Jumping the gun on government rules such as DEI is a disturbing trend which the City must resist, writes Lucy McNulty in today’s Notebook

The City must not fall foul of ‘anticipatory obedience’

There is a tendency by people living in authoritarian regimes to over-obey because they think it is what is expected of them. Yale University professor Timothy Snyder coined this phenomenon “anticipatory obedience”. It is, he says, “a political tragedy”.

“It means that leaders can see what people will accept and then push them just a little further,” he wrote in his book On Tyranny. “When citizens obey in advance, voluntarily conforming to expectations before they are even imposed, they grant power to those who would exploit it.”

That this phenomenon is gaining traction across America in these early days of Trump’s second presidency has been well-documented: from self-censoring media outlets and tech companies to an unusually apolitical Oscars, its existence is increasingly hard to ignore.

More recently, it has spread to Wall Street with financial services firms increasingly pre-empting potential backlash from Trump’s administration by scaling back the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives they had previously championed.

“It’s a........

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