The King is dead. Long live the King.
For the first time in 80 years, America appears to have a King. Only the Creator knows what comes next, but things are changing for the first time in my life.
Summary: Peter Banks examines Trump's decisive executive actions on DEI policy and their cascading effects on American institutions, arguing that decades of progressive administrative control through executive agencies, courts, and federal enforcement are now reversing. The author contends that corporate America's sudden abandonment of DEI policies, driven by shifted legal risk calculations, will reshape the entire cultural superstructure as employees conform to new institutional expectations. Banks expresses relief that what he perceives as racial tensions and progressive overreach are finally being directly addressed at the executive level.
In the lead-up to this election, I wrote and rewrote an essay where I laid out what I thought the incoming Trump administration was about to do. I ended up not publishing it for a relatively simple reason: the policies that Trump was proposing would be so transformational that the only essay I could write was one where I claimed Trump was about to, actually, change the country. But I hesitated because America seems to be a society that is resistant to change, unless that change is to the Left. Now in retrospect, I regret the decision not to publish the essay because much of what I wrote has turned out to be true. In fact, on pretty much every issue Trump has acted more decisively than I, frankly, could have imagined.
There has been extensive coverage of this in the press, so please go read articles like this or this if you want more specifics. But what Trump and co seem to have realized is that both the American public clamors for a strong executive after four years of a zombie presidency and that the Left in this country overplayed their hand since the pandemic and they are now facing a real backlash for the first time1. This, combined with Trump’s control of all three branches of government, means that he now has more power than anyone else in recent American history.
And Trump is using this power along many dimensions of American life, from migration to climate change. However, in this essay I want to focus on one area that to me as a White Man is particularly sensitive: Wokism.
The truth is that from a statutory point of view, America has been sort of frozen in the 1960s. Over the last 60 odd years, substantial progress has been made, but it was all built on administrative control of the executive agencies by ideological people, court rulings, and executive orders. Now that the courts are deeply red and the CEO of America is a man with a penchant for revenge, it seems like all of it could just come crashing down.
His executive order on DEI, in particular, shocked me. I’m going to link the whole thing here, but there are two big parts of it. First, “it enforces long-standing federal statutes and faithfully advances the Constitution’s promise of colorblind equality before the law.” Second, it makes explicit that the full power of the state will be used against private companies that do not comply with the principle of color blindness. “It directs all departments and agencies to take strong action to end private sector DEI discrimination, including civil compliance investigations.” This will be transformational. I think that the role legal risk played in the origins of DEI (or wokeness or whatever you want to call it) is broadly underappreciated by academics. But the risk profile of every company in this country has just transformed. If in 2024 the way you reduced legal risk was by pursuing a policy of affirmative action for all protected groups, in 2025, this is now probably your single biggest legal risk.
You are already seeing companies like Target removing all DEI policies, and this will only accelerate. What we are about to witness is what the economist Timur Kuran calls a preference cascade. Or colloquially, the moment everyone looks around them and thinks, “Oh, I’m not the only one.” The only thing that has kept the cadre of 50-year-old, disproportionately straight-shooting and psychopathic men—who basically always run any institution—from implementing social conservatism (which, let’s all be real, would be an easier personal match) is that they were afraid of facing backlash from HR and ultimately from the Civil Rights Code. Well, that enforcement exists primarily at the federal level, and it appears to have just died.
Right now, for all intents and purposes, America is primarily run by a diverse array of huge corporations that help write their own regulations and each function with an amazing degree of competence around the world. The way the managers of these companies feel about social policy matters a lot. We are all, in so many ways, serfs to our employers; as you, dear reader, have doubtless experienced when forced to attend a DEI conference, it is easy to shove down whatever frustration you are experiencing and wear a smiling face while your social superior lectures you. Progressives are just as responsive to the hard realities of capitalist life.
As corporate America shifts right, the entire cultural superstructure we have delicately assembled will shift with it. We, as the small folk, will have the obligation to put it all back together again and pretend—pretend for our daily bread depends on it—that it is universally fair and just.
I’m not sure what the short-term, let alone the long-term, effects of these policies will be, but frankly, I am quite relieved. The post-2020 racial milieu of this country was headed for a catastrophic cliff, and we appear to have swerved off that path at the last possible moment. If a year ago you had told me that the overt racism which has defined my entire professional life in Academia might actually come to an end, I would have laughed in your face. But today. Today for the first time it feels within reach.
All of this has been quite confusing for me. For decades, people on the right have pointed out the hypocrisy of the Left’s racism, and they have simply been ignored. It appears that the only person capable of killing it was a person as full of contradictions and chaos as Trump. I make no claims to know how Trump will govern on net. But on this area in particular, I could not be more grateful to our new King. May his rule be blessed by God, and may he be just and kind. I wish for nothing more sincerely than for this moment to really be the dawning of an American golden age.
Bryan Caplan makes a good distinction between backlash and pushback in this interview with Richard Hanania. The line that he draws is that backlash is when you get less than you could have gotten than if you had asked for less to begin with. I think that this is genuinely true in America. Without 2020 progressive policies, the Left would probably have continued their gradual dominance of our institutions in a permanent way.