The message Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries’ chose to convey in his press conference on 22 January, two days into Donald Trump’s second administration, was that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were “American values”. When I asked him how that could be true when half the country had voted against the party touting DEI programmes, his answer epitomised the Democrats’ post-election confusion.
“It’s not my understanding, based on anything that I’ve seen, that support for diversity, equity and inclusion had anything to do with the results in November,” he began, blaming the “high cost of living” and the “[failure] of working together to secure the border”. “Diversity, equity and inclusion are American values,” he reiterated. “Perhaps I can explain. The motto of the United States of America is E pluribus unum – out of many, one. That’s diversity. The 14th amendment to the United States constitution, one of the most important amendments in our country, provides equal protection under the law. That’s equity. In this country, we pledge allegiance to the flag… in that pledge, we promise one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all – A-L-L – that’s inclusion. Not complicated.” And with that, he ended the press conference.
If only it were that simple. Jeffries’ sleight of hand was to talk about DEI as if these programmes represented timeless American values that all flag-wavers would extol. But diversity, equity and inclusion, the concepts, are different to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the practice. Republicans have long railed against DEI initiatives as a form of discrimination which, in turn, corrupts meritocracy. Consider the US defence department’s Board on Diversity and Inclusion 2020 recommendation for the removal of “aptitude test barriers that adversely impact diversity”. These programmes and the infrastructure around them, such as federal diversity officers, pursue diversity as an end in itself.
The debate around DEI long ago floated free of a brief consensus and entered the gale of the cultural wars. It took President Trump only twelve hours to blame America’s most fatal plane incident in two decades on diversity programmes in the Federal Aviation Authority. (“I have common sense,” the President said, in lieu of supporting evidence.) The collision of a passenger plane and military helicopter over Washington’s Potomac River, and the death of 67 people, was a moment for Trump to unify the nation. He turned the disaster into a crass fable instead – a reminder that “anti-woke” politics can be more superficial than that which it sets out to oppose.
But Trump’s allusion to these programmes is a reflection of how useful they’ve been to the political right. If diversity trumps competence, then the risk for the Democrats is that an unquestioning belief in DEI indicates to voters that the party cares more about the appearance of progressivism than it does about issues such as wage growth, or labour protections, or confronting China. As the Democrats advance through the seven stages of political grief, they should examine their relationship with these “American values” – and ask why America rejected them so soundly last autumn.
The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has argued that the language of DEI emerged as a way for elites to signal to other elites that they are worthy of professional managerial jobs, and therefore that those who don’t support DEI are not. In the economic precarity that marked the 2010s, DEI became a vehicle for elite competition over status and well-paid positions. He notes, for instance, that in 2018 one of Yale’s admissions directors said they expect incoming students “to be versed in issues of social justice”. The woke movement behind DEI which reached its peak in 2020 is relevant to the elites and few else. It has, al-Ghabir contends, no genuine connection with the civil rights movements it claims to champion. Hence Jeffries’ confidence that DEI is self-evident ignores that many voters find such ideas unintuitive.
Asked after the election what they believed the Democrats’ top priority was, voters said the party cared most about abortion followed by “LGBT/trans[gender] policy”. Put that to Democratic staffers and they will say “but we campaigned on the economy!” Sure, but voters thought it was a front. To pretend everyone sees DEI as the embodiment of American values is denialism. At the very least, it is a curious strategy with which to reclaim power from a position of defeat.
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Jeffries’ answer illustrates the messy way in which the Democrats are trying to understand what happened in November. Theories abound, but all are incomplete. Most can admit that the surge in illegal migration under Joe Biden was fatal. A crop of Democratic lawmakers, including freshmen like Senator Ruben Gallego, are fretting over the distance between the party and voters on immigration. Gallego has said there is a “misunderstanding about where Latinos are when it comes to border and border security”. But the message rarely goes beyond a vague promise to work with Republicans on border security. Few articulate an argument from the left about why illegal immigration should stop. If the Democrats don’t define why they want to close the border – is it the rule of law? A desire to protect American wages? Perhaps to foreclose the slavish conditions some illegal migrants must work in? – they will seem insincere.
Others, at least in private, recognise that the woke agenda, exemplified by the DEI programmes Donald Trump has cancelled, weighed them down. A consensus is building that Trump’s widespread election ad – “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for YOU” – made inroads with voters. Pronouns are surreptitiously dropping out of politicians’ bios, most notably those of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the vigour with which Jeffries defended DEI on principle suggests dissenters are still unwelcome.
What about the economy – surely that mattered more than the third-person singular? This is the easiest explanation for Democrats, and so it is the most prevalent. All agree that the “economy”, by which most mean inflation, cost them the election. It’s true that the cost of living was voters’ primary concern. But that idea rarely builds into a comprehensive call for the party to expose Trump’s hollow economic populism and take on the discarded working-class mantle as Trump did in 2016. Or when Democrats do – Bernie Sanders attacked the party for abandoning the working class in favour of wealthy donors as Kamala Harris was on stage giving her concession speech – immigration and woke excess are absent from the analysis.
The diagnosis, therefore, is confused and fragmented. Without accounting for the unpopularity of DEI, disparate lines on the economy and immigration will not lead to a united message. You could go further: getting stuck defending DEI distracts from crafting a narrative that could win back wavering working-class voters. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote in an essay arguing for the left to forget identity politics and return to universalism, “winning majorities is not the same as adding up minorities”.
One reason for the Democrats’ inertia on this issue is that no one has taken responsibility for the loss. Individual senators and representatives can claim they won their own races. Harris’s team blames Biden for not dropping out sooner. Biden insists he could’ve won if Nancy Pelosi and others hadn’t replaced him. Pelosi thinks the Democrats aren’t to blame for the defeat, at all. Well, if not them, then who?
At Harris’s final campaign rally at the Ellipse in Washington DC I walked around asking attendees why they thought people voted for Trump. Racism, invariably, was their answer. And this is part of how such thinking among American liberals has become a totalising explanation for the Democrats’ unpopularity. The election hasn’t changed that. Every single candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee, who will set the strategy for next year’s mid-terms when the Democrats hope to reclaim the House of Representatives, raised their hand when asked at a hustings on 30 January whether racism and misogyny explained Harris’s election loss. “That’s good, you all passed!” the moderator Jonathan Capehart said. One frontrunner, Ben Wikler, the chair of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, recently posted on X that as chair he would “lift up our full coalition—with Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation”. As if a want of identity politics was what hobbled the Democrats over the past decade.
DEI is not a straightforward gift to the right though. Missteps like Trump’s over the air disaster create opportunities for the Democrats. Much of their opposition to Trump over the past eight years has taken extra-political forms: they pursued him through litigation, special prosecutors and congressional committees. But that tactic proved fruitless and treated voters as spectators of politics, not participants. The only option left is to try to sway those who voted for Trump, critiquing his own lazy thinking when it matters – as at moments of national tragedy. His recent executive orders, which disrupted access to Medicaid and allowed officials to receive gifts from lobbyists, show how exposed he is to a populist attack which links these policies to ordinary people’s livelihoods. Ditto his decision to stack his government with oligarchs.
But any attack will remain limp unless the Democrats rebuild their credibility on immigration and reckon with progressive excess. The outgoing Democratic National Committee chief Jamie Harrison told CBS News yesterday (31 January) that he still believes Kamala Harris could win in 2028. “If I didn’t believe [she] could win, I wouldn’t have worked as hard as I did to help her win this last time around,” he said. Some Democrats are responding to Trump’s radical start to office by gripping on to disproven theories, such as that Harris makes a good presidential candidate. This is a mistake, reminiscent of the illusion in 2017 that Trump’s election could be explained away by foreign interference. Both are grounded in the anti-democratic instinct to disbelieve what elections show the electorate wants. Blaming voters for not hearing you rather than listening to what they say in the manner of Hakeem Jeffries is a well-trodden route to defeat. The Democrats will not win again until they understand why they lost.
[See also: America’s Wild West pathologies]