DEI IS IN RETREAT BECAUSE IT IS A DISASTER, NOT BECAUSE TRUMP DOESN'T LIKE IT

National Review

 

DEI Is in Retreat Because It Is a Disaster, Not Because Trump Doesn’t Like It

By Noah Rothman

November 26, 2024 12:47 PM

 

Walmart, America’s largest retailer, announced this week that it will pare back its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and the New York Times is giving conservative activist Robby Starbuck most of the credit.

 

Starbuck, “an anti-D.E.I. activist and a social media influencer, declared victory on Monday,” Lauren Hirsch of the Times reported:

 

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As a result of the changes, third-party merchants will no longer be able to sell some L.G.B.T.Q.-themed items on Walmart.com that are marketed to children. The company will also stop funding the Center for Racial Equity, a nonprofit initiative that Walmart has backed with $100 million, when the agreement expires next year. And the company will stop sharing data with the Human Rights Campaign, a nonprofit that tracks businesses’ L.G.B.T.Q. policies. It will also stop using the terms D.E.I. and Latinx in official communications.

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Starbuck himself is taking a deserved victory lap. He described the changes in store for Walmart’s employees as well as its corporate governance, all of which are wholly desirable. But Starbuck isn’t the sole architect of this development, in the Times’ telling. The paper and other political observers see the hidden hand of Donald Trump pulling corporate strings behind the scenes.

 

“Walmart’s actions underline the risk it may see in a public fight, particularly as the anti-D.E.I. agenda gets a boost after Donald J. Trump’s election,” Hirsch observed. Bloomberg analyst Joe Wiesenthal agreed. Unlike in 2016, “corporations are going to move much more in line with the new administration,” he wrote. “And Walmart, in particular, will be a bright signal to other corporates to do the same.” To this, a fine pseudonymous Twitter account (which you should follow) offered some salient pushback:

 

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This is backwards; conservative activism preceded anything the new administration has done, it is following its voters, not leading.

https://t.co/Dq0bt6O0Kj

— NeverTweet (@LOLNeverTweet)

November 26, 2024

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This has the correct sequence of events. DEI was in retreat well before Donald Trump returned to the political fore, and even before his reelection to the presidency was generally regarded as a plausible outcome of the 2024 election cycle.

 

As I wrote at the time, the year that delivered the heaviest blows to the divisive and discriminatory ideology masquerading as best practices in human resources departments wasn’t 2024. It was 2023.

 

Pushback against DEI was a project first engaged by conservative Republican lawmakers in states like Florida, Texas, Ohio, and North and South Carolina, who executed the anti-DEI intellectual frameworks established by conservative thinkers and activists. The baton was then picked up by conservatives on the Supreme Court, who insisted on “colorblindness for all” in the college admissions process. The legal predicate for dismantling DEI having been established, the lawsuits soon followed. The threat those actions posed to the bottom line suddenly rendered DEI a financially prohibitive project. Thus, Walmart joined other big employers like Lowe’s, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Ford, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and more in sloughing off the obligation they once felt to contribute to this extortion racket. They just needed the proper inducement.

 

But Trump wasn’t that inducement. It was the intellectual scaffolding erected by conservative theorists that gave a leg up to lawmakers and political appointees, eventually creating a set of incentive structures to which large firms had to respond, if only in deference to their fiduciary responsibility to their investors. That’s how this is supposed to work, and it did in this case. But to reverse the sequence of events and conclude that naked corporate cowardice is responsible for DEI’s retreat — thereby absolving that philosophy of the perversions that rendered it so unattractive — obscures more than it reveals.