There is an air of defeatism in progressive circles today, the day Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term as President of the United States of America. Some of the reasons behind this sense of frustration and disappointment are captured in Ian Leslie’s latest Substack post, Notes on the Great Vibe Shift, which sees Trump’s election victory as a “far-reaching cultural reset”.
The principal components of this reset are the abandonment since the US election of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes by Meta, Amazon, McDonalds and others (including some universities after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on admissions in 2023), and the political changes within the G7 which mean, according to Leslie, that Western leaders rather than resisting Trump are “keen to be his friend”.
There’s some truth in this analysis – the DEI agenda is more on the back foot that just a few years ago and the mood music within the G7 leadership has changed. But to me it’s undercooked and, while the day may seem dark, there are glimmers of progressive light poking through the gaps in Leslie’s thesis.
I won’t dwell on the political analysis since it’s not my forte. I will only pause long enough to suggest, for example, that Leslie’s assertion that the Obama presidency represented a significant political victory but not “a social or cultural watershed” is at the very least contestable, as is his claim that Obama was unable to diminish the country’s divisions. The first overlooks the fact that Obama handily won a second term, while the second places on him an expectation that is historically unreasonable. Who, I might ask, was the last president to succeed in reducing political divisions in the USA?
I am more interested in Leslie’s argument that the abandonment of DEI commitments by American CEO’s marks an irreversible step that will find its way across the Atlantic. Here’s what he writes:
“Whatever the initial motivation, there is no danger of them changing their minds back, since the new positions feel closer to what most leaders instinctively believe – that you should hire and promote people on individual merit; avoid internal divisions wherever possible; treat people the same regardless of race or gender; do the work in front of you rather than debate politics; show up every day and work hard unless you absolutely can’t. These are common sense principles of successful and thriving organisations and it’s the privilege of those who aren’t in charge to believe anything else.”
This is all very sensible – who could disagree? And yes, there is no shortage of DEI advocates parading the wilder claims of identity politics who have never grappled with the complexities of running a well-functioning organisation.
But neither are these sensible measures inconsistent with a well-wrought approach to DEI*. How, for example, do you know if you’re hiring and promoting from the widest pools of talent? How do you know you are treating people the same, whatever their background? Exactly how do you go about creating a workplace where people can work hard, without the distractions and detriments of harassment or discrimination? CEOs and their organisations can only properly answer these questions if they are monitoring the data that reveals the demographics of hiring and promotion, or working hard to credibly foster a culture where everyone can give of their best.
Ironically perhaps, Leslie appears to endorse this latter point because in the Rattle Bag portion of his Substack he recommends Nabeel Qureshi’s list of 64 “principles for life” which includes at No.4 :
“Environment matters a lot; move to where you flourish maximally. Put yourself in environments where you have to perform to your utmost; if you can get by being average, you probably will.”
As stated this principle places the onus on the individual rather than the organisation to seek out places where they will flourish. I suspect this is part of its appeal to Leslie because elsewhere in his piece (tracking the vibe shift across the Atlantic) he cites Iain Mansfield’s tweeted attack on the recently announced pilot of moves by UK higher education funders for universities to incorporate reporting on People, Culture and Environment (PCE) in their submissions to the powerful Research Excellence Framework (REF). Among other things, these will require universities to account for their efforts to be inclusive of all talent, to tackle bullying and harassment, to foster collaboration, to support career development and to combat breaches of research integrity.
There’s certainly a debate to be had about how to implement this reporting without excessive burden on universities, but Mansfield’s angry volley betrays next to no engagement with the careful and consultative way the PCE framework has been constructed with the sector, with its clearly articulated desire to enhance UK research performance, or with the extensive scholarly literature on why these REF reforms are so necessary.
It’s a viewpoint that, bizarrely, dissociates organisational cultures from the ability of employees to do their best work, seeing attention to culture as performative virtue-signalling that the HE sector can ill afford. Mansfield’s viewpoint is also at odds, not only with the deeper rationale underlying the REF reforms, but also with the insights of deeper thinkers, such as Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, whose organisational – or institutional – insights are quoted here in a thoughtful post by James Plunkett:
“The Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, has a useful way of thinking about institutions as rule-based games that get repeated. We move through life in institutions, each trying our best (within constraints like bounded rationality) before repeating, and trying to get better. Ostrom spent decades working to understand institutions, so that we can improve them. Her guiding vision — which feels to me more resonant with every passing day — was that the ultimate goal of government, and of public policy, should be to build institutions ‘that bring out the best in people’.”
So, I still hope, contra Mansfield, that the REF reforms, refined by the pilot, will be given the chance to prove their worth in the full exercise in 2029. And I still hope, contra Leslie, that the vibe shift that has accompanied Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House will not endure.
For there is a fatal flaw at the heart of the Trump project: it is sustained by a disregard for evidence and for the truth, both of which can only be concealed temporarily. Those of us who advocate for progressive causes – ideally of course with all due regard for evidence and truth (as in this excellence piece on racism) – would do well to remember that on this day.
*This is not to assert that DEI policies have never been constructed or implemented unproblematically, or without being buffeted by ideology. Of course they have. But the view that DEI is necessarily performative and beside the point is not one that can withstand scrutiny. To be fair to Leslie, given what he’s written previously on this topic, I suspect his main beef is with performative or virtue-signalling DEI, but I don’t think he’s made that so very clear in his post on the Great Vibe Shift.
