starting with good old-fashioned correlation versus causation (couldn’t it be that successful companies were the likeliest to bow to DEI?). But the point is that the deeply influential McKinsey is articulating what Americans under thirty have been taught — and still believe. According to a website called BestColleges, more than 55 percent of students would consider transferring if their college abolished DEI programs, and think of Trump’s initiatives as a call to action. The more he removes programs, the more they feel the call to resist.

The need to please the incoming workforce might explain why so many American corporations did not shut down their DEI offices last year and some even flaunted their obeisance to progressive values. Among them was Costco, the third-largest retailer in the world, and Apple, the largest tech company by revenue. Other companies that stuck with DEI include JPMorgan Chase and Delta Air Lines.

Even among those that supposedly ditched DEI, the reality was more complicated. Six months after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which abolished most affirmative action programs in university admissions, the Washington Post reported on a survey of business executives that found “91 percent of the 320 executives surveyed said the ruling had not lessened their prioritization of DEI. In fact, 57 percent said they had expanded their DEI programming in the past year.” Even amid the seeming DEI death knell of last year, the research organization Conference Board found that just 9 percent of executives planned to scale back on external DEI communications and 3 percent planned to make internal changes.

What’s going on here? The answer lies in another finding from Conference Board: 53 percent of executives said they’d cut back on their use of DEI terminology while 20 percent were considering doing so in the future. It was, according to chief marketing officer Sarah Reynolds — nonbinary, they/them — merely a rebrand. “Smart HR leaders know [DEI] is not an on or off switch,” they told Employee Benefit News. “They’re looking at the reality of their talent pool.” Valeria Piaggio, global head of DEI at Kantar, told Retail Dive: “Most are not abandoning DEI. What we do know is that some companies are adjusting the language.”

This shows two things. First, regardless of whether McKinsey’s equating of diversity and profitability holds up, most corporations seem to think it does. They want to attract the best talent and believe doing this means making everyone feel comfortable in their claimed identities. As an article in Harvard Business Review put it, this has meant “positioning [DEI] not as ‘what’ they do, but ‘how’ they achieve high performance in their key objectives.” Even if, of course, they’re no longer calling it DEI.

The second is that the Trump effect might not be as sound as we wish. This isn’t to say the new sheriff in town won’t scare some people straight, but big institutions always prefer to posture and outlast pressure rather than change. If people have stopped caring about DEI, it effectively takes most of the scrutiny off it. And if Trump is going to create a brief wave of negative attention, they’ll just change the name on the door and wait for it to die down.

This speaks to one of the most frustrating things about social activism today: its fleeting nature. A social-media mob can make it feel like the sky is falling — for a day, maybe a week — but then everyone moves on to the next shiny object. It’s true that outrage over DEI has been sustained for longer thanks to a small group of talented conservative journalists. But more often than not, the philosophy is not to listen to such criticism. It’s to stay cool and ride out the wave.

There’s also the whack-a-mole difficulty of waging a campaign against an entrenched ideology. Conservatives have tended to equate legal and political wins with success, but consider the Fair Admissions Supreme Court triumph. It’s true that Ivies such as Harvard are forbidden from racial discrimination in their admissions and there’s evidence they’ve complied with the law. But they aren’t forbidden from offering courses like, to take an example from Harvard’s spring 2025 catalog, “Power to the People: Black Power, Radical Feminism, and Gay Liberation.” You can change a statute, but if colleges want to promote woke ideology and students want it in the classroom, it will find a way in. Those students will then go to work for corporations which will have to accommodate them to attract and retain them. The circle of life continues. DEI might not be broadly popular, but it remains relevant in the places that matter.

DEI also has a very important built-in advantage: modern America is very bureaucratic. Whether it’s an administrative state that often wags the elected government or a healthcare system that spends twice as much on administration as other leading nations, power in the United States, in the private and public sectors, is increasingly concentrated in massified bureaucracies.

DEI is intended to fit into these bureaucratic structures. It effectively turns diversity into a dreary exercise in bean-counting, which is the specialty of the bureaucratic mode of organization. The taxonomical identity categories of twenty-first-century America go perfectly on forms and flowcharts. Even the name DEI — technically now it’s DEIA, with “accessibility” tacked on to represent the disabled — sounds like an alphabet-soup government department.

Americans over the past fifteen years have increasingly elected populist politicians, signaling that they want large-scale change. One reason they never seem to get it is that bureaucracies don’t shift easily — because they’re so lumbering and so much of what they do is hidden or esoteric, they can absorb outside pressure and are difficult to reorient at any rate. The same is proving true of DEI.

What does this mean? It means anti-DEI changes are very often cosmetic, as with Starbucks, which removed some mentions of diversity from its website and de-emphasized its diversity programs — but little else. It means Walmart might have agreed to stop using the term DEI and shutter its “racial equity center,” but it’s facing pushback from investors even for this. It means Coca-Cola declared recently that diversity was “critical to [its] continued growth and success.” It means endless news stories on websites like College Fix showing just how prevalent identity politics remains in our schools and universities. It means Trump’s anti-DEI orders are already tied up in the courts.

None of this is to say that Trump’s war on DEI isn’t worth fighting — or that he isn’t doing some good. But it is to say that the battle is far from won. DEI might be a phenom of 2020 — but it’s far more entrenched in 2025 than we like to think.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.