The Review

Christopher F. Rufo, journalist, ideologue, and political tactician, announced last week on X that he would be “launching a new campaign to expose ideological corruption at the Department of Education.” His penchant for self-dramatization remains unchecked (“Entering the inner sanctum. Stand by.”) but with somewhat more real-world justification than it had two years ago, when I made fun of “the dark fantasist of ‘the counterrevolution to come,’ presumably to be led by Commander DeSantis.” Rufo might now be in a position — and at the federal, not the Florida, level — to enact his counterrevolutionary program, or at least to bring his blend of muckraking and propagandizing to a bigger audience than ever.

Infamously, President Trump has said he wants to eliminate the Education Department; it seems possible that Rufo has been deputized to uncover scandalous tidbits meant to support such a move. Whatever “ideological corruption” Rufo uncovers will almost certainly involve diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, targeted in two recent Trump executive orders now being challenged in court by the American Association of University Professors. (In a post on Substack written this past weekend, Rufo describes the Trump administration’s plan to use the power of the federal purse “to force universities to wind down discriminatory DEI bureaucracies and to uphold the standard of colorblind equality.”)

Whatever the fate of those executive orders, of Rufo’s adventures in government, and of the Education Department itself, it seems fair to predict that DEI as it has existed for the last decade or so will not survive the year. But what if another form of DEI — associated with the political right, rather than the left — comes to replace it?

Even as it works to dismantle the policies around sex, gender, and race that have come collectively to be referred to as “DEI,” the Trump administration, alongside Republicans more generally, have applied an overtly identitarian logic to two groups in particular: Christians and Jews (the latter conflated with supporters of Israel). Trump’s executive order “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism” promises “to combat antisemitism vigorously, using all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” And Trump’s “task force to eliminate anti-Christian bias” will, Trump told attendees of the National Prayer Breakfast, work to “protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares” and “eradicate anti-Christian bias.”

These developments might seem ironic, but they weren’t unpredictable. As Geoff Shullenberger wrote in Compact in 2023, “The fact that the right and left alike are currently mobilized to assert competing claims to victim status points to a bitter truth: Identity politics isn’t going anywhere.” DEI on the left and religious and nativist nationalism on the right have together weakened the taboo on particularist self-assertion. Expressions of identity-based vulnerability will run the gamut, from the purely cynical to the deeply heartfelt. I expect that members of religious groups — including Christians, who despite not being a minority have long felt marginalized in many secular precincts — will become especially vocal in the coming years about their right to recognition in what is in fact an increasingly irreligious polity. Campuses will be no exception. We might anticipate, for instance, more demands for curricular revision around religious sensitivities and prohibitions.

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Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin