Shared realities of DEI under a Trump Administration

A prediction: the Trump administration and many Republican-led state legislatures across the country will be enacting a range of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI) in the coming years. These new programs will be primarily aimed at the vanguard of Trump’s coalition and the symbolic soul of the MAGA movement—poor and working-class white voters.

I’m not trying to be cute or clever with these sentences. This is not me gearing up to call any political action from the Trump administration that does not target the most meritocratic person—the Harvard-trained chemist, the four-star general, the Nobel Prize-winning economist—"DEI."

Instead, I aim to build a sociological argument, not an ideological one. It can be applied to the ideology of your choice, as long as it is human beings who have adopted the ideology.

Shared realities, rationalizations, and justifications

I have long appreciated the efforts of the Democratic Party to address the grievances of marginalized groups—economic aid for low-income mothers here, reserved slots for Native Americans in engineering programs there. If someone were to describe what they value about the Republican Party, I suspect some of it would involve policies helping groups that the person believes deserve to be helped. An analysis of these policies will show that many of them are effective because they circumvent the rules of some meritocratic endeavor to help the group currently catching hell in that endeavor. For instance, I would argue that many farm subsidies are essentially efforts to support American farm businesses that are losing out to international competition.

At first glance, calling both farm subsidies and affirmative action policies “DEI” might seem odd to many. How is giving money to American farmers so they can compete with lower-cost producers abroad equivalent to reserving slots in an engineering program for first-generation Native American students?

The equivalency lies in the interference with a free market or competitive process to support a group that is less competitive in that process. In the first case, American farmers may face disadvantages such as older machinery and higher labor costs compared to their international counterparts, resulting in more expensive products. By the logic of the free market, they “should” lose and go bankrupt. In the second case, Native American students often lack access to the resources necessary to achieve high SAT scores due to systemic inequalities. By the logic of competitive admissions, they “should” lose in the elite university admissions process and go to community college.

If I am right that many are finding this line of reasoning odd, then I have a segue into the second part of the argument I am building. What matters in terms of the grievances aired by a given group and the political party willing to address them is not any objective understanding of the processes at play—the factors that create the phenomena of distinct groups failing in the first place—but what type of shared reality they develop between them.

Regardless of how these shared realities manifest, their function is predictable. They work to rationalize exceptions to the meritocratic ideal for the disadvantaged group while upholding the broader value of meritocracy that most of society unequivocally supports. Individuals described as “going the extra mile,” “burning the midnight oil,” or “hustling every day” receive near-universal praise. If this overarching value is not upheld, the specific interests of the disadvantaged group will be swiftly dismissed. The form of the shared reality will vary, but its function will not.

Consider a hypothetical example: a Democratic state politician proposes incentivizing businesses to hire more women. Within the shared reality of the Left, rationalizations for this exception might include addressing systemic sexism or valuing diversity in leadership for its intrinsic merits. These rationalizations help resolve internal contradictions for those on the Left. Simultaneously, they serve as justifications for both the policy and meritocracy as a whole. If sexism is eliminated, targeted hires would no longer be necessary; indeed, women may already be working harder than men to reach the same positions. Diversity, depicted as a qualitative good, inherently conveys merit in this shared reality.

However, it is often easier to recognize the rationalizations and justifications of groups that operate within a different shared reality. For example, this is a story I can cobble together from conservative spaces:

“My mantra is that everyone must take personal responsibility for their choices, rising and falling based on hard work. Yet, the farmer’s choice not to modernize equipment, adopt cost-saving technologies, or even avoid entering this business in the first place, is exempt from this rule. Why? Because these are hardworking (rationalization), American patriots (rationalization), who built the country (rationalization), and must try and compete globally while battling unions that raise worker wages (rationalization).”

These rationalizations are legitimate because they make the story internally compelling and don’t need to have validity outside of the shared reality in which they are being constructed. These rationalizations are then presented to wider society as justifications for a given policy while upholding the validity of the meritocratic endeavor itself.

There is another important aspect of these shared realities worth noting. The actual situation on the ground is only loosely connected to the rationalizations and justifications produced within these narratives. It doesn’t matter whether women on Wall Street face significant barriers to climbing the corporate ladder or whether, in most cases, they make relatively unencumbered career choices. It also doesn’t matter if fruit farmers are genuinely hardworking or if many of them inherited their businesses and spend their days in air-conditioned offices while migrant workers perform the labor praised by conservatives. What matters is that the relevant parties believe the narrative.

If I may push this whole shared reality business to a point close to absurdity, whether the endeavor under consideration is even meritocratic is irrelevant. I am not sure, just like with SAT scores, most of what we achieve in life is because of our unalloyed, singular efforts. I think the opposite is true—most clustering algorithms only need a few data points to predict where you will end up in life. It will be some combination of your parents' socioeconomic status, where you went to high school (area of the country and specific school), and your racial background. Most of us, including myself on my less aware days, just assume we got our diplomas, jobs, bank accounts, automobiles, and cars because we pulled ourselves up or down by our own bootstraps.

An objective analysis of any endeavor stated as meritocratic (e.g., SAT scores) will always return a series of qualifications and modifiers ultimately falsifying the claim (e.g., the overwhelmingly consistent finding that one can make predictions about a child’s future SAT score from the income of their parents). When I say objective, I am referring to objective in a sociological sense, where a person has not already adopted a given reality about the situation and are not embedded in the social structure and social relationships at play. Pure objectivity in this sense would require lacking any context. If they are from the mars, all the better.

This martian may ask honest questions about a university that states they are dedicated to academic excellence, gives grades and degrees based on scholarship, yet uses a person’s race when deciding whom to accept onto their campus. I’d imagine an immigrant new to this country would also question why one needs a “Black” university. Where are the “white” ones?

That same martian may look at Trump’s appointees—quite a few with little demonstrated skill—and wonder honestly how this happened not less than a month after he and his supporters claimed there were so many unqualified people in Washington, including his multi-degreed, decades-experienced opponent.

I say honestly here because everyone revels in pointing out the contradictions on the other side by asking these types of questions. But this imaginary martian genuinely does not know the the history and relationships at play, and thus their question is not unlike the earnest child in a Christian, military home asking their mother: If Jesus said love your enemy, turn the other cheek, and do not kill, then why is Daddy going to shoot someone in another country?

High IQ Revolutionaries

I will be watching curiously over the next few years to see how this all plays out—as a progressive and a sociologist.

As a progressive, I am not interested in how the "other side" deludes itself—I’ll focus solely on my side of that line. No, as a progressive, I am most interested in workshopping practices in my everyday life to legally push back against what is coming down the pike.

But as a sociologist, the DEI policies emerging from the Trump administration are of minor interest, as I will be more focused on the particular form the rationalizations and justifications take. We already know the function of these rationalizations and justifications. But we don’t know what it is going to look like.

How will conservatives rationalize to themselves, and thus justify to others, the apparent contradiction of allocating resources to individuals who may not necessarily be the most productive or meritorious in the country? Their task seems more difficult than Democrats because the Republican Party has spent decades arguing for pure merit: "Why not just use SAT scores? Why not just take the most qualified person with the most education and experience without considering their color or gender?"

I am genuinely interested in what form the shared reality amongst the Republican base will morph into in order to make sense of all the DEI policies coming their way.

Will they be successful?

Maybe Elon Musk's call for "high IQ revolutionaries” gives us a clue of where to aim our thoughts. The incoming administration is led by a collection of truly singular charismatic authority figures—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert Kennedy Jr., and, of course, Donald Trump. They find themselves at the levers of power with very little practical government experience but lean heavily on their IQ, influence, and, of course, wealth. If anyone can pull this off, maybe it is them.