SRSLY aren't you mad???

A look back on a tumultuous week one from a deeply optimistic person

After the election, I shared with you my mindset heading into the next Trump administration: Don’t Get Mad, Get Everything.

Getting liberals mad is a key part of the conservative playbook. If liberals are quick to get upset about every injustice they perceive, conservatives are quick to close ranks even in the face of the most egregious behavior. This is how they hold together their base while pursuing policy that doesn’t actually benefit their base.

This spring, Republicans will pass some kind of tax bill that will cut benefits to poor and middle income households in order to finance a $5 trillion tax cut that flows mostly to the very rich. Their strategy for selling it? Cutting DEI initiatives in the federal government, or whatever truly awful behavior makes headlines the week they are voting on it.

When I get upset, I remind myself of something: the economy we have isn’t working for many Americans, and Trump has no plans to help them. He can destroy, but he can’t create. That’s the north star for me.

At one point during the week a friend texted me: “SRSLY aren’t you mad about this?”

No and yes. Let’s go through a couple things.

The End of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Here are the lowlights:

Through an executive order, Trump closed all DEI offices in the federal government, put those workers on administrative leave, to be laid off next month, and ordered the end to any auspices of DEI in the federal government.

Make me optimistic:

My first reaction to this was: “Ohhhh who are they going to blame now?” The US labor market is not and has never been a very fair place. White men earn more money, hold more leadership positions, and have lower unemployment in every industry, in every occupation, and even across broad swaths of workers that have the same education. I wrote a column about this a couple years ago where I talk about the claim “Nobody wants to hire a white guy right now” and show how data negates it.

That data supports another conclusion as well: DEI wasn’t really working, at least not broadly. That could be because the task was too large or the effort not really genuine.

(Great book about failed private sector DEI effort is called “Diversity Inc,” if you’re interested.)

I think DEI initiatives from the federal government were important, they were deliberate, and they were much more likely to be successful than, say, Chevron’s or [insert large and ethically questionable corporation here], but it was an uphill battle. At the end of the day, the federal government is a powerful but not limitless actor, one that accounts for less than 2% of total employment. Changing the hierarchy of race in the US has to happen across the labor market and its connected institutions.

DEI is a fall guy. So you want to have a conversation about race in America and take away your favorite scapegoat? Doesn’t make me nervous. It’s not as if both parties have been shouting to the rafters that woke-ism and DEI are to blame for people’s economic frustrations and troubles. I promise you, eliminate DEI programming in the federal government, those economic troubles have changed not a lick.

What’s it going to do, bring back coal?

[[SIDEBAR: Bringing back coal was a massive focus of the 2016 Trump campaign and he hasn’t talked about it since because employment in the industry has still fallen. It was only about 50,000 people total in 2016, closer to 40,000 now. It’s been falling for decades. Coal production didn’t change much during his administration, despite whatever promises he made. Almost like he capitalized on human pain for his own political benefit. But if you’re interested, you can read about the assistance and opportunities Biden’s infrastructure law and energy law did for coal communities trying to pivot to non-coal economic development here.]]

So yeah, it’s a bit bleak when you read that the Air Force, in response to the DEI order, immediately cut from its curriculum lessons on the Tuskegee Airmen and Women Airforce Service Pilots in World War II. But it’s also ridiculous. Oh dear me! I didn’t realize Black men flying planes 75 years ago was such a threat to white men today. Let’s quick hide it!

It lays bare just how much of his policies and strategies are empty actions, built on rhetoric, built on lies, built on manipulation.

He’s hitting what he can, and in this case it’s laughably impotent.

A New Cruel Era of Immigration

Here are the lowlights:

He made a show of trying to end birthright citizenship (judge already stopped). People who had legally approved entry into the United States were blocked from entering. He’s ordered the Justice Department to investigate sanctuary cities, and host of other awful things aimed at what he calls an immigrant invasion. I think the refugees who were approved to enter the US, had flights booked, and then the flights were cancelled—that hit me the hardest.

Make me optimistic:

The US has been badly overdue for immigration reform for some time. The last Big Action was in 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act. There were smaller pieces of legislation in the 90s and after the September 11th terrorist attacks, but really the history of immigration reform is a history of failure to find a compromise. You can read books about the effects of failure or nice long think pieces about how warped immigration policy is as a result.

This history includes a lot of awful things—reminder that medical deportations are a policy that preceded Trump by nearly two decades, that all presidents for the past 30 years have flexed deportation at some point, and most have written executive orders about it.

For me, what sets Trump apart is that he’s breaking the unstated rule that the US has had with its non-citizen denizens for some time, a balance that’s not too far from: live and let live.

It doesn’t benefit the US to have people in our borders who completely remove themselves from society—who don’t put their kids in school, who don’t get themselves or their kids basic medical care, who don’t participate in police investigations that they are witness to, who don’t call in a crime, who don’t report abusive or exploitative employers (or landlords), who don’t get car insurance, or pay speeding tickets. The more they withdraw from society’s norms, the harder those norms are to uphold. In exchange for being good not-citizens, they were mostly unmolested.

I’m not sure what Trump’s success will be in actually deporting people, but what he will absolutely end is that delicate balance that grew in the absence of actual laws and reform.

Americans have largely struggled to understand how immigrants could help the economy, and conversely how deporting them will hurt the economy. They see the labor market as a zero-sum game in which an immigrant can only have a job if a citizen doesn’t. I don’t think this kind of two-dimensional mindset can ever be displaced.

But 11 million people pulling away from society—that might leave an impression that no expert preaching about economic realities ever will.

So that’s my optimism. The more he hurts people, the closer we get to reform. There’s no going back now, the stasis that the lack of reform created is gone. Take this new Ipsos poll that found that 66% of Americans support deporting undocumented immigrants. Seems bad. But look deeper. That two-thirds majority support switches to one-third minority support when it comes to: using the military to conduct deportation, using defense funds for that effort, or deporting undocumented immigrants who came as children. And down to one-tenth support deporting legal immigrants.

You know what that looks like to me? A policy that is going to blow up in someone’s face. Americans, truly, don’t know what they want when it comes to immigration reform, but they are about to find out whether they actually want this.

And so on

I could keep going, and talk about federal employees or the energy emergency or the shady crypto policy, but trust that my optimism is road tested and will continue to be.

Because like I said at the beginning—the economy we have isn’t working for many Americans, and you know who isn’t going to craft effective policy to help them? These people:

The economy is doing just fine for them.