An earlier version was published in The Polis on Medium.com on 11/25/24
I’m gonna miss you when you’re gone
I’m going out of fashion, it seems, becoming a cultural dinosaur hankering back to the good old days — to me, the 1960’s — when it seemed we’d finally as a country owned up to our racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic past. It’s not that we believed those social defects were solved back then, only that we were on a path to finally tackle them, rather than denying or wishing them away. We’d believed the country had actually made a good start with Lincoln and Emancipation (1863), followed by the Statue of Liberty (1886) welcoming the world’s ‘wretched refuse,’ and then cinched it by granting suffrage to women (1921) and American Indians (1924).
We weren’t ignorant of the blowback that accompanied each of these milestones. There was the whole debacle of Reconstruction that hijacked the promise of equal rights for Black people — for a hundred years!— after Emancipation. There was a 180 degree turn against immigrants in the early 1900’s that led ultimately to the Japanese American internment camps during the 1940’s. Women did get the vote, but still had to put up with misogynistic cultural pressures. And American Indian children continued to be separated from their families to undergo forced acculturation. The 1960’s shined a light on all these pesky societal ills directed at disparate elements of American society.
All this soul searching wasn’t at the time called DEI–diversity, equity, and inclusion. It was mostly addressed under the rubric of ‘affirmative action,’ a term first launched in the Kennedy presidency and a harbinger of the Civil Rights struggles in the 1960’s. It’s probably at this time that the three words in the acronym started joining up to constitute a unifying concept to advocate for civil rights. The original focus of this advocacy was Black people, but over the following decades more and more groups of culturally and economically disadvantaged groups got incorporated into the DEI label.
My Republican friends contend that the 1960’s with its bright light on disadvantaged segments of the population created social disruption and took us out of the comparative calm and cultural discipline of the 1950’s. The 60’s turned society chaotic, they say, and ushered in an era of disruptive identity politics. And as much as they’re right about the turmoil, they are certainly wrong in thinking the problems were going to heal themselves. They decidedly were not going to do so because without a spur we would only glue down the exclusionary behaviors and beliefs of the majority.
The need for DEI is ultimately rooted in the fact that the United States is by its nature a diverse community of people. This isn’t to say that all communities in America large and small feel the effects of this national diversity of peoples. The majority, especially rural communities, do not. They tend to be more homogeneous, and maybe this is a source of our tension over the term. There is a natural tendency to mistrust or distrust people judged to be different somehow.
But it is undeniable that the country as a whole is diverse and that our national government has to intercede when claims for DEI are made by segments of the population who feel denied opportunity and access. This is what happened in the 1960’s when the Federal government committed itself to ending the overtly punitive segregation practices aimed at Black people in the South. Somewhere in this decade the term DEI was born.
The majority believed that disadvantaged people deserved their disadvantage by virtue of how they were born or how they had been shaped, even if they became so because of their parentage or because of extenuating circumstances. So be it. It is what it is. I wish it were different, but it’s not. It’s God’s will. Thoughts and prayers.
But in rejecting the argument that the circumstances of birth or upbringing or accident were valid justifications for mistreatment, disadvantaged groups one by one said “No, we don’t accept those premises.” Recall gay people’s motto retaliating against the neglect of their essential humanity during the AIDS epidemic: ‘We’re here, we’re queer. Get used to it.’ Substitute any other group in the phrase and it could be as serviceable a motto as ‘With liberty and justice for all.’
‘Get used to it’ was a hard call for full inclusion in the promise extended in the Constitution. It was a hard slap in the face of those who defended false premises to justify their bias. When these premises started to crumble, the arguments for mistreating others could be pinned somewhere on a Likert scale spanning Dislike, Aversion, Avoidance, Hatred, Loathing, which could be called the prejudice measurement indicator. DEI attempted to make the country honestly rate itself.
America has been for much of its history self-congratulatory for being a ‘melting pot.’ The term appears as far back as the late 1700’s, though that phrase didn’t make it into our civics texts as an indicator of our essential character until the early 20th century. It really never was true though.
Every group who came voluntarily or under force into our country had to pass a gauntlet of mistrust until they proved their bona fides to a doubting population. This was true for Catholics, Jews, Chinese, Irish, Italians, Polish, Mexicans. Even American Indians, indigenous as they are to this land, have been stigmatized and ‘outsourced’ to the unproductive margins of accepted society. And there is, of course, the history of Black people brought into the country as slaves, who when they had outlived their economic usefulness to slaveholders were urged and propositioned to go back where they came from, typically places they had never been. Not exactly a melting pot, except in the sense that being in a melting pot can’t be that comfortable. It’s hot and stifling in there.
The 1960’s showed the power of dissent. It wasn’t always gentle; it was more often disruptive. But what the 60’s did was give various disadvantaged groups voice and visibility, both essential to showing their strength and determination to be included among the privileged in our society. Instead the truly privileged cried about the disadvantage they now felt in having to make concessions to those who they still believed weren’t as good as they were and likely never would be as good. These are the people, still with us today, who bemoan the fact of our society fracturing and siloing into so many special interest, identity groups that we’ve lost what was integral to keeping the society together. And so the ultimate push-back, the MAGA movement — make America great again, meaning I suppose take us back to the years akin to the 1950’s, certainly predating the 1960’s.
MAGA via its Napoleon, Donald Trump, is clear about his disdain for the claims of the disadvantaged. MAGA wants women back in the home bearing babies, Blacks to be happy with the minimum wage, Latinos to forget their ancestry, immigrants to go back to being wretched refuse, queer people to shut up and creep back into the closet. That was the 1950’s.
Since the majority still holds the reins of power and enough people in enough states have gotten fed up with listening to the woes and sorrows of people they believe are not as good as them. They are voting in legislators who are are promoting and putting back the constraints that had kept the peace (sort of) before the 1960’s. But it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle, so it’s going to be messier now with more punch applied. Forcible evictions, criminalizing medical procedures, denying climate science, censoring free speech, reeducating the young. We can expect all of that and more.
All of this war on woke will affect individuals who fall into one or more of the outcast groups. But the larger intent is not just to recreate that mythical gentle past of the 50’s, but to perpetuate it, to prevent those disruptive forces from rising up again. To prevent the electorate from having second thoughts about what they’ve done. And the path to that will be to make the Federal government itself an enemy of DEI. In the words of the Motown classic there will be “No where to run to, nowhere to hide.”
The overarching strategy for accomplishing this transformation has to be tied to changes in the language. Remember when not so long ago the acronym DEI blossomed with warm and morally unambiguous connotations, when Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion were considered foundational principles of American democracy, maybe essential to its very definition. No more. The MAGA movement is speedily recasting the connotations of these words with evil shadows, making their proponents out to be anti-American. Left unsaid, but clearly implied, is the notion that America, MAGA America, can’t work in a democracy any longer.
You can see the start of all this in the unsubtle hammer that Ron DeSantis, Republican governor of Florida since 2018, is banging his political enemies with. And he has a lot of enemies, probably more enemies than friends. He has total mind control over his legislature, pushing them to pass legislation outlawing the telling of Black history, muffling the voices of LGBTQ people, suppressing the votes of MAGA non-believers, challenging vaccine mandates, antagonizing immigrants, threatening free speech and banning books, dumbing down liberal universities, and so on. Florida is MAGA shifting into overdrive.
Now with the coronation of Donald Trump as our president MAGA is a running with a jet engine to not only demonize DEI, but to outlaw it. Through his executive orders he has eliminated DEI offices in all Federal offices and firing or reassigning their staffs. And this purge is rippling down into the business world and into educational institutions. For instance, West Virginia University has closed all of its DEI offices on all campuses, without it seems any explanation. We should fully except that all these institutions will show less diversity than they did. They will deny this, of course, but it will happen. Every class of people that relied on the push they needed to feel and to become valued in this country will now feel abandoned, but very likely resistant too.
So what is the new America to be called? A post-democracy? A melting pot with no fire under it? That’s just a dodge, though, because our social and educational system has firmly colored the alternatives to democracy — socialism, communism, monarchy, oligarchy — as borderline or even downright satanic.
So how will MAGA label us and communicate where it is heading us?
First it has to win the branding battle, finding alternatives to DEI, the concepts it is intent on demonizing. So I’m going to help them along by scanning through the English vocabulary to find equivalents to each of the letters. To make the case that the equivalents have to already have some positive connotations, I searched my lexicon, consulted my thesaurus, and came up with some possible alternatives.
For Diversity, we can propose Uniformity; for Equity, Stability; for Inclusion, Accountability. Tada! our new acronym, USA! How’s that for guaranteeing a positive branding!
Notice that it’s hard to come up with actual acceptable antonyms for DEI. Instead of Diversity, we have Sameness; instead of Equity, Unfairness, and instead of Inclusion, Alienation. That’s SUA, USA screwed up. Not acceptable to the image makers, however closer to the truth it might be.
So what kind of sociopolitical structure is encapsulated by the USA acronym? Uniformity implies that citizens think and behave alike; Stability that safeguards, particularly media and education, are in place to enforce uniformity; Accountability that record keeping is tightly policed, again to enforce uniformity. So pardon me if that conjures in my mind images of present day Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and historically the German Third Reich and Imperial Japan. In other words Totalitarianism, Autocracy, Despotism. Forgive me for thinking that those are the more expected outcomes for dumping DEI.
Think of the social and cultural forces that are decidedly Anti-DEI. These include slavery and apartheid, job discrimination, redlining, voter suppression, gerrymandering, book banning, population removal, forced acculturation, denial of medical care, withdrawing physical accommodations, strongarming, and turning away asylum seekers.
But look out for the inevitable consequences that will cast doubt on whether the G (Great) in MAGA is even or ever attainable, even with better branding. The most obvious immediate impact will be the masses of citizens who find the pathways that DEI created for them obliterated. They will certainly not be pleased and they will resist. This resistance can take many forms (this article being one of them), but they will be confrontational and disruptive, hopefully not violent.
Another obvious outcome will be that America will stop being a desired destination. The same countries that are run as dictatorships today (see above) are teetering on the brink of economic hardship because they are not replacing their populations and because immigrants avoid them. America might have an immigrant ‘problem’, but immigrants make up for our own low replacement birth rate. And the economic sectors in which immigrants predominate — construction, hospitality, agriculture — will suffer if we lose them.
Our overinflated higher education system, which is heavily subsidized by foreign student enrollment, will certainly contract, with many schools closing their doors when those students stop coming, voluntarily or because they’re denied visas. Our best universities are now truth finding and truth telling institutions and if that changes, why would a bright student want to come here. We might find as another corollary that our own bright, home grown students and our Nobel heavy faculties will themselves want to go elsewhere. We’re seeing the first inklings of this exodus among medical professionals who are leaving red states to avoid laws putting them under threat for practicing their professions.
The cascade of bad outcomes will continue. The United States is different from so many other countries because it has been so accommodating to diverse peoples. It’s the contributions of these people who can see their very differences as assets that contribute to the United States being a world leader in pushing innovation. It’s not just our Nobel prize winners in the sciences, but our business people and our prodigious talent in the creative arts who will second guess coming or staying. When Florida bans the books of Toni Morrison, a Nobel laureate in literature, you can guess the effect it may have on the next would-be, world renowned author still in their incubator.
You can see why MAGA branding is ultimately going to have to use a lot of lipstick for this pig.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that the few remaining advocates of democracy in the MAGA movement will rally and head off some of its more destructive aspects. Unless of course, the American populace decides that it’s worth the pain and sacrifice that will ensue just to get rid of those elements of society they despise. But if MAGA grows deep roots, the populace in the future won’t have much to say in the matter anyway.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/here-is-a-look-at-the-laws-desantis-has-passed-as-florida-governor-from-abortion-to-gun