DEI and the Republicans crusade against 'woke' acronyms

A case of intra-ruling class struggle

Corporate American is shedding it’s diversity promises faster than you can say DEI - Firstpost

Trump and Republicans are going all in on reshaping American society. There’s no better example than with the recent executive orders removing DEI or Diversity Equity and Inclusion practices from the Federal government. Diversity is out, America is back, which apparently means bikini’s and burgers. Companies are already bending the knee. Wall Street and Sillicon Valley are already pulling back their DEI policies.

Examples include Deloitte tellings its employees to remove pronouns from emails to the US government, Goldman Sachs ended their policy of promoting diverse board rooms, and ISS a top US proxy advisor has stated it will no longer consider DEI factors when making vote recommendations. Tech has been no different, as Google and Amazon have dismantled their DEI pratices.

What spurred this was Trump’s first week in office. Trump signed two executive orders. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed two DEI-related executive orders titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” (the “Gender Order”) and “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. On January 21, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.

The order is overall an attack on the relatively hegemonic liberal policy frameworks and practices for promoting racial and gender equality. While these weren’t anything radical, DEI policies have been part of the hegemonic project of neoliberalism which upheld the legitimacy of capitalist societies. The recent executive orders remove this all. They are not only reductive but additive, essentially codifying some of the most reactionary ideological components of modern North American conservatism into official policy. The January 21st order essentially boils down to an act against “reverse racism”, attacking not only public but private institutions for their use of ‘illegal’ and ‘immoral’ DEI practices.

The Gender order puts forward transphobic rhetoric about ‘biological sex’ and protecting women against gender ideology, phrases that could easily be mistaken for lines in a Ben Shapiro podcast. While I anticipated that Trump’s presidency would be reactionary, the administration’s boldness has been surprising. They are replacing DEI policies with measures that can only be characterized as all but formally white supremacist and transphobic.

There’s another interesting story here, one that I want to build on in the future, and that’s the battle between Republicans and certain fractions of the capitalist class. Specifically, Republicans targeting companies that they see as pushing progress ideology. These executive orders are very clear about their intention. They go beyond impacting just federal agencies or entities that receive federal grants and funding; they explicitly extend to private businesses, threatening them with sanctions for implementing DEI practices.

As the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance summarize, the January 21 DEI Order includes a section titled “Encouraging the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI Discrimination and Preferences,” instructing federal agencies to “take all appropriate action with respect to the operations of their agencies to advance in the private sector the policy of individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.”

It further directs the Attorney general, in cooperation with “all the relevant agencies”, to produce a report in 120 days containing “recommendations for enforcing Federal civil-rights laws and taking other appropriate measures to encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”

The goal of this report is to include a “strategic enforcement plan” which identifies:

• Key sectors of concern within each agency’s jurisdiction

• The most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern

• A plan of specific steps or measures to deter DEI programs or principles (whether specifically denominated ‘DEI’ or otherwise) that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences

• As part of the plan described immediately above, each agency is required to identify “up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars

• Other strategies to encourage the private sector to end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences and comply with all Federal civil-rights laws

• Litigation that would be potentially appropriate for Federal lawsuits, intervention, or statements of interest

• Potential regulatory action and sub-regulatory guidance

The administration is not just trying to deter these practices by shamming them, it’s seeking to identify potential large organizations to investigate and find potential Federal lawsuits to go forward with. Whether these are threats or serious is still unknown. Honestly, I think it’s more likely most companies bend the knee, as we’re already seeing. This might be different for NGO’s, particular ones that focus on equity.

The administration isn’t just trying to symbolically ban or deter these practices, it doesn’t want to just win a vague ideological battle. It seems it really wants to fight back, going as far to threaten business with investigations and lawsuits. In some ways, this entire ordeal is a twisted turn of events that makes me want to laugh. What stands out most strikingly is the contradiction between the rhetoric and actions of Republicans; the so-called "laissez-faire" free-market party is now aggressively targeting a fraction of private capital. Centralized orders from the government mandating how private businesses should engage with hiring practices. This is exactly the kind of meddling in the private sphere that the Republicans have been screaming was horrible for years! They are directly intervening in business and meddling with the free market!

But don’t make any mistakes, this isn’t the Republicans being some ‘based’ anti-capitalists. Deeper analysis shows that there’s no contraction here. While at the level of rhetorical all politicians support the ‘free market’, in practice governing is always about organizing political power with specific fractions of business, picking and choosing whom to develop a coalition with. With Trump 2.0 and a lot of corporations bending the knee, the Republicans are emboldened and clearly determined to further entrench their political and cultural hegemony. It’s clearer now the extent to which they are willing to bear potential political costs in their fights against certain businesses in order to advance their ideological agenda. But this attack on ‘woke capitalism’, that is, the alleged form of corporate capitalist virtue signalling, has been going on for some time.

Next week, I want to talk about the other acronym that Republicans want to eliminate, ESG, which stands for enviormental, social, governance. Building off this discussion, I’ll be showing how Republicans have waged a battle against asset managers, banks and anyone else who attacks their beloved institutions of whiteness, racism, and of course oil.