By ERWIN FREED
The first weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency has seen a barrage of spectacles pointing toward some of the fault lines in the capitalism of today’s global order. Trump, Musk, and their coterie of apparatchiks are quickly using their control of the executive branch to blame every catastrophe on “DEI,” “woke,” and “transgender ideology.” In their hands, the sins of U.S. imperialism have become the fault of trans, Latino, and Black communities and their alleged allies in the state, universities, non-profits, and media.
The MAGA regime counterposes the alleged excesses of “the left” to an eternal “common sense” that they claim to possess. Under the guise of fighting Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering,” they are carrying out a massive series of attacks on the basic protections that workers and oppressed people have won through struggle. The attacks are unilateral and unaccountable even by the mostly fake norms of bourgeois democracy.
The Trump-Musk-Vought triumvirate is simply shifting blame for the U.S. imperial decline and the harsh realities for oppressed and working people here away from the capitalist ruling class and onto the shoulders of the most victimized people—most openly, the trans and immigrant communities. While corporate DEI programs are themselves largely a fig-leaf covering the reality of ongoing workplace and social discrimination, the Trump administration’s attacks on the concept are nothing but a screen to usher in austerity and deepen oppression.
MAGA is using its attacks on “DEI” to rationalize censorship, cover up corruption, and discipline the state bureaucracy. Using Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone,” the far-right forces that have coalesced in the Trump administration are using the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to create or deepen the connection between “woke” ideology and “wasteful spending” in the popular imagination. Under this smokescreen, they are putting everything from school funding to Medicaid on the chopping block. The offensive against “DEI,” along with a constant flood of posts and claims that DOGE is cutting “wasteful” spending, sets the stage for more “traditional” corporate demands. This includes adding work requirements to welfare eligibility that could cut benefits to over 21 million people.
The failure of the Democratic Party to mount a visible or effective opposition suggests that they can imagine later benefiting from the strengthened executive state and corporate control of its most ideological apparatuses—education, police, etc. As celebrity billionaire Mark Cuban pointed out in a post on X, the Democratic Party agrees with the economic, if not the ideological, basis for the mass layoff program, “cutting the deficit.”
“Common sense” and the right-wing onslaught
The concept of “common sense” is one of the most nefarious weapons in big capital’s propaganda tool kit. Donald Trump has declared his regime the “common sense” presidency. Marxists have, since Marx, explained over and over how evoking “common sense” is a method for transmitting the “ruling ideas” in a certain historical moment from the ideas of the ruling class.
What does it mean when Trump and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, say that the people who disagree with them lack “common sense?” They are raising their personal understanding, and by extension the understanding of their class, to represent “Truth.”
In the case of racism and job discrimination, their “common sense” is that the “most qualified person should get the job.” Leavitt was very explicit in this during a discussion on FAA “DEI” policies that she alleged led to the tragic collision between a Blackhawk helicopter and passenger airliner in DC on Jan. 31. In that briefing, she said directly that a pre-hiring questionnaire that asks questions about “skin color” was responsible for the crash.
This is a worthwhile case study in image and reality in the “DEI” fight. What Leavitt is referring to is known as the “Biological Questionnaire,” an additional application requirement added to FAA applications in 2014. That questionnaire was implemented not specifically to hire more Black people, but rather out of a recognition that the standardized test used for recruitment effectively prioritized applicants who attended university or college-based Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative programs. These programs, a study found, are not only virtually all white and male, but also have a high drop-out rate by the few matriculated Black students.
The purpose of the poorly named “Biological Questionnaire” (BQ) was to give more hiring opportunities to students from other “applicant pools,” which includes veterans and already active air traffic control workers. These alternate pools are disproportionately Black and include more women. The BQ simply added weight to high-scoring applicants from these less “elite” pools in order to attempt to redress the social discrimination. It is no accident that the people shelling out money to attend full-time Collegiate Training Initiatives are generally white, or that qualified Black applicants’ experience came from learning on the job and self-study.
But the “common sense” perspective of the white ruling class does not see the actually existing racism in society as a serious problem. They benefit from maintaining it. “Common sense” preference for whites also has the effect of stoking fears within the white working class and petty bourgeoisie that, until now, their jobs have not been “protected” from competition with equally qualified Black and Latino workers.
In reality, while claiming “race-blindness” and preaching meritocracy, the Army, Navy, Space Force, and Air Force are already signaling a massive curtailment of elite Black engineers in the military. The Defense Department stopped a longstanding practice of sending high-level recruiters to the Black Engineer of the Year Awards and banned currently enlisted soldiers and officers from attending in uniform. A Military.com article quotes one general as saying that ending the practice is “f—ing racist. … For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply,’ and it breaks my heart.”
Similarly, the attack on trans people at the level of the president and his cronies also strategically attempts to use “common sense” to justify a regime of terror and dehumanization on trans communities. Underlying the ruling-class notion of “common sense” is the projection that their understanding of the world is both true, and more or less, eternal.
The war over “common sense” has become effective for the far right partly because of the fact that the Democratic Party and its connected non-profit apparatuses basically agree with the principles. While the Democratic Party has given superficial support to corporate DEI principles and allowed the expansion of trans rights on a largely local basis, this political party of the bosses has never given full-throated support to effective affirmative action measures in any arena of social life and has worked systematically to dampen struggles to apply the principle. It is also important to recognize that the Democrats have made it plain through five decades of refusing to codify abortion access into law that they see questions of social oppression as negotiating tools they can use in parliamentary maneuvers.
“DEI” programs themselves were largely implemented as a means of giving the illusion of progress in the wake of mass struggles like the Michael Brown and George Floyd uprisings. They have done very little to actually benefit Black, Queer, and other oppressed workers. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out in a recent New Yorker article: “Numerous studies have shown that most of the benefits of D.E.I. have accrued to white women. A report on board diversity from the consulting firm Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity found that “white women made the largest percentage increase in board seats gained in both the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500.” According to recent data by the job-search site Zippia, more than 75 percent of “chief diversity officers” are white, and more than half of them are white women.”
In attacking “DEI” programs, the MAGA crowd has identified an impossible fight for the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the right is using “DEI” as a stand in for Black, Queer, immigrant, and other oppressed peoples—as well as the idea of climate change. The Democratic Party’s “base” supports defending oppressed communities. On the other hand, actually existing “DEI” is generally a management-driven, top-down, and mostly ineffectual hand-out to professional white women. The Democratic Party attempted to craft their own “common sense” around “DEI” as a solution to race and gender inequality at the expense of embracing grassroots mobilization to defend and expand rights and social integration.
An important element of the “common sense” maneuver is that whether or not politicians and the rich “really believe” what they are saying does not really matter. Nancy Mace, one of the most vicious anti-trans attack dogs, said in 2023, “I’m pro-transgender rights. I’m pro-LGBTQ. Just don’t go to the extreme with our kids.” Peter Thiel, who aggressively opposed gay marriage, is himself gay and married his long term partner Matt Danzeisen in 2017. This is all to point out the cynicism and opportunism of these politicians and “powerful” people. They do not necessarily share the “common sense,” but they do understand the strategic purposes for base-building and developing scapegoats. These activities help consolidate their power at the expense of working-class oppressed people, while also helping develop and maintain loyalty networks based explicitly on racial and gender-based exclusion.
Republican “common sense” rhetoric has much in common with Nazi and McCarthyite obsessions with “deviants” and “subversives.” The point is to draw clear lines within the current racist social structure and state that they are not only natural but also necessary for a functioning society. Another function is manufacturing or escalating fear based on the apprehensions of the white ruling class into broader social circles, including Black and Latino communities. In short, it is an attempt to utilize the rhetoric of “wokeness run amok” to divide and conquer oppressed sectors.
These elements are represented perhaps most starkly in the growing right-wing censorship in schools and libraries. Workers in these institutions are expected to carry out the line of erasing Black, Queer, women’s, immigrant, and all potentially “subversive” histories and topics or risk losing their jobs. This is a critical touchpoint for the fightback against censorship and the onslaught attempting to rewrite and cover-up history. Librarians and education workers are and can lead the whole working class in a mass movement against censorship and in defense of free speech.
Liberal-socialist “left” runs cover for racism and transmisogyny
One of the most blatant recent examples of the liberal press soft-peddling the Trump administration’s attack on anti-discrimination and affirmative action efforts was a Feb. 6 New York Times article titled “As Trump Attacks D.E.I., Some on the Left Approve.” The article uses Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sankara to counterpose fighting oppression to trade-union struggles, citing the case of Costco. The article goes on to say that the strongest method for overcoming racial prejudice is unionization, which is in some ways obviously true. However, Sankara and the article both simply accept Trump’s attack on “DEI” at face value. Sankara is quoted as saying, “I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now.”
This view misses the forest for the trees, and is ultimately chauvinist. They are in line with the Times’s longstanding editorial policy of dehumanizing trans people. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and trans activists have been pointing this out for years, to no avail. In any case, as opposed to Sankara, corporate “DEI” programs are not the real target of the attack, although capital is happy to give up the cover of social progress.
Many liberal mainstream journalists have adopted the narrative that Trumpism is a reaction to “wokeism” gone too far. One article in Foreign Affairs lays this out in a way that is also endemic in The Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc.: “By delegitimizing traditional values in favor of ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture, progressive movements have alienated voters for whom religion, family, and national patriotism have provided a stable compass in a complex, chaotic world. At the same time, facing growing economic insecurity, many in lower income groups, or those, like white male citizens, who may feel stigmatized by liberal universalism, have found it easy to blame social ills on migrants, open borders, and the privileges that progressive governments have granted to a broadening array of minority groups. In short, progressives have offered moral constraints without problem solving—in response to which populist leaders offer problem solving without moral constraints.”
These claims are provided, as always, with no evidence. The Democratic Party certainly did not “go woke.” Biden carried out major rollbacks of trans youth health care, and the party embraced everything from fossil fuel companies to outright billionaires.
A somewhat bizarre article from the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA, formerly Socialist Revolution / International Marxist Tendency) puts forward a similar “class first” perspective on social struggle. While the general conclusion of the article is correct—that the Democratic Party (and Republican Party, a la Marco Rubio) uses women, Queer, and non-white candidates as a means of distracting from and papering over their pro-business policies—the larger point about the massive attack on genuine gains that were won through immense, often armed, struggle by Black workers is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the article claims that “as the right sometimes says, ‘woke is broke.’”
The RCA’s embrace of the right’s rhetoric on “anti-wokeness” is especially confounding given the specific history of the term “woke.” That word has a long history in African American Vernacular English, with roots in the Marcus Garvey movement. As Vox points out, Leadbelly, the famous working-class blues musician, used the lyric “stay woke” in his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys”; in an interview about the song, he said that Black people “best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” That article traces other examples of the term over the last 100 years. “Woke” ideology is, historically, recognition by Black people and allies of the need to be vigilant against white supremacy.
Underneath the polemic against the Democratic Party’s obvious cynicism and hypocrisy is an implicit rejection of political demands based on race, gender, and sexuality. This is, again, chauvinist. Worse, the RCA appears to be separating the struggle against political oppression from workplace exploitation. This is a ridiculous distortion of Marxism. The exploitation of working people is enhanced and deepened through racial and gender oppression. To abandon the struggles for integration and self-determination is to abandon the class struggle.
U.S. capitalists, and Trump, made fortunes on segregation
While virtually the entire ruling class and their political representatives gained their wealth and power at least in part from the racist social order, it is worth acknowledging that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner—Donald Trump’s son-in-law—have all benefited personally through systems of racial apartheid.
Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, and Joseph Kushner, Jared’s grandfather, both made their major business “breakthroughs” directly from segregated housing policy implemented after World War II. Kushner made the Faustian bargain with U.S. imperialism and, along with the rest of his family, moved full force into the Democratic Party machines of New York and New Jersey. Equally important, the Kushners developed a plethora of personal, political, and business links in Israel and with U.S.-based Zionist organizations.
For his part, Fred Trump was arrested while participating in a Klan riot in 1927. The Trump Organization was brought to court in the 1970s for actively discriminating against potential Black tenants. Ultimately, through political connections, an aggressive legal campaign directed by Roy Cohn—the notorious Mafia fixer, anti-Communist witch hunter, and friend of FBI director Hoover—and a fundamentally ineffectual bureaucracy, Donald Trump’s first official foray into the politics of landlordism resulted in a slap on the wrist. In a larger sense, Trump was rewarded by these same political networks with illogical tax-abatements on future development projects.
The real affirmative action that exists in the United States is the system of privileges giving white people, and particularly rich white men, preferential status in “opportunity,” to maintain their decision-making power as a whole. This system of privileges is what Trump, Musk, and all of their corporate backers aim to codify through the various pronouncements, executive orders, and mass media propaganda campaigns against “DEI.”
One example of the general principle of “developing” marginalized communities being warped by this political background was the 2017 “Quality Opportunity Zone” initiative put into law by Trump. That project was ostensibly meant to provide investment to underserved communities and increase access to affordable housing and better public infrastructure. Instead, it has turned into a driver of gentrification and handouts. The “benefits” of jobs and new buildings are largely going to people outside of the communities the program was sold as “helping.” Landlords, property developers, and banks got the largest piece of the pie through massive tax breaks in the zones.
Again on propaganda
The strategy of creating a moral panic based on buzzwords and dog whistles to justify seemingly unrelated political maneuvers is not new. However, it is useful to look at the particular individuals creating and shaping these narratives. Look, for example, at Chris Rufo, a right-wing intellectual and provocateur. Rufo is currently head of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a far-right think tank co-founded by Reagan’s CIA director William Casey, and America Studios, a propaganda production company. His efforts are funded largely by openly far-right foundations and individuals, but also include the top tier of capital like Blackrock, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab.
Rufo is credited with identifying and pushing the right’s completely asinine obsession with “critical race theory” in schools and government. Like similar operatives, Rufo engages in personal attacks, saying in his own words that he hired a researcher to find “sensational, scandalous, and shocking illustrations” of Kamala Harris’ “record” on DEI.
Rufo’s writings and public comments have been particularly influential with the Trump team. He was also a major figure promoting the complete lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were “eating pets,” offering $5000 to anyone who could provide evidence. This fabricated and debunked racist slander against Haitians was echoed by both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance.
Figures like Rufo play an important role in crafting “common sense” through utilizing social media, press contacts, and public figures—as well as dark-money-funded “grassroots” campaigns—to highlight their particular focus for the moment and create the illusion that it is both real and important. They use mass surveillance tools like those developed by Cambridge Analytica to identify the best pressure points to push on in order to maximize confusion and categorical, one-sided thinking.
Affirmative action in history
The history of the United States is the history of preferential policies for whites at the expense of everyone else. From the maintenance of racial slavery in the Constitution to de jure and de facto bans on Black people in jobs and housing, anti-Black racism and pro-white laws and practices were and are the basic principles of the “Republic.” Also baked into the Constitution are separate and unequal conditions for Indigenous communities, codifying the ideology justifying the theft of all Native controlled lands.
Black, Latino,Queer, Indigenous, and immigrant workers are forced into the worst paid, most precarious, most dangerous, and most essential jobs. The old adage of “last hired, first fired” remains true for Black and other oppressed workers. This is the general “economic” base of oppression. Under the leadership of all federal governments since Lyndon B. Johnson, the state has erected a massive system of surveillance, militarized policing, and prisons to maintain this social order. An important aspect of these coercive measures is that they are fundamentally a system of control for the most exploited and central workers within the entire U.S. political economy and social reproduction. Two obvious examples are the general lack of protections for agricultural and domestic workers.
The idea of “preferential” policies meant to address segregation and Black oppression has a long history. All positive developments on this front have been the result of the self-activity of Black people in the United States. All have been viciously attacked by the white ruling class and their racist foot soldiers.
An important historic touchstone was the Freedmen’s Bureau, established during Radical Reconstruction. In a classic article, W.E.B. Du Bois describes how “the government of the unreconstructed South was … put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen’s Bureau.” Although always partial and ultimately defeated, the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau included opening new lands to Black occupancy, forced hiring of Black workers, massive expansion of education in Southern Black communities, and defending voting rights for Black men. All of this was done effectively through military occupation of Southern states.
Radical Reconstruction gave way, through betrayal by Northern capital and indifference or outright rejection by the white working class and middle class, to an era of all-out, state-backed Klan terrorism against the Southern Black population. Lynchings were a regular occurrence and were often attended by thousands of jubilant white Southerners, including children. In the North, sundown towns, police and white racist violence against Black people, and overt segregation in jobs—including union apprenticeships, housing, and town codes—were the order of the day.
The growth of Black nationalist sentiment and organizing, independent Black mobilizations around the country and in the labor movement, buttressed by a growing U.S. economy and Black sacrifices in various imperialist wars, began to force shifts in the government and public sentiment. Ceding to pressure from threats like A. Philip Randolph’s proposed 1941 March on Washington, the F.D.R. administration made small concessions like the formal ban on discrimination in the armed forces.
In reality, racial discrimination and segregation remained the law of the land at all levels. As Richard Rothstein and Mehrsa Baradaran have respectively documented in “The Color of Law” and “The Color of Money,” legal, informal, and structural restraints against Black people benefiting from the so-called “American Dream” remained official policy of the federal and state governments through the 1960s and often much later.
After decades of partial gains towards “merit-based” integration, civil rights and Black power activists began putting forward a vision of what would now be called affirmative action. In 1962, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) national office sent a directive to local CORE units. That directive demanded that CORE members and collaborators make “very specific demands which far exceed tokenism.” One official recognized that “[we] used to talk simply of merit employment… Now, National CORE is talking in terms of ‘compensatory’ hiring. We are approaching employers with the proposition that they have effectively excluded Negroes from their work force for a long time and that they now have a responsibility and obligation to make up for their past sins” (quotes taken from “The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action,” Terry Anderson, 76).
The main “success” story for the movement lay in federal and state government jobs. As Nancy MacLean has documented in “Democracy in Chains,” sections of the ruling class—including the Koch and Coors dynasties—began immediately organizing a long-term legal and extra-legal strategy to undo these very modest victories. Such is the origin of the modern “school choice” movement, for example.
Affirmative action gains were always partial and limited. A tension always exists between the idea of “equal opportunity/non-discrimination” and affirmative action. Whereas “equal opportunity” measures ban explicit discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc., affirmative action explicitly prioritizes bringing demographics in a particular sector (housing, a workplace, an industry, etc) to be representative of the population as a whole.
Against the turn
Our response must be full-throated defense and a fight to expand, not demolish, the social gains won through historic struggles. Elite-run DEI programs were themselves meant to be a bulwark against working-class struggle. On the one hand, by acknowledging the existence of structural inequality, they were designed to provide a release valve for anger against the racist and sexist system. On the other hand, the programs were usually received as a management strategy foisted upon workers as job requirements. Thus, they were sometimes viewed as a potential threat to one’s livelihood. And as an alienated mode of education, they failed to seriously advance the cause of women, LGBT+ people, and racialized employees.
These sorts of corporate and foundation-funded programs are not the way to defeat oppression in U.S. society. Instead, as has been the case throughout the entire history of this country, the real way to make change is through independent organization rooted in Black, Queer, Indigenous, and other oppressed communities.
There is a need to build the struggle against these frontal attacks on the working class that is separate from the ruling-class maneuvers that use our rights as pawns in their game. Mass meetings countering book banning and reactionary education curriculums can develop into movement organizations. Mobilizations in defense of trans health care, as are happening in New York City, can connect with trade unions, Black community and immigrant organizations, and other progressive forces to demand and expand rights for the trans community as a whole.
Both liberal and conservative capitalists, represented by and funding both parties, show every day that they do not stand for the rights and livelihood of working people. We cannot let them use the attack on “DEI” as a cover for rolling back already limited democratic forms in the United States, as a cover for increased militarism, or to scapegoat oppressed communities. These facts should be readily apparent to all. The task is to build a movement that can stop these forces in their tracks. Unions must take up affirmative action in all of their mobilizations and political work. Just as seniority empowers and unifies workers, so does the fight against discrimination, Queerphobia, and racism in the workplace.
In the final analysis, as long as control of production, distribution, and the state remain in the hands of capital, democratic rights will always be under attack. Creating the conditions to really abolish social oppression will only be possible with the working class taking control of production, that is to say, building a socialist society. Due to the foundational role of racism in U.S. capitalism, the socialist revolution will have a “combined” character in this country. Workers’ power is impossible without also taking up the fights for Black self-determination, Land Back, and the socialization of what MAGA considers “women’s work.”
