The ninth of the ten points that Dan Froomkin (1) has proposed as guidelines for a restoration of democratic governance is:
Reassert support for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I once heard a speaker whose name I don’t recall who had worked in Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Administration talking about affirmative action programs, aka, DEI in the present-day Republicans’ favorite insult word for anyone who is not a white, straight man.
She explained that it was Nixon Administration that came up with “affirmative action” as an approach to enforcing civil rights laws against discriminatory hiring. This gave the government a way of dealing with a business or institution who gets caught breaking the law by demonstrably discriminatory practices. Instead of fining the company and/or its executives, or putting them in jail, or imposing a specific requirement that the next x number of new hires have to come from protected classes of applicants – the government could deal with it by directing the company to come up with a plan to address the deficiency. It’s not that requiring such affirmative-action plans is a bad idea. But they can easily be evolved into a way of not holding owners and managers who are knowingly breaking the anti-discrimination laws to direct account. And to give them more time to muddle along and see how little they can get away with.
Enforcement is really the key. And for the Democrats to defend such programs against Republican attacks, they have to be able to aggressively do just that and putting in into stories and language that any potential Democratic voter can understand. When was the last time you heard a Democratic politician pick out some business run by Republicans – those are not that hard to find! - and which practiced blatantly illegal discrimination and used repeated affirmative-action agreement for 10 or 15 years when they kept on violating the law against discriminatory hiring?
I’m sure there will be clear instances in which Trump appointees like Pete Hegseth fired a clearly effective manager or expert and replaced them with a white guy who turned out to be an crook or a sleazebag or an incompetent fool and message examples like that over and over and over again.
Democrats can do that. But they have to break themselves from their addiction to duck-and-cover responses to Republican attacks. (2)
Notes:
)1) Froomkin, Dan (2025): Is it time to start planning a post-Trump restoration? Heads Up News 06/30/2025.
(2) Duck and Cover: Bert the Turtle. Reading Through History YouTube channel 10/02/2012. <https://youtu.be/Lg9scNl9h4Q?si=ZrT9ikrS25gTuFqo> (Accessed: 2025-03-08).
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