Opening Shots Fired in the MAGA-PMC Civil War

A short-ish update on politics as I struggle to finish the more substantive posts I've been working on for months

In a previous update I suggested that American politics is turning into a battle between the professional managerial class (a.k.a. the PMC, currently aligned with the Democrats) and an anti-PMC coalition under Trump. My most recent update attempted to set some benchmarks on whether the Trump-Vance administration is really serious about a major political realignment, with more of the working class becoming Republican. This is an update on the realignment post.

The question I posed in the realignment post was whether Trump would do much to create material benefits for the working class, and I framed my discussion of Trumpian budget cutting initiatives around the issue of jobs:

Elon and Vivek can undoubtedly find a few offices full of DC wokesters to sacrifice, but that’s just another stunt. It won’t have a big impact on the budget, much less an impact on material conditions for the working class.

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At the end of the day, the biggest thing the working class cares about is the availability of living wage jobs. Cutting many of the best-paid and most secure jobs throughout the country does not provide an immediate net benefit to the working class, it mostly just provides cover for giving more tax-cuts to the rich.

I also wondered whether Trump could make a dent in the PMC’s power base of colleges and universities. In the long run, even if Trump and Vance consolidate their gains among working class voters, they have a serious problem with exercising power so long as the PMC retains a stranglehold on post-secondary education. Going to college is widely believed to be the only path to prosperity in this country, and college graduates are hired to manage all of our major institutions. If Trump figures out a way to break the iron grip of college on our culture and our economy, then a substantially bigger realignment is possible.

On reviewing the first reports about Trump’s executive orders, one order immediately stood out to me—the anti-DEI order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government. The anti-DEI order doesn’t just end goals and programs, it requires that the attorney general and budget officials shall:

(i) terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions) . . . .

(ii) provide the Director of the OMB with a list of all:

(A) agency or department DEI, DEIA, or “environmental justice” positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures in existence on November 4, 2024, and an assessment of whether these positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures have been misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve their pre-November 4, 2024 function;

(B) Federal contractors who have provided DEI training or DEI training materials to agency or department employees; and

(C) Federal grantees who received Federal funding to provide or advance DEI, DEIA, or “environmental justice” programs, services, or activities since January 20, 2021.

What Trump actually did with the anti-DEI order appears to be more than a stunt, and I think it deserves more attention than it is getting. This represents a structural attack on PMC ideological control over college education and the whole range of institutions that hire based on college education, and I think it has the potential to alter the playing field significantly.

Cory Doctorow recently wrote a good post about corrupt boss politics, using as an example the anti-DEI efforts that are replacing substantive FTC anti-trust initiatives:

So this is what Ferguson has killed off. In its place, Ferguson has instituted an internal action, aimed at rooting out "DEI" and "wokeness." The agency's top priority right now is running a snitch line where FTC officials can rat each other out for being anti-racist. This isn't just offensive, of course – it's also deeply unserious. Even if you stipulate that "woke" has some meaning (it doesn't, but go with me here), then killing off all the "woke" at the FTC will not make Americans more prosperous, let alone protect them from corporate predators.

I do not think the anti-DEI order is unserious. Doctorow is probably correct that attacking wokeness will not make the FTC better at protecting the interests of average Americans, but it might make the FTC better at serving the interests of the marketplace (as represented by robber baron monopolists). Those interests are tightly bound up with the regressive boss politics Doctorow describes in the post.

I’m currently working on a review of Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke. One of al-Gharbi’s big points is that symbolic wokeness/DEI is central to the identity of symbolic capitalists (his term for the PMC). The PMC rarely actually do anything to help oppressed people, and their lifestyles are highly dependent on oppressing people such as housekeepers and DoorDash drivers, but the PMC talk about wokeness/DEI endlessly and compete to see who can be more supportive of symbolic measures such as hiring chief diversity officers. Competitive wokeness is a major mode of legitimation in the PMC world, where “the ability to bring one’s own expressed convictions into compliance with the dominant talking points is one of the key attributes many institutions seem to filter for.” We Have Never Been Woke at 21. Being a professional DEI monger makes you central to the latest version of the PMC project.

But if Trump’s attack on DEI in the federal government starts a trend in corporations and other institutions, then the job outlook for graduates with DEI-centric degrees could crater and the demand for those degrees could also crater. Only true revolutionaries or intellectuals will have any interest in these subjects, not young people who mainly (or even secondarily) want to get cushy administrative jobs. It may take a while because young people are often the last to recognize trends in the job market, but young people will eventually figure it out. If Trump’s attack on DEI succeeds, then at some point in the foreseeable future universities will stop being citadels of PMC wokeness and wokeness will stop being a fundamental requirement for administrative jobs across the American economy.

Of course, if the PMC god of the marketplace is real, then we’ll find out within a few years whether DEI-centrism actually adds much to productivity in the workplace. Blue states, corporations, and other institutions that maintain a robust DEI capability will swiftly outcompete their troglodytic MAGA counterparts, and demand for DEI-centric degrees will increase rather than decrease in the medium to long run. Alternatively, we may find out that the twin gods of PMC ideology, 101-level Market Economics and DEI Virtue Signaling, are not really all that synergistic. If that happens, I wonder which of the two PMC gods will win out?

What Trump is doing appears to be cleverer than I anticipated, and it is difficult to predict how the material effects will play out. We don’t know yet whether the numbers will be large or small, and we don’t know whether funds saved by cutting DEI-centric jobs will be used to hire people for other federal jobs. If a bunch of senior executive women, African-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans get fired publicly, then Trump’s tentative progress in attracting these demographics to his coalition may reverse. If large numbers of lower level employees get fired in communities across the country because bonehead administrators feel free to discriminate, then there may be a really substantial backlash. It’s too early to tell, but Trump’s anti-DEI order could be a big deal even if you don’t consider yourself a combatant in the wokeness wars.

In other Trump effectiveness news, one commentator noticed that Trump is focusing his immigration raids on “deep blue cities in blue states,” which means the bad effects will be concentrated in enemy territory. This analysis is from the PMC point of view, which assumes that deporting nannies, gardeners, and Uber drivers will be bad for Americans generally. My realignment post assumed that deporting economic competitors would be the good for the working class specifically, but I had not given much thought to the possibility that Trump would target enforcement to places where it would cause the most pain to his enemies. On balance I still think Trump needs to do enough enforcement to improve the perception of job prospects among working class people who might actually vote for Trump’s successor.

Other indications that Trump may be more effective in his second term (at whatever he is trying to do) include the possibility that he might be turning away from Iran hawks in his foreign policy appointments, and he appears to deserve most (if not all) the credit for the (very) tentative cease-fire in Gaza. I mostly ruled out foreign policy improvements from the realignment post, but if these moves are the start of a trend then they are unambiguously good for ordinary Americans, not to mention the rest of the world.

These are small steps on a four-year journey, but the indications so far are that Trump might be serious about realigning American politics. On the other hand, Trump does not seem to be going out of his way to boost J.D. Vance so far, and it will be much harder to continue the Trump revolution if there is a scramble for the Republican nomination in 2028. Lots to think about.

Meanwhile, I have at least three substantive posts in the pipeline. The next big post is likely to be the review of We Were Never Woke, followed by a post in which I try to figure out how al-Ghabri’s insights affect my own view of the world. I’m separating this into two posts in an effort to give a clearer account of what al-Ghabri is saying and avoid misattributing my own confirmation biases to al-Ghabri. Also in the queue is a post about Ralph Linton, the anthropologist who is generally credited with inventing the concept of “ascribed” social status based on immutable characteristics such a race or gender. That subject may also be split into two posts along similar lines to the al-Ghabri posts if that approach seems to work well. As usual, I have no idea when these posts will reach a publishable state, but if you subscribe you’ll be the first to know.