{"id":74685,"date":"2025-03-11T19:28:06","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T19:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/?p=74685"},"modified":"2025-03-11T19:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T19:28:08","slug":"whats-behind-trumps-attack-on-dei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/whats-behind-trumps-attack-on-dei\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s behind Trump\u2019s attack on \u2018DEI\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By ERWIN FREED<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first weeks of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency has seen a barrage of spectacles pointing toward some of the fault lines in the capitalism of today\u2019s global order. Trump, Musk, and their coterie of apparatchiks are quickly using their control of the executive branch to blame every catastrophe on \u201cDEI,\u201d \u201cwoke,\u201d and \u201ctransgender ideology.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The MAGA regime counterposes the alleged excesses of \u201cthe left\u201d to an eternal \u201ccommon sense\u201d that they claim to possess. Under the guise of fighting Marxist equity, transgenderism, and Green New Deal social engineering<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014most 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\u2019s attacks on the concept are nothing but a screen to usher in austerity and deepen oppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAGA is using its attacks on \u201cDEI\u201d to rationalize censorship, cover up corruption, and discipline the state bureaucracy. Using Steve Bannon\u2019s strategy of \u201cflooding the zone<\/a>,\u201d the far-right forces that have coalesced in the Trump administration are using the \u201cDepartment of Government Efficiency\u201d (DOGE) to create or deepen the connection between \u201cwoke\u201d ideology and \u201cwasteful spending\u201d in the popular imagination. Under this smokescreen, they are putting everything from school funding to Medicaid on the chopping block. The offensive against \u201cDEI,\u201d along with a constant flood of posts and claims that DOGE is cutting \u201cwasteful\u201d spending, sets the stage for more \u201ctraditional\u201d corporate demands. This includes adding work requirements to welfare eligibility that could cut benefits<\/a> to over 21 million people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014education, 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, \u201ccutting the deficit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCommon sense\u201d and the right-wing onslaught<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept of \u201ccommon sense\u201d is one of the most nefarious weapons in big capital\u2019s propaganda tool kit. Donald Trump has declared his regime the \u201ccommon sense\u201d presidency. Marxists have, since Marx, explained over and over how evoking \u201ccommon sense\u201d is a method for transmitting the \u201cruling ideas\u201d in a certain historical moment from the ideas of the ruling class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What does it mean when Trump and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, say that the people who disagree with them lack \u201ccommon sense?\u201d They are raising their personal understanding, and by extension the understanding of their class, to represent \u201cTruth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of racism and job discrimination, their \u201ccommon sense\u201d is that the \u201cmost qualified person should get the job.\u201d Leavitt was very explicit in this during a discussion on FAA \u201cDEI\u201d 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 \u201cskin color\u201d was responsible for the crash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a worthwhile case study in image and reality in the \u201cDEI\u201d fight. What Leavitt is referring to is known as the \u201cBiological Questionnaire,\u201d 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<\/a>, are not only virtually all white and male, but also have a high drop-out rate by the few matriculated Black students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The purpose of the poorly named \u201cBiological Questionnaire\u201d (BQ) was to give more hiring opportunities to students from other \u201capplicant pools,\u201d 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 \u201celite\u201d 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\u2019 experience came from learning on the job and self-study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the \u201ccommon sense\u201d perspective of the white ruling class does not see the actually existing racism in society as a serious problem. They benefit from maintaining it. \u201cCommon sense\u201d 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 \u201cprotected\u201d from competition with equally qualified Black and Latino workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In reality, while claiming \u201crace-blindness\u201d 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<\/a> article quotes one general as saying that ending the practice is \u201cf\u2014ing racist. \u2026 For the Army now, it\u2019s \u2018Blacks need not apply,\u2019 and it breaks my heart.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, the attack on trans people at the level of the president and his cronies also strategically attempts to use \u201ccommon sense\u201d to justify a regime of terror and dehumanization on trans communities. Underlying the ruling-class notion of \u201ccommon sense\u201d is the projection that their understanding of the world is both true, and more or less, eternal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The war over \u201ccommon sense\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDEI\u201d 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<\/em> article: \u201cNumerous 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 \u201cwhite women made the largest percentage increase in board seats gained in both the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500.\u201d According to recent data by the job-search site Zippia, more than 75 percent of \u201cchief diversity officers\u201d are white, and more than half of them are white women.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In attacking \u201cDEI\u201d programs, the MAGA crowd has identified an impossible fight for the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the right is using \u201cDEI\u201d as a stand in for Black, Queer, immigrant, and other oppressed peoples\u2014as well as the idea of climate change. The Democratic Party\u2019s \u201cbase\u201d supports defending oppressed communities. On the other hand, actually existing \u201cDEI\u201d is generally a management-driven, top-down, and mostly ineffectual hand-out to professional white women. The Democratic Party attempted to craft their own \u201ccommon sense\u201d around \u201cDEI\u201d as a solution to race and gender inequality at the expense of embracing grassroots mobilization to defend and expand rights and social integration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important element of the \u201ccommon sense\u201d maneuver is that whether or not politicians and the rich \u201creally believe\u201d what they are saying does not really matter. Nancy Mace, one of the most vicious anti-trans attack dogs, said in 2023<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m pro-transgender rights. I\u2019m pro-LGBTQ. Just don\u2019t go to the extreme with our kids.\u201d 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 \u201cpowerful\u201d people. They do not necessarily share the \u201ccommon sense,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republican \u201ccommon sense\u201d rhetoric has much in common with Nazi and McCarthyite obsessions with \u201cdeviants\u201d and \u201csubversives.\u201d 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 \u201cwokeness run amok\u201d to divide and conquer oppressed sectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s, immigrant, and all potentially \u201csubversive\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberal-socialist \u201cleft\u201d runs cover for racism and transmisogyny<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most blatant recent examples of the liberal press soft-peddling the Trump administration\u2019s attack on anti-discrimination and affirmative action efforts was a Feb. 6 New York Times <\/em>article titled \u201cAs Trump Attacks D.E.I., Some on the Left Approve.\u201d The article uses Jacobin<\/em> 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\u2019s attack on \u201cDEI\u201d at face value. Sankara is quoted as saying, \u201cI am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This view misses the forest for the trees, and is ultimately chauvinist. They are in line with the Times\u2019s <\/em>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<\/a>. In any case, as opposed to Sankara, corporate \u201cDEI\u201d programs are not the real target of the attack, although capital is happy to give up the cover of social progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many liberal mainstream journalists have adopted the narrative that Trumpism is a reaction to \u201cwokeism\u201d gone too far. One article in Foreign Affairs<\/em> lays this out in a way that is also endemic in The Times<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em>, Wall Street Journa<\/em>l, etc.: \u201cBy delegitimizing traditional values in favor of \u2018wokeness\u2019 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\u2014in response to which populist leaders offer problem solving without moral constraints.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These claims are provided, as always, with no evidence. The Democratic Party certainly did not \u201cgo woke.\u201d Biden carried out major rollbacks of trans youth health care, and the party embraced everything from fossil fuel companies to outright billionaires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A somewhat bizarre article<\/a> from the Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA, formerly Socialist Revolution<\/em> \/ International Marxist Tendency) puts forward a similar \u201cclass first\u201d perspective on social struggle. While the general conclusion of the article is correct\u2014that 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\u2014the 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 \u201cas the right sometimes says, \u2018woke is broke.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The RCA\u2019s embrace of the right\u2019s rhetoric on \u201canti-wokeness\u201d is especially confounding given the specific history of the term \u201cwoke.\u201d That word has a long history in African American Vernacular English, with roots in the Marcus Garvey movement<\/a>. As Vox<\/em> points out, Leadbelly, the famous working-class blues musician, used the lyric \u201cstay woke\u201d in his 1938 song \u201cScottsboro Boys\u201d; in an interview about the song, he said that Black people \u201cbest stay woke, keep their eyes open.\u201d That article traces other examples of the term over the last 100 years. \u201cWoke\u201d ideology is, historically, recognition by Black people and allies of the need to be vigilant against white supremacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Underneath the polemic against the Democratic Party\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. capitalists, and Trump, made fortunes on segregation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law\u2014have all benefited personally through systems of racial apartheid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fred Trump, Donald Trump\u2019s father, and Joseph Kushner, Jared\u2019s grandfather, both made their major business \u201cbreakthroughs\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For his part, Fred Trump was arrested while participating in a Klan riot<\/a> 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\u2014the notorious Mafia fixer, anti-Communist witch hunter, and friend of FBI director Hoover\u2014and a fundamentally ineffectual bureaucracy, Donald Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201copportunity,\u201d 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 \u201cDEI.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One example of the general principle of \u201cdeveloping\u201d marginalized communities being warped by this political background was the 2017 \u201cQuality Opportunity Zone\u201d 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 \u201cbenefits\u201d of jobs and new buildings are largely going to people<\/a> outside of the communities the program was sold as \u201chelping.\u201d Landlords, property developers, and banks got the largest piece of the pie through massive tax breaks in the zones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again on propaganda<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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<\/a> the top tier of capital like Blackrock, Vanguard, and Charles Schwab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rufo is credited with identifying and pushing the right\u2019s completely asinine obsession with \u201ccritical race theory\u201d in schools and government. Like similar operatives, Rufo engages in personal attacks, saying in his own words<\/a> that he hired a researcher to find \u201csensational, scandalous, and shocking illustrations\u201d of Kamala Harris\u2019 \u201crecord\u201d on DEI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rufo\u2019s 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 \u201ceating pets,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Figures like Rufo play an important role in crafting \u201ccommon sense\u201d through utilizing social media, press contacts, and public figures\u2014as well as dark-money-funded \u201cgrassroots\u201d campaigns\u2014to 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affirmative action in history<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cRepublic.\u201d Also baked into the Constitution are separate and unequal conditions for Indigenous communities, codifying the ideology justifying the theft of all Native controlled lands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Black, Latino,Queer, Indigenous, and immigrant workers are forced into the worst paid, most precarious, most dangerous, and most essential<\/em> jobs. The old adage of \u201clast hired, first fired\u201d remains true for Black and other oppressed workers. This is the general \u201ceconomic\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea of \u201cpreferential\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An important historic touchstone was the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau, established during Radical Reconstruction. In a classic article<\/a>, W.E.B. Du Bois describes how \u201cthe government of the unreconstructed South was \u2026 put very largely in the hands of the Freedmen\u2019s Bureau.\u201d Although always partial and ultimately defeated, the work of the Freedmen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014including union apprenticeships, housing, and town codes\u2014were the order of the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s proposed 1941 March on Washington, the F.D.R. administration made small concessions like the formal ban on discrimination in the armed forces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cThe Color of Law\u201d and \u201cThe Color of Money,\u201d legal, informal, and structural restraints against Black people benefiting from the so-called \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d remained official policy of the federal and state governments through the 1960s and often much later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After decades of partial gains towards \u201cmerit-based\u201d 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 \u201cvery specific demands which far exceed tokenism.\u201d One official recognized that \u201c[we] used to talk simply of merit employment\u2026 Now, National CORE is talking in terms of \u2018compensatory\u2019 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\u201d (quotes taken from \u201cThe Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action,\u201d Terry Anderson, 76). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The main \u201csuccess\u201d story for the movement lay in federal and state government jobs. As Nancy MacLean has documented in \u201cDemocracy in Chains,\u201d sections of the ruling class\u2014including the Koch and Coors dynasties\u2014began immediately organizing a long-term legal and extra-legal strategy to undo these very modest victories. Such is the origin of the modern \u201cschool choice\u201d movement, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Affirmative action gains were always partial and limited. A tension always exists between the idea of \u201cequal opportunity\/non-discrimination\u201d and affirmative action. Whereas \u201cequal opportunity\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against the turn<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s livelihood. And as an alienated mode of education, they failed to seriously advance the cause of women, LGBT+ people, and racialized employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cDEI\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201ccombined\u201d character in this country. Workers\u2019 power is impossible without also taking up the fights for Black self-determination, Land Back, and the socialization of what MAGA considers \u201cwomen\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By ERWIN FREED The first weeks of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency has seen a barrage of spectacles pointing toward some of the fault lines in the capitalism of today\u2019s global order. Trump, Musk, and their coterie of apparatchiks are quickly using their control of the executive branch to blame every catastrophe on \u201cDEI,\u201d \u201cwoke,\u201d and \u201ctransgender […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":74686,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"litci_post_political_author":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3498],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-usa"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat\u2019s behind Trump\u2019s attack on \u2018DEI\u2019? - International Worker's League<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/whats-behind-trumps-attack-on-dei\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What\u2019s behind Trump\u2019s attack on \u2018DEI\u2019? - International Worker's League\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By ERWIN FREED The first weeks of Donald Trump\u2019s presidency has seen a barrage of spectacles pointing toward some of the fault lines in the capitalism of today\u2019s global order. 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