Republicans' Descent into "DEI" Madness

This is what happens when one half of your party screws over the other half.

The Dali underneath the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

I’m a proponent of knowing your enemy. If you don’t understand your opponents’ goals and strategies, you’re needlessly blinding yourself. To stay vigilant to what’s happening in the conservative movement, I consume Republican-aligned media to the point Ben Shapiro’s voice haunts my nightmares and National Review podcasts top my Spotify Wrapped. But even if you’re not deep into conservative lore, you’ve probably noticed that Republicans have gone bat-shit insane. While fringe beliefs have always been at the heart of conservatism, their insanity is escaping the backrooms and making its way onto the main stage. And I’m not talking about ending welfare or cutting taxes. According to conservatism’s leading voices, “recreational sex” must be outlawed, Black mayors cause naval disasters, and Taylor Swift’s love life is a secret Democrat plot to steal the 2024 election (I think? That one is hard to follow). While it seems like someone dropped mercury tablets in the CPAC water supply, the source of this right-wing lunacy lies in the very foundations of modern conservatism.

A recent Monmouth University poll found that 1/3 of Republicans think Taylor Swift is a Democratic PsyOp.

Conservatism’s Shakey Foundation

Modern conservatism can be traced back to William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review. During the 1950s and 60s, Buckley coalesced Southern racists with Northern “Rockefeller” Republicans by showing “states’ rights” racism could fit hand-in-glove with “small government” laissez-faire business policies. In doing so, Buckley helped realign America’s duopoly to its current form — social conservatives and business interests went to the Republicans, while civil rights and labor-flavored neoliberalism went to the Democrats. Because there’s a lack of common interest between capitalists and socially conservative workers, Republicans use reactionaryism as the glue that keeps their base intact. By stoking racism, anti-feminism, and other forms of bigotry, Republicans throw red meat to working-class Americans, distracting them from the GOP’s crusade against New Deal programs and labor rights.

For decades, Republicans implemented this strategy through dog whistles: sly code words (“small government,” “states’ rights”, etc., etc.) that conveyed racist intent while providing the speaker plausible deniability. Chairman of the Republican National Committee Lee Atwater infamously detailed this “Southern Strategy” in a 1981 interview. 

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N—-er, n—er, n—er.” By 1968 you can’t say “n—er.” That hurts you. So you say stuff like,  ‘Forced busing, states’ rights’, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than Whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N—err, n—er.” - Lee Atwater, political consultant to Presidents Reagan and Bush

Guided by this strategy, Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, miles from where three civil rights activists were lynched in 1964. Eight years later, Reagan’s VP George H.W. Bush used the infamous Willie Horton ad to put the fear of Black men in the minds of White America during his Presidential bid. The dog whistles continue to this day, such as Jordan Peterson’s frequent rants against “Cultural Marxism,” a slight adaptation of the Nazis’ antisemitic theory of “Judeo Bolshevism” or “Cultural Bolshevism.” 

And while Republicans have frequently let the mask slip, over the past few years they’ve ripped it off and ditched the dog whistle for a bullhorn. Last week a runaway cargo ship crashed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing the structure and killing six. Immediately, conservative influencers honed in on what they deemed the cause of this maritime catastrophe —  Brandon Scott, Baltimore’s Black mayor. According to them, Scott was a “DEI hire.”

“DEI” (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion) is a corporate initiative to hire more women and minority workers. Like all corporate initiatives, its intention isn’t social equality, but better public relations and increased profits. Just as they did with the term “woke,” the conservative movement seized “DEI” and claimed there was an epidemic of hiring ostensibly unqualified Black people over more qualified (but nonexistent) White people. In addition to handing another racist dog whistle to their aggrieved White base (“thug” is their other favorite), blaming Black people via “DEI” helps conservatives distract the working-class half of their base from the problems caused by the other half, the capitalist class. As the inherent negatives of capitalism, such as stagnating wages, inadequate public infrastructure, and the prioritization of profit over safety can no longer be ignored, Republicans have had to go to extreme lengths to claim these are the fault of DEI, transgender children, or whichever pop star released a hit single that week.

We can see this absurd strategy manifest in the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge was built in 1977 and recently passed a safety inspection. But, as shipping companies have built larger ships over the last half-century to reduce costs and increase profits, they have quickly outpaced the capabilities of port infrastructure. As we can see from the graph below, most cargo ships between 1970 and 1980 (when the bridge was built) carried between 1,000 and 4,5000 TEUs, the global measurement of ship container capacity. The ship that crashed into the bridge holds 10,000 TEUs, an average size for modern ships. At over double the size of most ships when the Francis Scott Key bridge was built, it’s no wonder the gargantuan ship crumpled the bridge like a house of cards.

Average cargo ship size over time. (Source)

“Despite meeting regulatory design and safety standards of the 1970s, the Baltimore Key Bridge may not have been equipped to handle the scale of ship movements seen today.” - Professor Toby Mottram, Structural Engineer at the University of Warwick

But aged infrastructure and profit-motivated capacity increases aren’t the only sources of this tragedy. Maersk Line Limited, the company that chartered the ship, had previously punished employees for reporting safety concerns to the Coast Guard. When combined with uncontainable profit-seeking and public underinvestment, the increased corporate power created a perfect storm that destroyed a major highway and killed six workers. But of course, Republicans can’t blame profit-seeking or deregulation for this tragedy. That’d be institutional suicide, like the ice cream man telling you to cut down on sugar. So, they employed their outlandish “DEI” conspiracy to blame the collision on Baltimore’s Black Mayor, as they’ve done with every problem caused by their policies. When decades of airline deregulation results in planes falling apart mid-flight, they blame hypothetical Black pilots. And when Silicon Valley Bank crashed due to Donald Trump reducing Great Recession-era stress-test regulations, the GOP claimed the collapse was because SVB was a “woke bank,” the funniest oxymoron of all time.

No matter which form the red meat strategy comes in, whether it’s “DEI,” “wokeness,” or “globalists,” this Republican talking point is as flimsy as it is vile. It was recently exposed by Don Lemon, of all people, who questioned Elon Musk about his claims that DEI was causing medical malpractice deaths. Musk admitted the hiring of unqualified Black people isn’t actually happening, then quickly canceled Lemon’s short-lived X contract. (Free Speech is BACK!)

I don’t mean to scare you, but this racist fear-mongering is only going to get worse. By courting socially conservative workers while preserving their suicide pact with the capitalist class, Republicans have boxed themselves into a corner. As they can’t and won’t propose solutions to the systemic problems of wealth inequality and public underinvestment, their only recourse is to shout more outlandish conspiracy theories and Henry Ford-level racism, leading them to claim Taylor Swift is a Democrat-CIA operative and the Gonzaga basketball team is a horde of “illegal invaders.”

This is a GOP elected representative claiming a basketball team is a caravan of undocumented immigrants.

As the excesses and contradictions of capitalism become unbearable, so will the excuses made by its most prominent champions. If you want a bit of sanity back in your news cycle, I suggest you subscribe to this newsletter.