Return of the competent white men
Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”
Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “[who] protect employees’ civil rights and others [who] investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”
Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms.
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The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
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As the Trump State Department official Darren Beattie wrote, “Competent white men must be put in charge if you want things to work. Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”
Well that certainly puts it out there for all to see. It sounds like a dopy social media blurt, but it comes from a State Department official. Who knew that only white men are competent? That guy for one.
Other MAGA figureheads have promoted similar ideas. In 2020, the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell published a book arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had revoked “the de jure constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.” Because of the Civil Rights Act, white people had fallen “asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.”
Ahhhhh right, white people built this country and black people did not…except of course for all the slaves who created vast wealth for their “owners” who were thus freed up to prance around the landscape bragging about how valuable they were.
This ideology is apparent in the rote blaming of diversity by some conservatives for every catastrophic event—as they did following a midair collision over the Potomac River. Or a freighter crashing into a bridge in Baltimore. Or doors flying off Boeing planes.The contention, overt or implied, is always that unlike white men, whose competence can be assumed, the non-white people with desirable jobs are undeserving. The irony, of course, is that many of the white men making these assumptions are themselves unqualified. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is best-known for being a reality-television star.
But no doubt a supremely competent reality-tv star.
H/t Tim Harris
Well, of course they’re unqualified; why on Earth would a white man need to be qualified when he’s bound to be supremely competent in any and every position, simply by virtue of being a white man?
Women in particular, and people of either sex who are not white enough, are quite obviously vastly inferior to white men. No amount of education and qualifications could possibly compensate for their inferiority to any white man who fancies himself capable of any job or career.
As we have learnt from the gender wars, what a man thinks of himself is of paramount importance. Indeed, as David Dunning and Justin Kruger pointed out in 1999, too much education is bad for white men, because they might come to suspect that there is more to a particular subject than they are certain that they know, and therefore come to doubt their supremacy in all things. That would never do. No; much safer to give all important jobs to men who are entirely ignorant of the field, and therefore know everything there is to know about it.
It’s good to know that “Woke racism” is just getting replaced by good old-fashioned racism-racism… Now maybe the idiots (Yascha Mounk) bleating about Trump’s multi-racial working class coalition can STFU. Whoever may have been duped into voting for him, their interests aren’t being served by Trump 2.0.
It’s so clear “DEI” is the new euphemism for “n—-r.”
(1)The Trump gang is not an “administration.” It’s more like a regime or a junta. Don’t treat this gang of thieves as if it were interested in governance. Don’t normalize the coup as if any of this were ordinary.
(2) How is using the government to punish people for wrongspeak not a violation of the First Amendment? If a journalist says “Gulf of Mexico,” they are kicked out of their place as White House correspondents. If universities say “DEI,” their federal funding is cut off. How can this be Constitutional? It’s viewpoint discrimination based on the content of speech and press.
(3) Not that schools and universities will have any federal funding to cut off, if the wrecking ball crew succeeds in de facto abolishing the Department of Education. No more carrot and stick to bully educational institutions with.
The whole thing is such a colossal disaster. I’m reeling.
So many people are reeling it’s a wonder we haven’t tilted the planet yet.
BTW see Woodrow Wilson for a previous reversal of what progress had been made in the US for people who were not white & male.
Mike B, not just n****r but also b***h.
So how is it that Trump is in the White House? Remind me again, how many ventures branded with his name has he run into the ground? If it were remotely true that government could or should be run as a business, by this standard, there’s no way Trump should have been put in charge of anything to do with running any government organization.
It also depends on how one defines “working.” A cost-cutting, penny-pinching designer who saves his company a few cents per unit on a production run of millions of units might be fulfilling one requirement of his position, but the catastrophic failure of that same dollar-starved, stunted component might very well kill people. Lots of people. If the profit margin still ends up ahead of the cost of lawsuits, it’s a win, right? Get rid of the right of the injured to launch lawsuits at all and it’s a bigger win. In some books, this “works”. Red tape and bureaucracy; who needs ’em. We do. Not all regulation is bad. Watchdogs and whistleblowers protect things that somebody considers valuable. What are the competing interests? What is the cost of “streamlining” things in the name of “efficiency”? Who gets to define what is “efficient”? Prioritizing having the trains run on time comes at the cost of the occasional derailment because of a skipped inspection or delaying scheduled mantenance. Eliminating oversight and enforcement and even more things will “work efficiently”, just like this.
I don’t know about minority voters who chose Trump, but Trump’s core, White base is apparently happy as long as the people they hate, the people Trump and Musk are targeting through this attack on anything and everything DEI (whether it actually is DEI or not), are being punished and are suffering. The question becomes how much suffering they themselves are willing to accept to acheive that end? Most of Trump’s destruction of the rest of the government, which can’t be passed off as having anything to do with “diversity”, is strictly a power grab, with the accompanying gutting or kneecapping of any countervailing institutions that might oppose this blatant executive over-reach. Attacking DEI is even more of a smokescreen than Serwer is pointing out. It helps to distract everyone from the even bigger game of anti-Constitutional reorganization. This is a war on multiple fronts that is going to have serious consequences for everyone, including ignorant, short-sighted, authoritarianism-tolerant Trump supporters.
Loyal toadies parachuted into the vacancies produced by these wholesale public service purges are going to fuck up the vital jobs that still need doing (Health and Human Services, anyone?), and the resulting suffereng and chaos will not magically confine itself to the hated demographics they want to see returned to the back of the bus, or pushed back into the kitchen or closet. How much of the inevitable damage will they be able pass off as “the Will of the People”? White men will suffer right alongside the brown, female, and gay people.
If, through malice or incompetence, the unqualified pilot of the airliner you’re on crashes the plane, killing everyone on board, you die too. You might dislike all the “diverse” passengers sharing the cabin with you, but are you willing to die alongside them, just so long as they die? Any small measure of satisfaction is going to be fleeting, and likely quickly blotted out by the alarm at your own impending death. Are you ready to be a kamikaze passenger?
Tigger@#1. Sometimes it’s tempting to believe that the dumbing down of first degrees has been precisely calibrated to turn out graduates who know just enough about a discipline to be politically plausible without being handicapped by the intellectual honesty inculcated by appreciating its complexities.
Holding up Trump & Co. as exemplars of “competetent white men” makes as much sense as seeing Hitler, Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels as poster boys for Aryan manliness and strength.
Yes, I’ve Godwinned myself, but the comparison was just too irresistable.