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Will We Look at the Beginning of Trump’s Second Term as the Beginning of the End?
The second Trump presidency could represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War. How do we keep hope alive once we’ve truly grasped the danger(s) we face?
Feb 08, 2025
This past weekend my partner and I got together with a group of friends. We’ve been meeting every six weeks or so since 1982. Originally, this group of lesbians convened to talk about sex: what we were doing, what we wanted to do, what we fantasized about doing. But you know how it is with any relationship. Over time, it can come to embrace so many other things. That’s how it’s been with the group we call “Group” (or sometimes “A Closed Group with No Name”). We’ve seen each other through breakups, new lovers, job changes, housing worries, ailments, the deaths of lovers, caring for aging and dying parents, and now confronting our own age and the nearness of our mortality.
We’ve been together through an earthquake, several wars (Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the rest of the “Global War on Terror”), the advent of the Internet, and seven presidents. Now, we’re facing the return of the worst of those seven. The Group’s latest meeting took place at the end of the first week of Donald Trump’s new term. So many disturbing things had happened in just seven days, and none of us really wanted to talk about any of it.
Finally, I thought: If I can’t talk about him with these women I’ve known for more than 40 years, who can I talk with? I watched them, sitting in that living room nibbling on corn chips and guacamole, and finally asked, “Do you think we’ll look back on this time and know that it was the beginning of the end?”
The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat.
I didn’t even need to say the end of what: of American democracy; the rule of law; and the hopes of people of color, women, and queer folk? “The end” alone signified all of that and so much more.
“Absolutely we will,” was my partner’s instant response. The other women agreed that Trump’s second term represents a genuine break with the democratic history of this country; that yes, it’s as serious as that. We sat for a moment in overwhelmed silence.
It’s often hard to recognize the difference between a change, however important—say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade—and an actual break in the political structure of a nation. This country may have seen just one such event in the almost 250 years of its existence: the Civil War that killed between 618,000 and 750,000 combatants (something like 2.5% of the total population) and nearly divided the nation permanently. On that occasion, however imperfect the motives and the liberation, the forces of freedom triumphed over those dedicated to human enslavement. I hope that 100 years from now people will be able to feel the same way about this moment: that the forces of freedom triumphed.
A Paradigm Shift?
Could the second Trump presidency really represent as big a threat to the continuity of American life as the Civil War? It’s so hard to recognize a paradigm shift when you’re in the middle of one. It’s easier when you’ve been dumped out on the other side, but by then it can be too late. This was the experience of many German Jewish victims of the Holocaust. For at least a century, their forebears had been assimilated into German life. It took time to recognize the individual stages of an extermination plan whose full horror only came into focus over a period of years.
The expression “paradigm shift” derives from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn’s pioneering analysis of the way scientific disciplines change over time. As he saw it, a paradigm is a shared fundamental understanding of how a complex phenomenon (physics, biology, a nation) works. A paradigm shift represents the abrupt replacement of one theory (like Newton’s theory of gravity) with something profoundly different (Einstein’s theory of relativity).
The point is that a paradigm shift in this country wouldn’t just be a tweak to business as usual like a change in the way the filibuster works in the Senate. It would be a wholesale upending of the constitutional balance of powers. In this case, it would potentially mean relocating the power to make, assess, and execute the law (powers now resting in three distinct branches of government) all in the person of the president. It would be a change from democracy to autocracy, or as President Donald Trump has implied, to dictatorship. And it’s happening now, in front of our very eyes.
Moving toward dictatorial control is the fundamental purpose of issuing a seemingly endless series of executive orders that clearly violate existing laws—for example, those governing the firing of inspectors general. It’s certainly true that Donald Trump doesn’t like the very idea of inspectors general. We should remember that from his first term. He wants a free hand to run all the federal departments and agencies without watchdogs getting in the way. But far more importantly, that executive order violated the 2022 Inspector General Act, as a former Pentagon inspector general under Trump toldNational Public Radio:
Well [Trump’s order] didn’t follow the Inspector General Act, which requires the president, if he wants to remove an inspector general, which he’s allowed to do, but he must give Congress 30 days notice before the removal, and the substantive rationale with detailed and case-specific reasons for each removal.
The most important function of Trump’s first week as president was to flaunt his power to make—and break—the law by fiat. Similarly, he has used executive orders to attempt to freeze funds already approved by Congress under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. As the Senate Committee on Appropriations has pointed out, it is Congress, not the president, that holds the power of the purse under the Constitution. In its 1975 decision in Train v. City of New York, the Supreme Court denied presidents the power to impound funds Congress has appropriated.
The same logic applies to Trump’s order, through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to impose a 90-day halt to all U.S. foreign aid, civilian and military, except to Israel and Egypt. Again, this is an arrogation of congressional power by the president, and its point was undoubtedly as much to assert presidential power as to effect some as-yet-undefined foreign policy goal.
And that logic will undoubtedly apply to a flood of other previously unimaginable actions Trump will most likely take between the writing and the publication of this article.
The Great Trumpian Litany
The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer contains a long prayer known as the Great Litany. A litany is a ritual petition to God, a list of actions congregants “beseech” God to take. The Great Litany is most often recited during Lent, a 40-day period of reflection leading up to Easter. If you’re standing or kneeling, it can seem to go on forever. And just when you think you might be nearing the end, along comes a whole new section requiring a whole new response. As time passes, you may find yourself covertly glancing at your watch. It’s hard to stay focused through it all.
English speakers also use “litany” in a secular sense, as a metaphor for a long list of anything, especially when recited or recorded. We speak of “a litany of grievances,” “a litany of excuses,” or even “a litany of gripes and grudges,” which was how Vanity Fair described some of Trump’s Inauguration Day remarks.
In the single week since that inauguration, observers have already produced excellentlitanies of his many distressing actions. Although lists of these are available online, there is no space to catalog them all here. In fact, I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, because the list grows by the day, even the hour. Since I sat down at my desk this morning, Trump or his appointees have fired attorneys who worked with Special Prosecutor Jack Smith on criminal cases against him, rescinded job offers to 200 bank examiners who were to have been employed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (the FDIC, which insures our bank accounts), and launched an investigation into the prosecution of the January 6 rioters. And that’s just in the last six hours.
The Episcopal Great Litany, a long list of human concerns, leaps from topic to topic, petitioning for benedictions ranging from protection from “lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine” to a request that God “illumine all bishops, priests, and deacons with true knowledge and understanding of thy Word; and that both by their preaching and living, they may set it forth, and show it accordingly.”
Some might argue that this last request was at least partially fulfilled in the sermon of Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the first woman elected to her position, who, at the ecumenical service held on the occasion of Donald Trump’s inauguration, had the effrontery to address the new president in these words:
Millions have put their trust in you. As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families who fear for their lives.
And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in our poultry farms and meat-packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shift in hospitals — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches, mosques and synagogues, gurdwara, and temples.
Trump, of course, instantly demanded an apology.
In another bit of the Great Litany that seems particularly apt at the moment, supplicants plead with the Divine, “so to rule the hearts of thy servants, the President of the United States, and all others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth.”
If only.
Flooding the Zone
The list of Trump’s post-election actions is its own kind of litany—not of benediction, of course, but of horror. Like the Great Litany, it, too, leaps from topic to topic. To name just a few:
- The nominations to positions of power of the manifestly unfit (remember Matt Gaetz, the ethically-challenged), or the frankly vicious (Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer), or indeed of candidates combining both qualities (Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabard).
- A spate of executive comments, orders, or presidential decrees displaying an imperial greed for territory that would have seemed like so many jokes just a few weeks ago. (Watch out, Panama, Canada, and Greenland!)
- The fulfillment of the Israeli fascist right-wing’s dearest desire: a proposal to cleanse Gaza of its more than 2 million Palestinian inhabitants, in order to make way for the development of what Trump has labeled “a phenomenal location,” where “some beautiful things can be done.”
- First steps in keeping his vow to deport millions of immigrants living in the United States, including a Chicago Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, operation, which included an “embedded” Dr. Phil—further proof, should we need it, that the strategy is to enforce the authority of any decree, no matter how bizarre.
- Elon Musk’s seizure of access to the records of all federal employees and control of the Treasury Department’s disbursement process.
Any one of those actions would have been sufficient to fuel a whole news cycle on its own. But that’s now inconceivable because before we, or the media, can focus on one Trump absurdity, another takes its place in the battle for our attention. To wit: in the last 15 minutes (while I was writing this), The Washington Postreported that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ordered a freeze on all federal grants, “including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” And now, in a head-snapping twist, the OMB seems to have rescinded the order—for the moment.
The Cambridge Dictionary offers an additional definition of litany: “a long list spoken or given to someone, esp. to someone who has heard or seen it before or finds it boring.” Taken together, this apparently endless flood of outrages reflects the infamous observation of Trump’s adviser (and exoneree) Steve Bannon during his first administration: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
And indeed, the litany of Trump’s autocratic actions has already flooded the zone with shit. The question is: How are we to navigate all that excrement? Can we do more than simply hope to stay afloat? Is there any way we can actually dam the floodtide? Or will we sigh and say we’ve seen it all before and find it boring?
Fools for Freedom
At least we can try to build that dam. A few weeks ago, I wrote about some national organizing we could join or support, efforts that are crucial because—yes!—we have to think big. But we also have to think small. I’ve been surprised by how many writers have responded to Trump’s reelection by urging people to strengthen their own local connections with friends, neighbors, and family, while focusing on those among us who are most in need of protection from immediate attacks. In a way, that’s exactly what the members of my group of lesbians have done for each other all these years. It’s what the members of my own household of chosen family do for each other daily, when we leave gifts of food or books, when we plan together to protect immigrant friends at risk of being scooped up on the way to work.
All of that effort, big and small, must be sustained by hope. How do we keep hope alive once we’ve truly grasped the danger(s) we face?
I now ponder that question daily. This morning, one answer arrived in a newsletter by email, from a group called the Faithful Fools. The Fools live in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, where they accompany the other residents in their daily lives in a neglected and despised neighborhood. Being Foolish, they don’t ask whether they can be of any use or recognize the puniness of their efforts compared to the edicts of a president who would be king. This morning’s newsletter brought me these words:
Plenty of people have asked the question, “After all these years, what keeps you going?” And we say, “Well, we keep going because we are Fools, of course.” This isn’t to say that our work is ridiculous or without foundation. It’s to say that we understand how uncertain the future is and we can’t lose our way when the road gets rocky and tiresome…
We aren’t foolish enough to believe that hope alone carries the day or soothes the soul. No, we believe it’s the other way around; we believe that actions driven by justice, solidarity, and compassion are what sustain hope. Small gusts of good will are acts driven by justice and compassion and solidarity, and they are what soothes our broken hearts.
In short, in the age of would-be King Donald Trump, we sustain our own hope by doing the small, essential things that sustain the hope of others.
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To Save Democracy From Trump, Mobilize Popular Rage Against the Wealthy
Anger over a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich will make it more likely that any future lies about a “strong leader” and a “stolen election” will fall on deaf ears.
Jan 23, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump cares little about democracy, except in the most utilitarian sense. For Trump, democracy is a ladder that he can use to ascend to power. He is not interested in promoting democracy abroad or strengthening democracy at home. He cares only about power: corporate, presidential, national.
Before Trump, presidents frequently promoted U.S. democracy overseas, despite its obvious design flaws: elections won by candidates who lost the popular vote, wealthy people buying seats in Congress, redistricting to favor a particular party, a system dominated by two parties.
There won’t be any democracy promotion under Donald Trump. In his second inaugural, Trump promised to promote American power, not American principles. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again, right to the top, and export American energy all over the world,” he trumpeted. He promised to push American cars and promote the U.S. military, not least of which to retake the Panama Canal.
U.S. democracy has long been deformed by the influence of the wealthy. But now the playing field, under Trump, will tilt so dramatically that all but the richest will simply tumble off the edge.
It’s no great loss perhaps that the United States will be suspending its official democracy promotion. Other countries are better positioned to that kind of work. The South Korean people, for instance, impeached their leader Yoon Suk Yeol when he declared martial law, something the U.S. Congress failed to do twice with Donald Trump when he overstepped the law. A number of European countries have achieved a much higher level of civic participation and a lower amount of economic inequality than you’ll find in the United States.
The problem for the foreseeable future lies not with the exported version of U.S. democracy. It’s what Trump will do to American democracy at home.
Trump is a convicted felon who attempted to remain in power even after he lost the 2020 election. The case against him for breaking the law to stay in the White House was likely strong enough to result in a conviction. Avoiding prison was perhaps the chief motivation for Trump to win the 2024 elections. His victory led to the dismissal of the case.
To avoid a prison sentence, Trump resorted to lies, distortions, and threats to win the 2024 election. He also relied on the deep pockets of billionaire Elon Musk to sponsor deceptive ads and buy votes in swing states.
If he had lost the 2024 election, Trump was fully prepared to tear the country apart in an effort to prove that the election had been “stolen.” He did win, of course, though with only 49.9% of the vote, the smallest margin of victory in nearly 60 years.
Day One Dictator
Trump promised to be a dictator for his first day in office. It’s no surprise, then, that he issued the most executive orders of any president on inauguration day. Executive action is nothing new. Both Democrats and Republicans have collaborated in expanding the powers of the presidency. But Trump has gone beyond what other presidents have done, or instance to challenge the U.S. Constitution itself by declaring an end to birthright citizenship. He also pardoned the January 6 insurrectionists, which sends a disturbing message to the citizenry about the lack of consequences for those who attack the federal government.
Trump will also take a chainsaw to government—cutting the regulatory agencies that implement policy and keep Americans safe. Democracy, in the modern world, requires state power. By cutting back on federal authority, Trump will empower instead conservative states, corporations, and religious institutions.
The MAGA revolution is all about destroying public institutions, like government-mandated health insurance. Eliminating the Department of Education will only further undermine what religious institutions and hardline conservatives have been pushing for years: the expansion of private schools at the expense of public education.
Although Trump pitched himself as the hero of the “working man,” he has on the contrary created a Kremlin-like oligarchy around himself. Elon Musk is only the richest and most prominent of the dozen billionaires that Trump has selected for his cabinet. Other oligarchs, like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, have scrambled to curry favor with the returning president, turning such sycophancy into an astute investment decision.
America’s richest people expect to grow their wealth exponentially under Trump. After all, Musk himself made $170 billion just since Election Day, a few short months ago.
U.S. democracy has long been deformed by the influence of the wealthy. But now the playing field, under Trump, will tilt so dramatically that all but the richest will simply tumble off the edge.
Democracy in America has been around for over 200 years. Surely one man, no matter how many super-wealthy people he gathers in his circle, cannot unravel such an august institution. Democracy survived Trump’s first term. Surely, it will survive the abuses of his second.
Or will it?
Coup vs Civil War
The challenge that Trump poses lies not just in the policies he promotes, the public institutions he defunds and delegitimizes, or the wealth he redistributes upward. The new president threatens the very fabric of the country.
The handover of power went smoothly after the last election because the losing party respects the rule of law.
But the erosion of democratic norms under Trump suggests that the next presidential election in 2028 will not go as smoothly. An even more elderly Trump might defy the U.S. Constitution—and its two-term limit for presidents—and stay in office under some contrived state of emergency. Or he might usher his hand-picked successor into the White House in a similarly autocratic fashion.
Paradoxically, it’s the presence of a dozen billionaires in Trump’s inner circle that may save democracy—by fueling the wrath of the disenfranchised and prompting them to support an alternative to MAGA.
The best-case scenario, of course, would be a democratic election in 2028. But let’s say Trump’s successor loses. Trump has effectively said that any election that doesn’t go his way is illegitimate. Should a Trump-inspired uprising take place in 2028 to challenge a “stolen election,” it will be much better planned and executed than the one on January 6, 2021, just as Trump’s second term is much more organized than the first. Such a nation-wide insurrection following any disputed election outcome could unravel an already divided United States.
So, the worst-case scenario for the United States is a coup and the best-case scenario is a civil war? That does not bode well for American democracy.
What to Do?
The only way to avoid these scenarios of coup or civil war is to strengthen democratic institutions even as Trump tries to destroy them. This is no easy feat.
The obvious strategy is to bolster democracy at a state or local level, particularly in areas that did not vote for Trump. This makes a lot of sense, but it will, inevitably, deepen the divide between red and blue states and encourage the very civil-war dynamic it’s urgent to forestall.
Building up the capacity of California or Chicago to fend off authoritarian power grabs from a federal bureaucracy commandeered by Trump will necessarily absorb a lot of the time and energy of the mainstream resistance. It will also put anti-MAGA forces on the defensive as they scramble to file lawsuits to stop Trump’s actions.
But the only sustainable way to strengthen U.S. democracy is to build a movement that includes a lot of the voters who supported Trump. They voted for the current president because they wanted change. They didn’t vote for rule by the rich.
It’s often said that American democracy is being undermined by the wealthy and their capacity to buy elections. Now, paradoxically, it’s the presence of a dozen billionaires in Trump’s inner circle that may save democracy—by fueling the wrath of the disenfranchised and prompting them to support an alternative to MAGA.
Anger over a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich will make it more likely that any future lies about a “strong leader” and a “stolen election” will fall on deaf ears. It’s just a question of what political entity will mobilize that anger and turn it into an electoral force.
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Running in Circles on Racial Justice
Hard-fought victories in terms of racial justice in the U.S. are always met with a vicious backlash that makes progress a circular motion where we end up, it seems, where we began.
Jan 20, 2025
We keep running in circles when it comes to addressing racial justice in the U.S. This means that with every advance we almost come back to the same place and must fight the battles all over again. It doesn't mean that progress has not been made, but the progress retrogresses due to the immediate backlash that charges any advance to rectify past racial injustices as an affront to white people. At best there is an ebb and flow when it comes to rectifying the racial harms and damages of the past.
Race history and the many initiatives to rectify past wrongs is more of a circle than a linear line. It may be an expanding circle considering advances, but for every victory won there is a vicious throw back. It is almost like the 1993 movie Groundhog Day where morning after morning we awaken to history repeating itself, and where victories of racial justice are swept away by the courts or a change in the body politic. The struggle continues, and in many cases, we must begin again.
Every racial justice victory in the United States came about because of the Civil War and the various modes of resistance employed by victims of racial injustices. Mass protests and resistance has generally forced those in power to seek easy answers to placate the anger of the victims of racial injustice. But every attempt to satisfy and pacify the various protests is met with vociferous protests that erase hard fought victories. Just a few examples over four centuries in U.S. history serve as evidence. At each juncture of political protest those in power have historically responded with various initiatives designed to calm the uprisings and unrest. However, any advance is quickly eradicated under the guise of reverse discrimination.
If the United States is ever going to create a society of real growth and opportunity, it needs to stop chasing its tail.
After the Civil War, one man, one vote was militarily imposed resulting in the elections of Black men to numerous political offices in the South. With those advances came the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 abolishing slavery. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to people born in the U.S. This served as a response to the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision that ruled Blacks were not citizens. The 14th Amendment passed in 1868 addressed and attempted to rectify state laws that abridged the rights of Black people. In 1870 the 15th Amendment was adopted that attempted to grant the right to vote to Black men (It should be noted that it wasn't until 1920 that women had the right to vote). In 1871 another Civil Rights Act was passed, also known as the Klu Klux Klan Act, which was a response to the growing terrorism used by whites against Blacks and advances in civil rights. These acts of terror were designed to take away the vote, enforce racial codes, and re-impose restrictions on Black people that had been granted post-Civil War. The backlash turned back the clock on the numerous advances that sought to correct the racial injustices of the past.
In 1865 Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson became President. Andrew Johnson was a Southerner who worked to turn back the numerous advances made in racial justice. Under his administration amnesty was granted to Confederates. Confiscated lands (plantations) were returned to those who rebelled against the Union. The last remaining Union troops were withdrawn from the South in the Compromise of 1877 resulting in the reestablishment of pre-Civil War policies that completed the circle of restoring white Southern rule, reinstating the Black Codes, and allowing states to make policies that re-created de facto enslavement. The circle turned 360 degrees from voting rights, citizenship, anti-terrorism, social rectification, and attempts at inclusion to making it virtually impossible for Blacks to vote, live and work, or engage in the routines of life without fear and intimidation. Reconstruction, a response to racial injustices and calls to the nation to be inclusive and equitable, was short lived—from 1865-1877—and in that short time it ushered in amendments and civil rights acts. However, it was attacked from the beginning, sabotaged, and died because of white backlash. Most of the steps forward were spurned within 12 short years, and all the advances undone. The circle of racial justice took Blacks from winning to having to fight all over again.
In response to the racial justice organizing in the 20th century and the social unrest through demonstrations, sit-ins, and mass marches, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. This act prohibited discrimination in labor and attempted to end segregation in public facilities, public schools, and federally funded programs (keep in mind that 10 years prior, in 1954, the Supreme Court had already ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional and ordered schools to desegregate). In 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed to challenge the many schemes employed by states to abridge the ability of Blacks to vote. It also required Southern states to seek permission to substantively change voting practices. However in 2013, the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holdergutted these protections arguing that they were "based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day." Hence voting protections enacted in 1965 were gutted effectively rendering the act a relic of the past. This is an example of the ebb, or the circular motion, of the nature of racial rectification in the U.S.
In the 21st century white resistance to the freedoms of Blacks to move and live within the society coupled with continued fears of whites towards Black people resulted in "Stand Your Ground" laws. These were boilerplate legislation written by the American Legislative Exchange Council and offered to state legislators which produced glaring and frightening consequences for Black people. Black people were shot for ringing the wrong door bell, or for being in the wrong neighborhood. But all of this played into a larger scheme to erode equal rights and turn back the clock on racial rectification.
The reaction to racial justice is relentless and comes whenever strides are made to make the nation more inclusive. The Black Lives Matter movement emerged, trying to hold people and society accountable. The movement was spurred on by the killings of Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery by vigilantes. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile were examples of police killings. In the streets voices chanted, "Defund the police," and bodies blocked expressways and intersections. Political leaders and bodies across the country entertained discussions on the matter. Corporate America responded along with other entities employing "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (DEI) measures. DEI became part of the discussion in the economic, political, and educational arena. The corporate world responded to the various outcries of disadvantaged groups that included racial and the LGBTQIA community and sought ways to demonstrate their desire to include and sell to these groups. Among those employing DEI initiatives were Amazon, Meta (FaceBook), McDonald's, Walmart, Ford, Lowe's, John Deere, American Airlines, Boeing, Jack Daniel's (Brown-Forman), Caterpillar, Harley-Davidson, Molson Coors, Nissan, Polaris, Toyota, and Anheuser-Busch.
The criticisms however grew louder as the "Turn Back the Clock" and Make America Great Again activists homed in on "wokeness" and began to attack those corporations for their support of racial justice and gay rights. The 2023 Supreme Court decision on college admissions, which struck down affirmative action programs declaring that race cannot be a factor in college admissions, was used to advance charges of reverse discrimination and of lowering standards. Then with the election of President Donald Trump the attacks on DEI found greater energy and corporations demonstrated lesser courage. Each of the corporations mentioned have since rolled back or eliminated their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs. This is another example of a 360-degree turn in the struggle for racial justice and inclusion within the society, culture, and workplace.
Blacks have been historically wronged and remain disadvantaged. We continue to lag behind our white counterparts in terms of education, economics, and wealth. If progress is linear then we could surmise that at some point Blacks would catch up to whites. Instead, in most categories, the gaps and disparities have grown wider. The only way to explain this phenomenon is that we are engaged in a circle of gaining and then losing. The circle may grow larger signifying the progress being made, but the hard-fought victories in terms of racial justice are always met with a vicious backlash that makes progress a circular motion where we end up, it seems, where we began.
If the United States is ever going to create a society of real growth and opportunity, it needs to stop chasing its tail. It needs to change its belief that correcting past wrongs is somehow to penalize someone else. The irony is that those who complain about reverse discrimination are the ones who have been the beneficiaries of a system of discrimination. A strong society must come to terms with its history; tell the stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly; and muster the courage to create and maintain policies, programs, and systems that correct the sins of the past.
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