Trump’s total war on decency, constitutional law, and Western civilization is bad enough. Almost as galling are the billionaires, academics, columnists, and political hacks who so demonized D.E.I. that they helped rationalize voting for Donald Trump: the useful idiots of the MAGA movement.
Niall Ferguson, the columnist and historian, isn’t the only anti-woke warrior who argued that Kamala Harris was a greater threat than her Republican rival, but he stood out. After years of denouncing D.E.I. as Stalinism and “the path to hell” (in 2021, he even co-founded an anti-woke university in Austin), Ferguson was gleeful in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory. “This election,” he wrote, “was a crushing defeat for political lawfare, critical race theory, woke campuses, biological males in women’s sports, genital mutilation of teenagers, the Ivy League, the legacy media, and Hollywood.” He signed off with “Hail to the Chief” and meant it.
Yet by February, after Trump started bashing Ukraine in order to cozy up to Vladimir Putin, Ferguson was gobsmacked. “I had not realized,” he wrote on February 20 in the Free Press, “that the Trump administration’s idea of peacemaking was going to be a policy of appeasement.”
Really? No clue? This from a jet-setting academic whose geopolitical-consulting firm, Greenmantle, is paid handsomely by corporations and billionaires to assess global trends and risks.
Though, in fairness, who could have predicted the stagy public scolding Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance gave Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday? Perhaps only Putin—the White House rebuke was a MAGA version of the Soviet-style lackey-lashing that the Russian leader loves to act out in front of the Kremlin cameras.
Ferguson’s fellow travelers may not have voted for Trump—many abstained or grudgingly chose Harris “kicking and screaming,” as The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens put it—but throughout the campaign, they helped legitimize Trump’s caricature of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as far-left radicals who would encourage transgender surgery for children, “replace” white men, and betray Israel.
Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was vehemently anti-Trump, and even he said he felt exhilarated by the election, insisting it signaled a return to free speech and common sense. There is no doubt that at times, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, newsrooms, college classrooms, and corporate H.R. departments lost all perspective. But the collective conservative backlash against campus protests, safe spaces, snowflakes, non-binary bathrooms, cancel culture, pronouns, sexual identity, defund the police, and so on was way out of proportion to the problem—especially given the alternative.
Billionaire Bill Ackman, who went to war against Harvard when it didn’t silence or expel anti-Israel protesters, called D.E.I. “racist.” He seems to forget that the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion didn’t supplant merit and equal opportunity; it was intended, whatever its excesses, to better distribute the academic and professional spoils gobbled up by rich, white, privileged heirs like Eric Trump and Ackman’s own children.
The collective conservative backlash was way out of proportion to the problem—especially given the alternative.
So far, Trump is dismantling D.E.I. to replace it not with meritocracy but with his own version of affirmative action, favoring loyalty, obsequiousness, and obedience, or L.O.O. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, a four-star general with 40 years’ experience, was fired last week. Why? Because Brown thought Black lives matter.
Trump’s pick to replace Brown is retired lieutenant general Dan Caine. What are Caine’s qualifications? Trump claims that when they met in Iraq, the air-force general put on a MAGA cap and told Trump he “loved” him and that he would “kill” for him.
If equality of opportunity and merit were the administration’s criteria, would Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaxxer with no medical degree, be the head of Health and Human Services? Would Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and combat veteran with no meaningful command experience, be in charge of the entire U.S. military? Would Kash Patel, a conspiracy nut who has contempt for the F.B.I., be running the country’s largest law-enforcement agency? This week, Patel named an equally unqualified candidate to be his number two, the Trump-loving conservative podcast host Dan Bongino.
There is a long and sorry history in Communist countries of valuing loyalty over competence. It’s like the nightmare scenario outlined by the anti-D.E.I. crusaders, only far, far worse. Trump’s science denialism, be it about vaccines or climate change, echoes that of Stalin, whose favorite agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, rejected modern genetics as “bourgeois pseudo-science” and imposed his own crackpot theories for increasing crop yields. Tens of hundreds of scientists were sent to prison for rejecting Lysenkoism; millions of people died in the famines of the 1930s.
Or consider what happened in Venezuela. Although the country is sitting on top of the world’s most valuable oil reserves, Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro hollowed out the engineering ranks and installed their own people. Eventually, the country was unable to extract and refine its own natural resources.
There is a long and sorry history in Communist countries of valuing loyalty over competence. It’s like the nightmare scenario outlined by the anti-D.E.I. crusaders, only far, far worse.
Even some MAGA voters are worrying about Trump’s foreign policy. The Atlantic recently published a story about Trump supporters who are now suffering buyer’s remorse, particularly America First isolationists who believed Trump when he said he would never commit U.S. troops to overseas wars and felt duped when he promised to take over Gaza by force, remove the Palestinians, and impose a real-estate solution.
And finally, we are beginning to hear some whispers of regret, or at least concern, from some of the leaders of the anti-woke intelligentsia. Once the giddiness of the election wore off, Bari Weiss, whose digital publication, the Free Press, was founded in 2021 as an antidote to liberal orthodoxy, was more honest than most. Even as she celebrated the defeat of the left, she acknowledged that what comes next could be far worse.
“Partly it’s because so much that’s happening right now seems so good—the opportunity so huge—that no one wants to be the wet blanket,” she said in a speech that was reprinted in the Free Press on February 18. “And then suddenly your 16-year-old cousin is telling you that women like getting slapped around and that the Nazis were just misunderstood and eugenics got a bad rap.” Your cousin, or the co–commander in chief Elon Musk.
The awakening of the anti-woke intelligentsia is welcome, but it comes way too late. If an egg weren’t so expensive, they’d have it all over their faces.
Alessandra Stanley is a Co-Editor at AIR MAIL
