The strange death of Affirmative Action

In the first 48 hours of the new administration, Democrats spent most of their time condemning the pardons for Jan. 6 rioters, looming cuts to health care coverage, and Trump’s new name for the Gulf of Mexico; distractions, they said, from his promise to lower prices. They attacked the racial justice rollbacks only when their scale came into view — layoffs of any Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion officials in the government — and when reporters asked about it.

But the Biden administration’s ambitions went further than DEI programs, with the goal of “eliminat[ing] systemic racism” completely. Conservative who wanted Johnson’s order gone had bigger ambitions, too: Ostensible colorblindness in federal law, and the end of affirmative action. Forty years after Ronald Reagan balked at rewriting part of EO 11246, Trump — who in 2015 said he was “fine” with affirmative action — took the whole thing down.

“The left thought [its] anti-white racist citadel was impregnable,” wrote the Claremont Institute scholar Jeremy Carl on X, marveling that Trump had enacted the key proposals from his work on “anti-white” racism. “Today, Donald Trump led an army through the citadel’s front gate and lit the whole place on fire.”

In 2020, Biden and his party ran on imbuing “racial equity” in every one of their policy goals. In 2021, they executed on that. But they did not emphasize those programs in their 2024 campaign, held after years of effective Republican messaging that moved public opinion against DEI. Accepting the 2020 Democratic nomination, Biden pledged to fight “racial injustice” and “[wipe] the stain of racism from our national character.” Accepting the 2024 nomination, Kamala Harris dropped the topic, running “on behalf of every American, regardless of party, race, gender or the language your grandmother speaks.”

Democrats and civil rights groups largely reacted to Trump’s reversals this week with economic arguments. Trump, they said, was making the country less competitive. “Organizations with diverse workforces have a strategic advantage over those who don’t,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson in a statement, citing a McKinsey study.

Affirmative action was not a winning electoral issue for the party. Even in 2020, the California electorate that gave Biden a 29-point landslide voted by 14 points to keep the state’s ban on racial preferences in college admissions decisions. After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that ended college affirmative action, Stephen Miller’s America First Legal began knocking down race-conscious programs in academia and the private sector. (Miller is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff.) Project 2025, the think tank playbook that Democrats centered in their campaign messaging, called on page 584 for EO 11246 to be rescinded. No Democratic ads cited it.

This week, some congressional Democrats worried about the Trump orders, saying that he was unwinding policies that had helped non-white Americans enter the middle class. California Rep. Robert Garcia, the former mayor of Long Beach, pointed out that blue states and cities could maintain their own diversity programs. But few members of Congress have lived in a world without EO 11246.

“Latinos in Illinois have made great strides because of affirmative action in colleges and universities, in corporate settings, in government as well, and this will jeopardize that steady progress that we’ve seen,” said Illinois Rep. Chuy Garcia. “We’ve had a tremendous growth in Latino students in colleges and universities, graduating from there and returning to their communities, going into boardrooms. That is going to be slowed down by this initiative that seeks to end diversity programs.”

Alabama Rep. Shomari Figures, who won a new seat created after the state’s GOP-drawn map was found to violate the Voting Rights Act, said that Trump had “the characteristics of a tyrant,” and that the move against affirmative action hadn’t surprised him.

“The message that it sends to large groups of people — who have historically been denied opportunities to further their careers, historically been denied the type of service that our government should be providing to all people — is that you do not matter,” he said.

The idea of rescinding Johnson’s order now was popularized by Richard Hanania, whose 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke,” identified the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its interpretation by federal rule-makers as the root of biased racial preferences. (The law’s original advocates didn’t see that as inevitable.) He introduced that idea to Vivek Ramaswamy, who adopted it for his presidential campaign, and transferred it to the Trump team.

It was still, on Wednesday, a fairly obscure idea for Republicans. But for them, anything that would knock out DEI and preferences was worth doing.

“The American people have spoken very clearly that the best way to stop discriminating against people on the basis of race and gender is to stop discriminating against people on the basis of race and gender,” Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy told reporters on Wednesday, paraphrasing Chief Justice John Roberts.

“We have to live in the meritocracy,” said Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, one of four Black Republicans in the House. “Everybody believes in diversity, but I think what the Democrats have done with this whole equity focus is turning diversity on its head. It’s actually been much more divisive amongst the American people.”

The opposition’s playbook for Trump’s second term is simple: Ask why he’s doing X, Y, or Z instead of lowering prices. Why talk about buying Greenland? Why create a crypto reserve? Why go on a hunt to remove DEI officials from the public sector?

“It’s not my understanding, based on anything that I’ve seen, that support for diversity, equity and inclusion had anything to do with the results in November,” Jeffries said on Thursday. “The results in November had everything to do with the high cost of living in the United States of America.”

Jeffries and other Democrats were ready to defend the affirmative action policies that Trump was ripping out — and he’d need Congress or friendly judges to really uproot the underlying laws. But I was struck that their arguments came back to economic sense, and that Trump was taking away some competitive advantage by dismantling diversity programs. At the end of the first Trump term, when the administration started banning diversity trainings, it had little public buy-in, and opponents confidently accused him of undermining the surging racial justice movement based on whatever he saw on Fox News.

In his four-year exile, Republicans and anti-liberals had time to think about how the system worked, and how to get a running start if they took it over again. “Undoing the excesses of civil rights law is not the ultimate solution to wokeness,” Hanania wrote in his 2023 book. “Rather, it should be seen as the first step toward evening the playing field so the real game can begin.”