In this first year of President Trump’s second presidency, we are witnessing his outright contempt for freedom. We cannot let it prevail.
Take free speech, for example. He claims he has “brought free speech back to America,” yet he tolerates only the speech he finds acceptable. He punishes those who don’t agree with him, including universities, law firms, and businesses that have policies Trump doesn’t like.
DEI and ESG are two of them. DEI emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce, while ESG focuses on environmental stewardship, social justice, and good governance. Using executive orders and fiat, the president punishes states, businesses, and universities for these policies. In Trump’s America, public and private institutions are not free to adopt policies and practices they consider important to their values and success.
Trump’s contempt for diversity extends to immigration. He panders to the element in America that believes migrants and immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Actually, diversity adds character and strength to society, much as it does in nature.
Trump invites us to indulge in intolerance, fear, and hegemony by characterizing the tired, poor, and terrified people at our borders as rapists, drug dealers, and “very bad people.” Yet nobody works harder at being model citizens than people who have lived without liberty, security, and opportunity.
On the first day of his second term as president, Trump called DEI programs in the federal government “radical and wasteful.” He’s entitled to his opinion as the CEO of the federal government, but he overreaches by using federal grants and contracts as a cudgel against DEI policies in universities and businesses. He is not the CEO of society.
Trump argues that hiring policies should be based on merit rather than on sex and race, as though those attributes are mutually exclusive. Yet, he has hired the most unqualified Cabinet and team of presidential appointees in the nation’s history, based not on merit but sycophancy.
Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to block states from promoting ESG policies, especially in regard to climate change. He calls efforts to reduce fossil-fuel pollution “burdensome and ideologically motivated.” The real burden is unmitigated global warming.
Many red states are following his lead. So far this year, Republicans have introduced more than 100 anti-ESG bills in state legislatures; 11 have become law. They typically deny state funding to businesses and financial advisors who discourage investments in fossil fuels.
DEI and ESG are among the many things conservatives ridicule as “woke.” Trump says the U.S. will be “woke no longer.” He and the far right should relax. A vibrant nation allows a free marketplace of ideas. It experiments with policies and trends. The good ones stand the test of time. The bad ones end up in the dustbin of history along with leisure suits, pet rocks, mullets, and disco. A few years from now, progressive Millennials and GenZers will wonder what they were thinking when they decided it was important to reveal their gender preferences with pronoun clusters on their business cards.
America’s attitudes toward immigration ebb and flow. In 1993, TIME magazine featured “The New Face of America,” a computer-generated blend of several races, highlighting that immigrants shape a multicultural society.
“The face of America has been dramatically altered in the final years of the 20th century,” the editors wrote. “America’s face is not just about physiognomy, or even color, although endless varieties of each can be seen throughout the land. It is about the very complexion of the country, the endless and fascinating profusion of peoples, cultures, languages, and attitudes that make up the great national pool.”
While the conservative pushback and Trump’s cudgels are encouraging some companies to abandon formal DEI policies, analysts say an emphasis on diversity continues and is quietly evolving beneath the surface. A talent-advisory firm points out that “DEI plays a fundamental role in market competitiveness and innovation … in a rapidly evolving global economy.”
Most Americans agree. In April, the Public Religion Research Institute found that 70 percent of us prefer a nation of people from a wide variety of religions, 80 percent want the population to be from all over the world, and 64 percent disagree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our culture and ethnic background.”
Unfortunately, it also found that six in 10 Republicans still subscribe to the idea that immigrants threaten America’s culture and white majority. The Great Replacement Theory is the karmic shadow of America’s original great replacement, the racial and cultural genocide of Native Americans by white Europeans from 1492 into the early 20th century.
Some demographers, however, disagree that white Americans are becoming the minority in America. They point out that racial intermarriage is blurring demographic distinctions. In 1958, Gallup found that only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. By 2021, 94 percent approved.
The Center for American Progress, a center-left think tank, points out that Great Replacement theorists want to stir toxic notions of racial superiority, stoke fear of immigrants and minorities for political ends, and cast whites as an embattled majority that must defend its power by any means necessary.
Trump’s animus for ESG is simpler. He prioritizes the security of the oil industry over the interests of the American people. As his EPA administrator puts it, his administration is “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Yet, global warming is a matter of science, not faith.
America will be 250 years old next year, but it is still a work in progress. It needs the freedom to explore new ideas and norms, even those that are woke and disruptive. They can help us achieve our new Manifest Destiny: greater respect between people and greater harmony between the human society and the natural world.
William S. Becker is co-editor of and a contributor to “Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People,” and a contributor to Democracy in a Hotter Time, named by the journal Nature as one of 2023’s five best science books. He previously served as a senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice. He is currently executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.
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