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On or about November 5th 2024 the character of America’s workplace changed. In sharp contrast to 2016, the country’s most powerful influencers have started furiously signalling in the same direction as its incoming political leader. Meta has announced the scrapping of its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program. Mark Zuckerberg has been on Joe Rogan’s show to sing the praises of “masculine energy”. Amazon, whose founder will join Zuckerberg and Elon Musk at President Trump’s second inauguration, is heading in the same direction.
It’s not just the “tech bros” either. McDonalds is abolishing diversity goals for senior management and withdrawing from an advocacy group’s annual survey of “LGBTQ+ inclusion”. Walmart will no longer offer DEI training through the “Racial Equity Institute” or consider race and gender when striking deals with suppliers. Ford, Lowe’s, and Harley-Davidson have made similar changes. And these are just the first movers.
There are prior causes of this reformation. One was the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action for university admissions (a Court tipped to the right by Trump). That changed what Meta called, in its statement, the “legal and policy environment”. For at least a year now liberal universities have been edging away from DEI and reaffirming their commitments to free enquiry.
But these recent announcements, and the emphasis that companies and institutions are putting on them, are products of the election. The breadth of the change suggests that this isn’t just about regulatory favour. It represents what sociologist Timur Kuran, an expert on post-Soviet Eastern Europe, calls a preference cascade - when people who have felt compelled to falsify their opinions in public suddenly feel able to be honest, on seeing others do the same.
Critics of these moves say they show that business leaders adopted pro-DEI policies cynically, and can’t be trusted. They may be right on the former, at least in the sense that many executives were not true believers but allowed themselves to be borne by the progressive tide. They wanted to be seen as caring and current and they certainly didn’t want a fight with the significant minority of their employees who had, by the end of the 2010s, become vociferous internal activists.
Some of it was genuine. As Marc Andreessen (tech investor and Trump supporter) points out in a recent interview with Ross Douthat, the idea that CEOs are ruthlessly focused profit-maximisers is very wide of the mark; most of them are far more invested in being a Good Person. He notes that during the first Trump term the private dinner party conversations he had with tech leaders were perfectly consistent with their public support for the progressive agenda.
Whatever the initial motivation, there is no danger of them changing their minds back, since the new positions feel closer to what most leaders instinctively believe - that you should hire and promote people on individual merit; avoid internal divisions wherever possible; treat people the same regardless of race or gender; do the work in front of you rather than debate politics; show up every day and work hard unless you absolutely can’t. These are common sense principles of successful and thriving organisations and it’s the privilege of those who aren’t in charge to believe anything else. Having been emboldened by Trump’s win - or perhaps, having been scared into being bold - leaders who were swayed or who looked the other way for the sake of a quiet life are now more prepared to stand up for the basics.
It’s hard to recall a presidential election sparking such a far-reaching cultural reset. The 2008 election was momentous for the obvious reason but it did not prove to be a turning point in American history, and neither did 2012. These were consequential political victories but not social or cultural watersheds. Amidst the fallout of the financial crisis, Obama was unable to overcome or even diminish the country’s divisions. Rather than dissipating, the anger of American voters intensified, and found its avatar in Obama’s entirely antithetical successor.
Trump’s 2016 victory was explosive but not decisive. The backlash was furious and sustained. Prominent business leaders joined Democrats and some Republicans in denouncing or expressing deep wariness about the new president. America’s red and blue camps engaged in trench warfare with little movement. In 2020, Biden, having been in national politics since 1972, was never likely to incite cultural change. He could only promise the restoration of normality and competence and did not, in the eyes of voters, even deliver that.
Whatever impact the 2020 election might have had was anyway swallowed up by the coronavirus. I broadly buy Paul Graham’s chronology of woke: that it is a mutation of 1980s political correctness, fermented in elite universities, which gathered momentum in the 2000s and reached its peak in 2021. The pandemic, when combined with Floyd, ratcheted up America’s culture war to a screeching climax. Last year, Kamala Harris argued that only she could end America’s strife and that Trump would plunge America back into the worst of it. “We are not going back,” she said, and she turned out to be right. America is moving on, albeit under the leader they had before.
Trump’s second victory, while far from a landslide, was unambiguous and broad-based. His vote share increased in blue counties as well as red ones (ah, so this is what depolarisation feels like, hmm). In contrast to 2016, his election has been widely accepted and perhaps even welcomed by those who didn’t vote for him; his favourability rating was recently the highest it’s ever been; he is for the first time favoured as much by the young as the old.
Given the Hitler comparisons prior to the election, there has so far been a remarkable lack of hysteria about Trump’s return on the left (except from predictable sources). The Resistance seems to have been sapped of energy and resolution, like someone who has realised they’ve lost an elbow-wrestling match. Trump himself noted the difference in his reception this time around: “In the first term everybody was fighting me. In this term everybody wants to be my friend.”
This extends internationally too. As Lawrence Freedman notes, in Trump’s first term, America’s allies were openly critical of him, pushing back on his hostility to NATO and his outrageous claims, such as that Germany is captive to Russian oil. At the 2018 G7 - described by the then French foreign minister as “G6 + 1” - in Canada, Justin Trudeau led the global resistance. He pointedly framed the G7’s priorities as, “to strengthen the middle class, advance gender equality, fight climate change, and promote respect for diversity and inclusion.” It is impossible to imagine a world leader making such a statement today.
The confidence of the G6 is much lower now. There is no open opposition to Trump within the Western coalition; no Trudeau or Angela Merkel willing to scold him, or to champion a kinder, gentler vision of Western democracy. Everyone is keen to be his friend. And as with the workplace, there is a sense of a return to the rough ground of reality. America’s economic advantage over Europe is greater than ever; belligerent Russia consorts with scheming China. As European countries scramble to increase defence budgets, what Freedman calls “the standard progressive agenda” has become utterly anachronistic.
Britain’s professional culture will be affected by the shift in American norms, since our elites tend to follow signals from the imperial centre. But change will be slow and uneven. This government has little appetite for hacking away at DEI regulations and stipulations, which grow like bindweed. (As Ed West puts it, “Britain is simply not rich enough to throw away money like this - we're like fallen gentry further impoverishing ourselves by trying to ape aristocratic lifestyles.”). In the private sector, LinkedIn is still full of the old mantras, although what proponents of ultra-progressive policies used to say about their critics - that they were old men shouting at clouds - now seems increasingly like self-description.
American politics, even more than in most democracies, is a switchback ride, and Trump may become very unpopular within two years. He will do some popular things, but many voters will be reminded of what they didn’t like about him - his abrasiveness, his unpredictability, the sheer amount of noise he generates. While he is getting the benefit of the doubt from voters for now, it will be harder to blame his failures on enemies who are weaker and less aggressive than they were last time around. In 2028 the Democrats could well retake the White House. But the winning candidate will be one who explicitly disavows identity politics and all that goes with it. Whatever happens in Washington from here on in, the great vibe shift will endure.
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