Donald Trump did not campaign on a promise to end the Pentagon’s celebration of Black History Month. Nor did the Republican air advertisements pledging to remove displays honoring nonwhite and female scientists from the National Science Foundation. And no Trump 2024 bumper sticker featured the tagline: He’ll curb the military’s recruitment of Black engineers!

Yet the administration has focused inordinate time and energy on such odd endeavors. While doing little to address persistent inflation (beyond seeking to exacerbate it through tariffs), Trump has waged total war on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — an umbrella term for workplace policies that seek to advance the fair treatment and full economic participation of people from historically marginalized groups.

In recent weeks, Democrats have debated how they should respond. Some argue that the party should expend little political capital on defending DEI — and that Trump’s war on diversity initiatives may even have some upside.

This contingent insists that the most effective way to redress identity-based inequalities is through class-based activism and redistribution. They contend (with good reason) that unions are more effective than corporate diversity initiatives at closing wage gaps between white and nonwhite workers. And they note that universal redistributive programs do more to mitigate racial disadvantage than the economic policies associated with DEI (Social Security reduces the poverty rate among Black senior citizens by nearly 30 percentage points each year, whereas prioritizing nonwhite or minority-owned businesses in government contracting benefits only a tiny fraction of nonwhite people.)

Some “class-first” progressives see DEI policies — and the identity-centric politics associated with them — as not merely inadequate but counterproductive. In an interview with the New York Times, president of The Nation magazine Bhaskar Sunkara argued that corporate diversity initiatives have “pushed workers to dwell on their differences” while identity politics “trained politicians to court racial and ethnic groups rather than appealing to interests that were more universal.”

Sunkara and like-minded progressives therefore reason that Trump’s rollback of DEI initiatives might actually be politically beneficial, helping them recenter the Democratic Party on class politics.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie deems that last argument dangerously naive. Bouie grants some of Sunkara’s premises: He concedes that DEI programs often serve little purpose beyond corporate PR. But he contends that the Trump administration’s war on DEI is not narrowly targeted at frivolous multicultural messaging or diversity workshops. Rather, the administration is rolling back civil rights enforcement, denigrating nonwhite and female federal workers, and restricting the recruitment of Black professionals. All this is more likely to yield something approaching “segregation” than a renewal of class solidarity, in Bouie’s estimation. “To concede that this administration has a point about DEI,” he writes, “is not to concede that they have a point about corporate personnel management but to concede that they have a point about rolling back the latter half of the 20th century and extirpating 60 years of civil rights law.”

I think there is some merit to both these perspectives. I share Bouie’s sense that the Trump’s DEI crackdown is fundamentally aimed at defending white privilege, and that little good can come from such endeavor. That said, to my mind, there is little question that Democrats would be well-advised to focus their messaging and agenda on furthering the common economic aspirations of working people of all stripes.

But today, I’d like to focus on a narrower point: I think it would be a mistake for Democrats to deny the validity of the right’s complaints about DEI. in all cases. The unfortunate reality is that some of the conservative movement’s complaints with DEI programs — that they waste time, undermine........

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