Behold—the GOP War on Acronyms! Why Stunt Legislation to Ban DEI Will Fail | Opinion

Congressional Republicans introduced a bill last week to ban Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal government, opening up yet another front in the party's chaotic culture wars that seem to consume their every (anti-)waking moment. Apart from the fact that this bill has no chance of becoming law absent a total GOP takeover in Washington next year, it will also do virtually nothing to address the problem it purports to solve. Companies appear to value the goals of these programs, and will continue trying to build diverse workforces and inclusive office environments if they want to attract top-shelf talent. Having Congress try to eliminate an acronym will only lead to new acronyms, because ultimately, you can't ban values.

DEI refers to efforts to build more diverse workforces, where people from all backgrounds are treated fairly and where "all employees feel their voices will be heard," as described by Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-Ark.) former employer McKinsey & Company, the prestige consulting firm that people on both the Left and Right love to hate. This typically involves creating a well-paid position that directs a company's DEI efforts, supervising workshops, training, outreach and other practices that, when you describe them, sound less like a nefarious, racist plot and more like boilerplate strategic planning and team-building.

Yet for the architects of this latest moral panic, "DEI" has come to stand in for everything conservatives dislike about contemporary workplace culture and hiring practices. Like a serial monogamist stepping seamlessly from one relationship to the next, conservatives are using DEI to take the place of the "CRT" panic, despite the lack of a decisive battlefield defeat of Critical Race Theory itself. That push has ended in some insipid, ineffective legislation in red states, where the only meaningful achievement has been to further alienate teachers. Parents hopped up on Fox News propaganda ran for school boards and subsequently implemented unpopular culture war policies like book bans, patriotically correct curricula, and speech restrictions on teachers and librarians. A lot of them went down in defeat in the next school board election, as parents discovered that they don't want their kids' schools turned into sites of never-ending ideological combat after all.

As with CRT, it is highly doubtful that most people who are purportedly angry about it could say what DEI actually is or how it works, even in their own workplaces. More likely, they associate it with online employee trainings that they find annoying and pedantic, and with ideas about race and gender that they see as tiresome or offensive.

If it makes them feel any better, most companies are probably only installing DEI offices and policies to coat their unapologetic naked profit-making in a thin patina of justice, as best lampooned on Amazon's ultraviolet superhero satire The Boys, where corporate conglomerate Vought tries ineptly to soften its image by, for example, stocking a theme park with BLM BLTs and Woke Woks.

But here as elsewhere, Republicans are acting with great, unearned confidence that they are on the right side of public opinion when, in fact, they are not. A Washington Post/Ipsos poll published today showed that 61 percent of Americans, including a majority of white respondents, approve of corporate DEI practices. Only 27 percent thought these programs hurt white workers. That survey tracks with existing data about Americans' attitudes toward DEI, and it's about as close to an unproblematic consensus as you can find in America these days: Americans believe that employers still need to take basic, proactive steps to recruit from marginalized communities and make some kind of an effort to ensure that they can thrive once they are onboarded.

It's notable that this consensus remains untouched after more than a year of DEI hysteria that has ultimately succeeded only in radicalizing people who were already extremely angry all the time. The right-wing media complex is, if nothing else, extremely talented at focusing that anger wherever their paymasters believe it can be most effectively deployed.

But Americans are not, in fact, clamoring to have their DEI offices shuttered by a Congress that can't seem to figure out how to do much of anything else, nor should anyone want their company's internal policies dreamed up by Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), two "Dismantle DEI Act" co-sponsors who seem consistently more interested in currying favor with Donald Trump and getting on television than in governing.

If conservatives don't like DEI offices, they should start companies that don't have them, and see what kind of people they attract. In all likelihood, the effort will end the same way as other big pushes to do ideological end-runs around mainstream industries, like right-wing children's television, right-wing beer, right-wing dating sites and right-wing investment funds.

That Republicans can't trust the market to deliver them the workplaces that they want—ones where you can still call the secretary "honey" and hire your pals from Georgetown Prep without running an actual search—says more about their inability to adapt to changing norms and expectations than it does about the supposedly mortal threat of corporate diversity practices.

If you want fewer Republicans wasting their powerful positions on stunt legislation that solves no one's problems, may I recommend practicing your own form of DEI this November: Don't Elect Idiots.

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.