PAUL GOTTFRIED: The Antidiscrimination Regime

Christopher Rufo, whom the New York Times has unintentionally complimented as “the anti-DEI crusader,” praises Donald Trump for trying to make our anti-discrimination regime more honest. According to Rufo, if such a form of government intervention must exist, the right has decided “it should be one of its own making.” Thus, Trump is withholding money from higher education for not reining in anti-white bigotry. He is forcing Ivy League institutions to live by those rules of nondiscrimination that they claim to embrace. “The terms of this debate have now changed. The president has ensured that the civil-rights regime will no longer be a one-way lever.”

There is a lot to unpack here, but let me begin by pointing out that historians and legal scholars on the right are beginning to view our government since the 1960s as an increasingly harsh anti-discrimination regime. Christopher Caldwell’s study The Age of Entitlement: America since the 1960s provides food for thought on this topic. Since the appearance of Caldwell’s eye-opening work in January 2021, other critics have been examining a repressive regime that is allegedly saving people from insensitive white American males. This regime, built on congressional and state laws, was designed to prohibit discrimination against blacks and women. However well-intentioned the original legislation may have been, notes Caldwell, it led to the creation of a vast bureaucracy and to intrusive regulations purporting to guard us against “prejudice.”

Similar laws and officialdoms have appeared in Western Europe, perhaps in imitation of ours, as I note in my book, After Liberalism. But these measures in Europe typically involve severe restrictions on speech, something that our First Amendment was meant to protect us against. That longtime protection in the US, however, has periodically eroded with governmentally endorsed crusades against “hate speech.”

Since the 1960s, our antidiscrimination regime has progressed in several ominous directions. More and more groups have been included as victims of discrimination; and all of them, we’ve been made to believe, require extensive government protection. Gays and transgenders have joined the list of those whom we are supposed to view as habitually victimized groups. Moreover, permissible speech with and about designated victims of discrimination continues to narrow, as the parameters of what is called Political Correctness become ever more constricting. 

Finally, a deeply divisive position, namely that the white majority is “systemically racist,” has become a public orthodoxy, thanks particularly to the Democratic Party and its usual handmaidens. The antidiscrimination regime has also increasingly focused on punishing whites, or at least those whites who don’t belong to the governing class and its woke plutocratic funders. For those with money and connections to the Democratic Party, however, the behavioral rules are routinely waived.

Since seventy-five million Americans voted last fall for a presidential candidate who proudly boasted of her support for DEI, which most definitely discriminates against whites, males, and straights, it’s ridiculous to pretend that all Americans oppose our antidiscrimination regime. That regime abounds in fans and beneficiaries, and this may be why Republican administrations before Trump hesitated to challenge its power, even though its advocates and implementers hardly ever voted Republican. (RELATED: Plurality Of Voters Support Eliminating DEI Programs Amid Trump’s Crackdown)

It would not be too much of a stretch to imagine that the effort of the Democratic Party to hold on to illegals, including convicted criminals, whom they let into the country, is partly driven by the hope of expanding our antidiscrimination regime. Since most of these illegals are dark skinned and obviously foreigners, they will not only presumably vote for the Democrats but can also be presented as needing special protection as targets of prejudice. Government workers in Europe, who like their American counterparts, vote overwhelmingly for the cultural left, see in Muslim immigration a meal ticket for themselves, their relatives, and their friends.

Trump is going after this unelected regime, since he believes its officials are unfairly discriminating against whites and males. But the swelling protests against the self-proclaimed opponents of discrimination are now increasingly directed against their other iniquities. Government-funded universities, which have reveled in issuing DEI directives, now stand accused with some justification of anti-Semitic outbursts and the persecution of believing Christians. These institutions have become symptomatic of all that is hypocritical and oppressive about the antidiscrimination regime.

The president is therefore trying to make academic and political institutions enforce those standards of tolerance and openness they mendaciously claim to be upholding. He is also going after such darlings of the ideological left as the Department of Education, NPR, and USAID and thereby quite consciously stripping the antidiscrimination regime of its generous government patronage. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Republicans Take Aim At Taxpayer-Funded Union Activity)

This has created an understandable backlash. Among his putative sins, Trump has challenged the right of those who run the antidiscrimination operation to do as they please. This has involved the power to define “discrimination” and “prejudice” and to classify Americans based on twisted definitions of these terms. To their credit, Trump and his administration have refused to concede those privileges. 

Paul Gottfried, Ph.D., is editor-in-chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, a Guggenheim recipient, and and is the author of numerous articles as well as 13 books. Passage Publishing will be releasing The Essential Paul Gottfried, Essays from 1984 to 2024.