Summary
- Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said that “DEI is back!” following his party’s midterm election victories.
- Democrats messaged on economics, but the culture war issues are far from dead.
- The Left intends to seize power and make resistance to DEI impossible going forward.
“DEI is back!”
That was the message from Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., following Tuesday night’s midterm blue wave that swept Democrats back into power in both houses of Congress and in many state capitals.
Khanna then went down his list of those he conserved to be DEI Democrats who won last night. It was just a list of people who are not straight, white men.
Perhaps Khanna was trying to be provocative. His party is generally reveling in what they think is a massive national mandate for their agenda.
But I think that the fact that Khanna, one of the let’s say “more ambitious” members of the new Democratic coalition, decided to immediately spike the football for diversity, equity, and inclusion after an election in which Democrats did everything in their power to avoid cultural issues is telling.
It’s a clue, a little reminder, of what the modern Left is about.
Leftists haven’t decided that their ideas about race or men in women’s sports went too far. Sure, they made some sheepish mea culpas following the 2024 election indicating that maybe there was a reason some people opposed them. But they mostly abandoned that tack and went into don’t ask, don’t tell mode to get past the unpopularity problem.
It seems to have worked, for now.
But they haven’t suddenly abandoned cultural issues.
They’ve merely conceded to the reality that their ideas on these matters had become toxic to a public that was sick of pronouns, sick of perpetual, over-the-top virtue signaling, and sick of the racialization of everything.
However, and it must be stressed time and again in coming days, it would be a huge mistake to assume they’ve abandoned the field and the various woke ideas that are foundational and nearly sacred to the mostly secular Left.
If it wasn’t obvious before the midterm, it’s certainly obvious now that congressional Democrats, at least, intend to use the next two years to engage in lawfare in an attempt to stymie the Trump administration in any way they can, pulling out the stops to make sure they won’t lose power again.
Hence the flood of gleeful social media messages about lawyering up and subpoenas.
No doubt they hope they can give their base what it wants—prosecutions, reprisals—while appealing to the broader electorate with further appeals to “affordability.” Of course, they won’t do anything to make things more affordable, but the message is what Americans want to hear, and they no doubt hope they can pin all the problems on President Donald Trump and the GOP.
Yet, grabbing and securing power is the starting point, not the finish line for the Left. They are still enraged about the loss of their political and institutional power that forced them to retreat on the culture war battlefield.
They’ve seen a bloc of former Big Tech allies go wobbly on wokeness, colleges have been forced to compromise on affirmative action and racialized admissions, DEI is being expunged from federal and state governments. All nearly unthinkable realities just a few years ago.
Their ability to force issues they spent the last decade obsessing over has been deeply constrained following their collapse in popularity and Trump’s return to office.
There’s little indication, even after a monstrous wave election, that voters suddenly decided that open borders and gender surgeries for children were what we needed all along.
But the Left can’t give up the cultural crusade, especially given its importance to the younger members of their coalition. You can bet that they will push for activist judges who enforce their cultural norms, they will sue and subpoena on behalf of institutions that lost funding over illegal DEI initiatives, they will signal to higher education to rope a dope just a little longer in preparation for dumping as much money into DEI-adjacent programs as you can imagine.
DEI isn’t back. The Trump administration has, often quietly, waged an effective counterrevolution against it. The Left’s power in the new Congress won’t make those changes, both legal and administrative, go away overnight or likely in even within the next two years.
But they fully intend to amass power in the meantime. And they’re dead set on making structural changes to our system to ensure that the revolution will be back on soon. This time there will be nothing you can do about it.
For the sake of the country and the future of Western civilization, we must hope the Trump administration holds the line and refuses to back away from ending the illegal and un-American identitarianism that the Left wants to foist on us. It must continue the work that the counterrevolution started and squeeze these rancid ideas out of American institutions.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
