American race relations are at a crossroads. In the years since our current racial bargain was struck in the 1960s, our country has coped with its contradictions and imperfections by the very American method of muddling through. That has worked for a long time, but soon it won’t work anymore. We will have to choose between one path and another. There are two reasons for this, and they are unavoidable.
The first reason is demographic. Our racial bargain was made for a country that was biracial and almost 90 percent white. It will no longer work for a country where white people are a minority and the non-white population includes multiple races, including some that were hardly present in the United States when the racial bargain was struck. There were fewer Chinese Americans in 1960 than there are Egyptian Americans today and fewer Mexican-born Americans then than Venezuelan-born Americans now.
For Generation Z, the beneficiaries of our system of racial benefits are no longer a marginal 10 percent of the population. They are a demographic majority. Non-white Zoomers—and, to an extent, white women as well—benefit from both demographic predominance and an explicit or tacit boost in any head-to-head competition with white men, which, in combination, means that affirmative action is no longer a matter of white Americans sacrificing the occasional promotion. It means white men in particular are effectively shut out of many prestigious fields and institutions, especially in the lower rungs.
This is both unfair and unworkable. Unfair, because a white Zoomer does not feel toward the son of an Indian computer programmer or the daughter of a Mexican illegal immigrant the same moral obligation he feels toward the descendant of slaves. Unworkable, because the challenge of making every institution match our national demographics becomes more difficult as our diversity gets more diverse. Diversity used to mean making sure there was a black person in the room. Now it means finely calibrating multiple demographics, which requires putting race at the forefront of personnel decisions.
The second reason race relations are approaching a crisis is that our racial bargain was supposed to be temporary. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it was quickly agreed that some racial favoritism was justified to compensate for the black minority’s unequal starting point. The temporary nature of this favoritism was crucial to the deal. The imperative to treat citizens equally under the law was the moral claim on which the whole civil rights movement was based. Race-based remedies were only “transitional,” promised one chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and would “fall into disuse once the job is done.”
At the time, it was sincerely expected that black and white outcomes would converge. A study by the Urban Institute in 1971 extrapolated black progress over the previous eight years and predicted exactly when the catch-up would occur for various metrics such as poverty rates, college completion, and infant mortality. The one that would take the longest, life expectancy at thirty-five years, was predicted to reach white levels in 2019.
In 2003, Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote, “We expect that twenty-five years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” in her decision in Grutter v. Bollinger upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan. There were a handful of conservatives at the time who would have told her that this was optimistic, based on the available data, but these voices were marginalized as politically incorrect. The conventional wisdom was with Justice O’Connor.
Today, two years away from Justice O’Connor’s twenty-five-year deadline, the conventional wisdom has changed. Everyone can see that the long hoped-for convergence has not materialized. Affirmative action is still necessary to achieve colleges’ desired racial diversity. We have created a black middle class, but blacks from wealthy households on average still have lower SAT scores and lower credit scores than whites from poorer households. Large disparities in violent crime rates still persist, as do disparities in wealth, in part because houses in black neighborhoods still have persistently lower home values.
Both the left and the right have registered the stubbornness of these racial gaps. The recent popularity among liberals of radical authors such as Ibram X. Kendi, who proposed an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting “racial inequity” and a new government agency to implement it, was a symptom of this disillusionment. As equality of opportunity recedes as a plausible goal for the civil rights regime, having failed to arrive after three generations, there is a growing market for pessimists like Kendi who want to shift the goal to equality of outcome.
“The old racial bargain is breaking down.”
So that is the situation we face: The old racial bargain is breaking down, due to a combination of changing demographics and a dawning realization that racial outcomes are not going to converge any time soon. One possible path forward is to throw out the old racial bargain and establish a new one based on equality under the law. The other possible path is to accept permanent racial favoritism at every level of society.
We got a glimpse of the doubling-down option in 2020. Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory name for the ideology that swept America in the summer of 2020. “Critical race theory” and “identity politics” both had their day. “Wokeness” is the term most people have settled on, for lack of a better one. They have even picked it up in France, “le wokisme.” The main problem with the term is that it sounds frivolous. It makes you think of gender studies professors. But the phenomenon was not frivolous. The goal of wokeness was not gender-neutral bathrooms. It was the redistribution of money and power from disfavored groups to favored groups.
It succeeded. Between 2016 and 2023, the share of management positions held by non-whites grew more than four times faster than it had in the preceding decade, according to a 2026 report by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. More than 30 percent of new board appointees at S&P 500 companies in 2021 were black. The Washington Post calculated in 2021 that America’s fifty biggest companies had pledged $50 billion to racial equity causes since George Floyd’s death, including $45 billion in loans and investment and over $4 billion in direct grants.
The ideology of 2020 has a historical antecedent in the theories of decolonization developed in 1960s, which held that all of the Third World—Asia, Africa, Latin America, and even the ghettos of the United States—was united in a single struggle between white oppressors and people of color. In that struggle, people of color were entitled to seize the wealth of whites because that wealth had all been stolen from them in the first place. This “Third Worldism” was essentially a variation on Marxism with people of color in the place of the proletariat.
Though the modern version has continuities with Third Worldism, the problem with Third Worldism as a term is that makes it sound foreign. Today’s Third Worldists do care about foreign policy, especially the war in Gaza, but most of their agenda is domestic and their ideology was certainly not imported from abroad.
The term that I prefer for the ideology we saw in 2020 is race communism. The term “gay race communism” originated with the pseudonymous X account Drukpa Kunley in 2022 and entered the public record when it appeared in print in the Wall Street Journal in 2024. It started as a jokey epithet, but, as a straightforward description, it has much to recommend it.
“Race communism” captures the fact that race holds something like the place in our ruling ideology that the working class held in communist countries. Taking stuff from the bad class and giving it to the good class is the source of the state’s moral legitimacy; decisions about jobs, promotions, housing, and university admissions are all tilted toward favored groups. Proficiency in the ruling ideology is a criterion for advancement in any kind of career. Every large workplace has an ideological enforcer whose job it is to make sure the institution is aligned with the ruling ideology publicly and internally.
“Communism” makes people think of gulags and the midnight knock on the door. But for most of its existence, the Soviet empire was a fairly normal place to live. Its uniqueness lay in the way it put Marxism-Leninism at the center of society and judged every program, event, or phenomenon by whether it advanced its particular notion of progress. Race has come to play a similar role in the United States.
Race communism is a blunt term. I came to accept it only by a slow process. It started when I noticed how normal it had become to speak in dehumanizing terms about white people. When Sarah Jeong had her position on the New York Times editorial board called into question in 2018 over social media posts such as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins,” her defenders said that her posts were just part of the Millennial online vernacular. This was true, and that was the problem.
This talk sometimes had the fig leaf of being about “whiteness” rather than white people. According to Kendi, “whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity.” It was not just academics who talked like this. A diversity training module for Coca-Cola employees told them to “try to be less white,” meaning “be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive.” Whiteness was talked about as something to be eliminated or abolished.
The next step came when I noticed how race was intruding into completely unrelated topics of conversation. Reading a book about euthanasia in 2021, I was jolted to see a quote in it to the effect that, since over 90 percent of people who seek assisted dying are white, we shouldn’t worry about it. Economist Adam Posen, in a viral clip of a conference panel in 2022, dismissed worries about America’s manufacturing base as “part of the general fetish for keeping white males of low education outside the cities in the powerful positions they’re in.”
When Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg delivered a speech about “equity and racial justice in infrastructure,” it was good for a laugh, but it wasn’t a joke when he put $1 billion toward it. The Federal Trade Commission in 2021 declared its intention to target racial bias as an unfair business practice. Some states put whites with multiple comorbidities behind non-whites with none in their distribution of the Covid vaccine. Everywhere I looked, people were spending real money and making real decisions based on the idea that non-white people deserved more consideration than their white counterparts.
Powerful people talked about the need to reorient institutions toward the goal of fighting white supremacy. Joe Biden said he decided to run for president after the “Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis” at Charlottesville in 2017 showed him a “battle for the soul of this nation” was underway. The executive editor of The New York Times responded sympathetically to a staffer who said in an employee town hall in 2019 that “racism is in everything, it should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren co-sponsored a bill to add racial equity to the mandate of the Federal Reserve.
“Our race laws have become all-pervasive.”
The call to make anti-racism central to our institutions is framed as aspirational, but we are nearly there already. Our race laws have become all-pervasive in part because there are simply more people running around who qualify as their beneficiaries—more claimants, more claims. That is why there can be no going back to some ideal moment when our civil rights regime struck a better balance. There is no way to maintain our current laws and our current demographics without our entire politics revolving around race.
A new generation of Democrats is emerging to whom this style of politics comes naturally. They grew out of the socialist wing of the party that rallied behind Bernie Sanders in 2016, but with an emphasis on racial justice. “The fact that he’s a brown person who speaks to all these marginalized communities in a place like New York is a part of the difference between him and Bernie,” a supporter of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Vanity Fair. These Democrats tend to support amnesty for illegal immigrants, reparations for black Americans, and Palestine—all issues that fit the narrative of white oppressors and non-white oppressed.
These new Democrats are from the same Millennial milieu that talks flippantly about white people. Melat Kiros, who won an upset congressional primary victory in Colorado, said in a podcast interview during her campaign that America is “objectively a white supremacist society” and addressing this would require reparations. Claire Valdez, who won a congressional primary in New York City, scoffed at “all these, you know, white conservative men” who “talk about who does and does not belong here” when “this nation was founded on genocide and the mass displacement of people.” Mamdani appointee Cea Weaver called home ownership “a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building.’” She currently advises the mayor on housing policy.
This facility with the language of “white supremacy” is disconcerting because so many of these Democrats are first- and second-generation immigrants. Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents. Kiros was born in Ethiopia. Streamer Hasan Piker was raised in Turkey. Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman was born in India. Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s parents came from Korea. Michigan Senate primary contender Abdul El-Sayed’s parents came from Egypt. None of these people has any connection to the Jim Crow era or American slavery, yet they invoke the vocabulary of racial grievance against American whites.
The term “race communism” is not meant to imply a hidden genealogy connecting today’s Democrats to some discredited Marxist thinker. It is not a scare term for what the ideology’s adherents will impose if they get more power. It is the outcome toward which we are already tending by default if we stay on our current trajectory.
Living in America today feels like the dying days of the Soviet empire. The official ideology is simultaneously omnipresent and the object of widespread cynicism. People who invoke the ideology are frequently assumed to be doing so for opportunistic reasons, but open dissent from the ideology is still forbidden in many contexts. All the while, the dysfunctions of the system keep eating away at it invisibly. Even if no imitation of Soviet communism is intended, I can foresee a day when we will follow its fate.
Living under an official ideology of anti-racism doesn’t mean that the average person thinks about race all the time, any more than the average Russian circa 1980 walked around thinking about Marxism-Leninism. In any society, most of life is just going to work and figuring out what to make for dinner. A person usually runs up against the regime ideology only when he tries to do something: start a business, move to a new house, publish a book, organize politically.
In 2000, parents in the Sausalito Marin City School District outside San Francisco were unhappy with their local schools, so they did what you are supposed to do in a democracy. They got themselves elected to the local school board and started a new school in line with their ideas. Willow Creek Academy opened the following year and attracted hundreds of K-8 students from the type of local families that had previously sent their kids to private schools. It was progressive, a “little, hippie-dippy, artsy, Montessori-type school,” as one parent put it. It was also diverse. In 2017, it was approximately 40 percent white, 25 percent Hispanic, 10 percent black, and 10 percent Asian.
Willow Creek did not discriminate against any race. But in 2016 a state audit found that the district was racially segregated because its only other K-8 school, Bayside Martin Luther King Jr., which enrolled kids from the local housing projects, was overwhelmingly black and Hispanic and plagued with high staff turnover and discipline problems (but not funding problems; per pupil spending was $42,302 in 2012). The state attorney general issued a desegregation order in 2019 that forced the schools to combine. The Willow Creek families fled, enrollment dropped by 50 percent, and the district returned to the status quo ante.
That is how many of our race laws work: as a veto when someone tries to do something. Sometimes the goal is to stop the thing from happening. Sometimes the goal is just a payout. Any form of regulatory approval that includes a provision about “equal opportunity,” “public interest,” or “community needs” can be used as leverage by activist groups to extract handouts. Groups like ACORN were adept at using the Community Reinvestment Act for this purpose during the bank merger wave of the 1990s, getting hundreds of billions in loans for their clients and billions in fees for themselves. The Comcast merger of 2011 was approved by regulators only after the company signed Memorandums of Understanding with civil rights groups outlining various racial handouts in jobs and contracts.
An entire infrastructure has grown up to facilitate this transfer of resources. Former US Attorney General Eric Holder charged up to $2,295 per hour for conducting “racial equity audits” as a lawyer at Covington & Burling. These racial equity audits generally recommend changes to hiring, promotion, and contracting practices to increase minority representation. In the case of Facebook and Airbnb, they also recommended changes to the company’s core business. Airbnb started hiding guest photos during the booking process, citing “direct input” from an auditor. Facebook adopted stricter content moderation policies on speech aimed at “vulnerable groups.” These changes were recommended not as nice things to do but as ways for the company to stay in compliance with civil rights law.
We take it for granted now, but it would have sounded bizarre to the framers of our constitution that the government can simply command a company to get rid of employees from one ethnic group and hire more employees from another. The laws that mandate workforce diversity are not like other regulations. They are not quotas, which one either meets or doesn’t. They ban discrimination, elastically defined, which leaves companies unsure whether they are in compliance. Over and over again, the biggest companies with the most carefully designed HR practices have been hit with nine-figure settlements in racial discrimination lawsuits, Texaco in 1996 ($176.1 million), Coca-Cola in 2000 ($192.5 million), Merrill Lynch in 2013 ($160 million).
These lawsuits are based primarily on statistical disparities—more whites than non-whites in upper management, fewer blacks at a company than in the area where its office is located—but for a lawsuit to succeed, these disparities must be enlivened with anecdotal evidence of bias. In the Texaco case, the company settled after audio tapes were leaked of its executives talking about “black jelly beans” that were “glued to the bottom of the bag.”
By 2022, when black employees filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Google, the anecdotes had gotten distinctly underwhelming. One plaintiff complained that colleagues mixed her up with other black women in the office. Another claimed she was told to “speak proper English.” Black applicants who were never hired by Google joined the suit, claiming that interviewers who rejected them over “cultural fit” were using that phrase to hide racist motives. Google ended up paying $50 million to settle the suit.
In 2017, three sociologists published the book Rights on Trial about anti-discrimination lawsuits—not the multimillion dollar national kind but the everyday cases, with a single wronged employee and a median settlement amount of $30,000. As they collected data on their sample group of about 1,800 cases, they initially asked their research team to include an assessment of the merits of each case, that is, whether any discrimination had actually occurred. They abandoned this idea when the researchers rarely agreed. “Some were clear instances of ‘frivolous’ cases,” they wrote, “and a few seemed to have ‘smoking guns,’ but the vast majority fell in between.”
“An entire class of ideological enforcers has been called into being.”
The threat of these lawsuits matters more than any particular case. An entire class of ideological enforcers has been called into being by the very ambiguity of these laws. The job of an HR person is to sniff out anything that might create legal liability for a company. That includes any department with insufficient diversity and any employee communication that might be interpreted as politically incorrect. How many people currently work as ideological enforcers for our racial regime, and how much do we spend on it? A McKinsey study in 2023 estimated that companies spend about $7.5 billion each year on diversity training, but that is an undercount of the broader phenomenon. A 2024 audit of the University of Virginia found 235 people with jobs related to DEI, with the highest paid earning $587,340 and all of them together costing $20 million a year.
When these legal doctrines first evolved in the 1970s, scholars recognized their expansive potential. If the government can intervene any time it sees a racial disparity, then its power is effectively unlimited, because those disparities are everywhere. Law professor Gail Heriot titled a 2019 paper, provocatively, “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” For a long time, these concerns remained theoretical, in part because activists and judges showed some restraint in the application of these sweeping principles. This restraint has been eroded.
More and more aspects of daily life, far removed from DEI’s usual spheres, have come under attack in the name of racial justice. Many cities, including Philadelphia and Los Angeles, have limited routine traffic enforcement because too many of the drivers pulled over for minor offenses were non-white. Discipline in public schools became noticeably worse in the last decade, because, under Barack Obama, the Department of Education made it harder to suspend disruptive students since too many of the students suspended under the old policy were black. (The Trump administration revised that federal guidance in July.)
The University of California system currently has test-blind admissions, meaning that students can’t submit their SAT scores even if they want to. This has produced classes of unteachable freshmen who can’t do basic fractions, according to professors. Even the New York Times editorial board has called for the UC system to bring back the SAT. But UC didn’t adopt test-blind admissions in a sudden fit of radicalism. It was forced to do so by a lawsuit.
The plaintiffs in Smith v. Regents argued that the SAT was discriminatory against disadvantaged groups including blacks and Hispanics. The named plaintiff, Kawika Smith, who is black, got a 980 on practice tests and felt discouraged by his low score from applying to UC Berkeley. A judge in 2020 sided with the plaintiffs and ordered the UC system to exclude test scores from consideration. A legal settlement extended test-blind admissions through 2025. Any attempt to bring back the SAT will have to contend with this litigation.
There have always been people who claim that the SAT is a racist test. The disparities on which the plaintiffs based their argument have existed since the beginning of standardized testing. The fact that this lawsuit succeeded was a matter of the activists’ initiative and the judge’s receptivity. Demographic change means that these legal tools, which have existed for decades, will be used in more imaginative ways as activists get more ambitious and the minority groups they represent become more politically powerful.
We all like to think that if were living in a communist country, we would know it. We would be afraid to speak our minds. But with every passing year the idea of America as a country of fearless plain speakers sounds more old-fashioned. Many people recognized something Soviet about the atmosphere of fear that prevailed during the peak of wokeness, when telling the wrong joke could get you fired and truth was no defense against charges of wrongthink. What went underappreciated at the time was that this atmosphere of fear was not just a side effect of an episode of mass hysteria. It could also be traced back to the government.
Ask a real estate agent whether a neighborhood is safe or if the local schools are any good. She can only give evasive answers, even though those are reasonable things for any prospective home buyer to want to know. It’s not because she is dancing around an awkward subject. It is illegal for her to give a straight answer, because the facts might have racist implications. When Redfin announced in 2021 that its listings would not include any information about crime rates, the reason it gave was to avoid “reinforcing racial bias.”
Ilya Shapiro was canceled in 2022 for tweeting that the Supreme Court vacancy that just opened up should be filled by the best candidate, which in his opinion was Sri Srinivasan of the DC Circuit, but “alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” (President Joe Biden had promised during the campaign to put the first black woman on the Court.) Shapiro’s employer, Georgetown Law School, opened an investigation into whether the tweet created “a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex.” The tweet was excused on a technicality but the school warned that “another, similar, or more serious remark” would open up Georgetown Law to legal liability. Shapiro took the hint and quit.
Companies that part ways with employees over controversial social media remarks are usually perceived as caving to public pressure, but the relevant pressure here was not from the public. Georgetown Law was claiming that Shapiro’s tweet could have created a “hostile environment” in the technical sense and thus opened the school up to a civil rights lawsuit.
Government censorship in the US has taken this indirect form, laundered through private actors, because the American people have traditionally rejected overt censorship. Around 2020, that changed. The idea that dangerous ideas should be suppressed became more acceptable. Publishers hired “sensitivity readers” literal censors, to purge manuscripts of anything politically incorrect. HBO withdrew Gone With the Wind from its streaming service and only reinstated it with a disclaimer. Surveys found college students growing more likely to say that controversial speakers should be banned from campus and a majority saying professors should be reported for saying bad things, such as denying any anti-black bias in police shootings.
The advent of social media revolutionized the manipulation of public opinion. The need to contain “hate speech” became a versatile tool in the hands of censors, and the line between hate speech and conservative opinion was deliberately blurred. Twitter’s list of banned phrases included “go back where you came from” until 2019, when Donald Trump used the phrase in a tweet about progressive lawmakers such as Ilhan Omar and moderators balked at forcing him to delete the tweet as they would have done for any other user. They removed that phrase but kept the prohibition on speech targeting immigrants.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk led to a surge of interest in starting new chapters of Turning Point USA, but some students found that they were banned from doing so on the grounds that TPUSA was a hate group. An administrator at Taft High School in Chicago, which prohibited students from forming a group, called Turning Point “an organization promoting racial intolerance.” At the student government meeting at Loyola University New Orleans that denied permission for a campus chapter, one person called Turning Point “an organization that explicitly promotes hate towards Hispanics” because of Kirk’s position on immigration.
This tactic of using accusations of “hate” to hobble conservatives will only get more common as demographic change proceeds. More political issues will take on a racial character as the country becomes more diverse. Advocacy groups will flex their political muscle by expanding the definition of “hate” to their advantage, the way the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus characterized it as anti-Asian hate when Trump called Covid the “Chinese virus.” Because these protections are only ever applied to marginalized groups, the restriction on political speech and organizing only ever goes one way.
Literary critic Gary Saul Morson, an expert in Russian literature, wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2020 that he could pinpoint the moment that he knew younger Americans had very different ideas about free speech: “I used to get a laugh from students by quoting a Soviet citizen I talked to once. He said to me, ‘Of course we have freedom of speech. We just don’t allow people to lie.’ That used to get a laugh! They don’t laugh anymore.” Morson’s students no longer laugh because it matches how Americans think about free speech in their own country today, only in our case a better phrasing would be that we have free speech, you’re just not allowed to spread hate.
How did the people who lived in the Soviet Union come to realize that theirs was an evil system? The answer is, mostly, they didn’t. Even those who realized that something wasn’t working were unable to see that it was the system itself that was the problem. Even the dissidents, who put their lives on the line to criticize the regime, were all socialists.
“They could not see what was right in front of their faces.”
It’s shocking to go back and realize this in retrospect: These were smart people, brave people, and yet they could not see what was right in front of their faces, that the problem with communism was communism. Even the independent thinkers believed in the system too much to get their minds outside it. They wanted economic reforms, like Mikhail Gorbachev, or more personal freedoms, like Andrei Sakharov, but they didn’t want to give up on the socialist dream.
Communism didn’t end because people were persuaded to abandon it. It ended because it collapsed under its own dysfunctions. These dysfunctions mostly involved the misallocation of resources. Communism elevated people to positions of authority based on ideology rather than competence. Job security was a basic entitlement, so people had to be kept in their jobs even if they were incompetent or their positions were obsolete; overstaffing was estimated at 15 to 20 percent of the labor force in state industries by the 1980s.
It demoralized the most capable individuals by not offering them any incentive to reach their potential, since their standard of living would be similar either way. In the 1970s, Leonid Brezhnev decided that the ladies who swept the streets of Moscow should be paid more. Their wages were duly raised. “But then people in the government slapped themselves on the head,” recalled an economist. “Engineers, doctors, and teachers are making about the same as a cleaning woman. What a mess. Why study to become an engineer if you can make almost the same amount as a street cleaner?”
A pervasive mediocrity came to characterize everyone in any position of authority, as years of bureaucratic complacency and risk aversion took effect. A 1987 article in Pravda complained that “I don’t like him, he’s cleverer than I am” seemed to be every manager’s philosophy. When Gorbachev tried to reform the system, he found that many of the people on the ground were not up to the task of implementing his agenda.
The system could cope with these inefficiencies for a long time. The Soviet Union even achieved enviable growth rates for many years. But eventually the flaws compounded and the machine ceased to function.
Racial favoritism makes institutions less efficient, by definition, because it elevates people for political reasons rather than merit. This does not necessarily make it bad. A rich country can afford some inefficiencies in the interests of justice or social harmony. The danger is that these inefficiencies build up over time and start to threaten the functioning of important institutions. That is the point we are reaching now.
The slackening of racial hysteria in late 2024, the so-called “vibe shift,” had many causes—the most obvious being Donald Trump’s election victory—but one underappreciated cause was Kamala Harris. Her presence on the ticket in 2020 was a result of candidate Joe Biden’s pledge to choose a woman as his running mate, and the pressure exerted on his campaign amid that year’s racial reckoning to select a black woman. When her presidential candidacy flamed out, it called into question one of the basic principles on which the affirmative action regime is based.
The premise of affirmative action is that a qualified minority candidate is always out there. It might take you longer to find him, and he might not be as qualified as the most qualified white candidates, but he will be good enough. All the Democratic Party had to do in 2020 was find a black female vice-presidential candidate who met minimum standards, but it seemed the best they could do was Kamala Harris, who self-evidently did not. She flubbed softball interviews, perhaps because, according to former staffers, she had a history of refusing to do basic prep work.
Watching Kamala Harris flounder in 2024 raised the question of whether affirmative action had not just elevated someone less qualified, but saddled the Democrats with someone who was simply unqualified, whom they could not get rid of even in a high-stakes situation with the future of the party on the line. Usually, complaints about affirmative action are framed in terms of fairness, that the more qualified person should have gotten the job and skin color should not have mattered. Now it was brought home in the most vivid way possible that unfairness was sometimes the least of its problems.
Another mediocrity who crashed and burned on the national stage that year was Claudine Gay. Even before the plagiarism scandal that led to her resignation, Gay was transparently unqualified for the role of president of Harvard University. Her academic resume was unimpressive; she had not published a single book. Previous Harvard presidents included scholars of distinction like Drew Gilpin Faust, whose books won national awards.
Harvard is one of the richest places in the entire world in money and talent. You might think that if any institution could afford a few affirmative action hires without threatening its ability to function, it would be Harvard. But mediocrities attract mediocrities. They carve out little fiefdoms and drive out the real geniuses. While serving as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Gay played a leading role in what the documentarian Rob Montz called the “coordinated professional assassination” of the talented black economist Roland Fryer. Eventually the entire apparatus is eaten through with termites, and the mediocrities are able to claim the institution for themselves.
The Potomac spill of 2026 was one of the biggest sewage disasters in history, dumping hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated water and fecal bacteria into local rivers. Although the reason for the spill is disputed, a March class-action lawsuit alleges negligence on the part of the water company. DC Water’s CEO, David Gadis, had recently implemented diversity initiatives that took the utility’s leadership from 63 percent white when he took over in 2018 to 25 percent white in 2021. Did such rapid change come at the expense of competence?
In 2023, there was a string of frightening news stories about near-collisions at airports. The New York Times later reported that there really had been a 65 percent increase in “significant” air traffic control lapses in 2023 compared to the previous year. After a collision killed sixty-seven people at Washington’s Reagan airport shortly after his return to office last January, President Trump blamed diversity policies at the Federal Aviation Administration for a fatal crash. The theory was plausible: In 2014, under the Obama administration, the FAA had overhauled the hiring process for air traffic controllers, scrapping the previously used standardized test on the grounds that it excluded too many black applicants and replacing it with a “Biographical Assessment” designed to diversify recruitment. But, as in the case of the sewage spill, there was no proof apart from the timing that the two were connected.
It is hard to know when forces of decline will start to matter. The number of white Army recruits dropped 43 percent between 2018 and 2023, while black and Hispanic recruitment stayed roughly steady. A survey of veterans in 2024 found that two-thirds of those who would not advise a young family member to join the military cited “DEI and other social policies” as a reason. A recruitment crisis like this could turn catastrophic in the event of a war, but until then it would be hard for most people to notice. Special forces tend to be whiter than the military at large, in defiance of top-down efforts to increase diversity, but that informal exemption could end at any time and the military’s elite units could be forced to change their standards in order to diversify. That, too, would be fine until one day it wasn’t.
Affirmative action, when it was developed, was sold as something that would not interfere with the functioning of our institutions. In the beginning, that promise was mostly kept. But as its beneficiaries grew to be a greater share of the population, now approaching a majority, it became impossible for biased hiring to remain relatively costless. Like communism, its dysfunctions compound over time.
In February 2026, a video went viral of Texas state representative Gene Wu saying in a 2024 interview, “The day the Latino, African-American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning, because we are the majority in this country now. We have the ability to take over this country.”
Some videos go viral because the speaker said something crazy. This was not one of those. Wu’s statement was calm, clear, and logical. It is also fatal to the republic. The shared oppressor he referred to is clearly white people, although some of his defenders suggested otherwise. The giveaway is the “now” in “We are the majority in this country now.” That would not make any sense if he had been referring generically to a cross-racial coalition against exploitation.
Wu was describing an electoral strategy that has worked well for the Democratic Party. Race is a tempting target for organizers in any democracy because it offers large blocs of voters and clear ways to mobilize them. But multiethnic democracies that are polarized around race are fundamentally unstable. They don’t debate issues, they count heads, and they often degenerate into violence.
“No Democratic candidate has won a majority of white votes since 1964.”
Republicans have had a difficult time fighting against this strategy. No GOP presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover has won a majority of the votes of any non-white ethnicity in any election (just as no Democratic candidate has won a majority of white votes since 1964). It’s not because the GOP hasn’t tried. It’s because you can’t beat something with nothing. If one party offers an array of racial privileges and the other wants you to give up those privileges in exchange for nothing, that is an easy choice.
Think of the ways the Democratic Party makes life materially better for its clients every day. Under our system of racial preferences, your kid gets into a better college than he otherwise would. Your boss thinks twice about firing you because it might be a legal headache. If he does fire you, or just doesn’t promote you fast enough, you can sue him and maybe get a five-figure legal settlement. One man in Detroit, Sauntore Thomas, after settling a racial discrimination suit with his former employer, also brought suit against the bank where he went to deposit his $99,000 settlement when his large checks met with extra scrutiny; although a bank spokesman pointed out that the assistant manager who put the deposit on hold was also black, it later settled with Thomas for an undisclosed amount. Whatever else his racial identity might have meant to him, it was, in this instance, a button he could push to make it rain money.
Compared to the material advantages offered by our system of racial preferences in housing, education, employment, and just plain cash, how can Republicans compete? Not with better arguments. So the only way to avoid the end point of a racial spoils system is to do something decisive: to take race-based redistribution off the table completely.
Right now, the strategy of the Trump administration is to make our race laws apply equally to everyone. The Civil Rights Division of the DOJ is suing Yale School of Medicine and other schools for discriminating against whites and Asians in admissions. The EEOC is suing The New York Times on behalf of a white male employee who claims he was passed over for a promotion in favor of a less qualified woman of color. America First Legal, the public interest firm founded by Stephen Miller, has initiated an investigation into Penguin Random House for similar anti-white, anti-male employment practices.
These lawsuits may result in immediate victories for those who want a less racialized politics. But if we continue to wage our political battles through lawsuits on behalf of one race or another, then race will continue to be central to our public life. A better way to think about these lawsuits, as a matter of long-term strategy, is as a way to inflict enough pain on institutions that they agree to a compromise: no more race-based lawsuits of any kind.
That is the point of the racial crossroads thesis. If we keep race-based laws and programs, then the force of demographic change and persistent disparities in outcomes will result in those laws consuming our politics and creating dysfunctions that will drive the country into a ditch. The year 2020 was a bad time, and lots of people are currently acting as if they would like to forget the hysteria of that year, but a replay of 2020 is what we should expect so long as our laws remain unchanged.
The only way to avoid that toxic dynamic is to eliminate race entirely from our laws so that those forces no longer have a foothold. Under the new bargain, institutions would be free to have DEI programs and also free not to. HR departments would no longer be able to wield the threat of lawsuits to bully the rest of the company. The upside for Harvard is that it gets to keep its affirmative action program. The upside for conservatives is that they can start a new school with meritocratic admissions without fear of having different policies imposed by a lawsuit. We would keep the legal prohibition on racial segregation, in the spirit of the 1964 law and its goal of ending Jim Crow, but that’s it.
A lot of people ask how long white Americans should have to pay for crimes committed before they were born. But the real question is how long until former minorities start acting like the majority. The basic idea of our current racial bargain is that the demographically predominant group should extend favors and privileges to minorities to make up for the disadvantages they face. I am not aware of any majority-minority jurisdiction, in the United States or anywhere else, where the white minority is treated that way. On the contrary, it is usually treated as a legacy oppressor even in places where whites have not held political power in decades and their share of the population is small and shrinking.
As America confronts our racial crossroads, we face two time constraints. One is the countdown to the day when the dysfunctions outlined above result in some catastrophe, either because we run out of money to redistribute or the competence crisis catches up with us. The other is the countdown to the demographic tipping point when the beneficiaries of our system of racial favoritism become a majority of voters and our current trajectory is locked in.
Removing every reference to race in our laws and regulations, apart from a bare-bones version of the 1964 law banning segregation, would be enough to take the air out of most DEI in this country. Government action created these industries, and I predict that it can un-create them, since they don’t actually add value for anyone. The job market for diversity professionals started to cool even before Trump was reelected, and the number of mentions of “diversity” and “DEI” in annual corporate reports plummeted 72 percent between 2024 and 2025, which suggests that businesses don’t actually need believe that they need this ideology in order to employ a diverse work force or sell to a diverse range of customers.
We don’t have to abolish race as a concept or a source of meaning for some people. We just need to get rid of it as a legal tool. People can talk about race. They just can’t sue over it. There will still be tensions and conflicts in society that take on an ethnic character. But at least we won’t be locked into a path to a politics that revolves around race. History proves, contrary to the left’s assurances, that there is no good version of that outcome.
In 1991, when Russia ceased to be a communist country, there were so many former “political officers” running around whose jobs had been eliminated that there was a question of what to do with them all. Some became management consultants, others became psychotherapists. I don’t know if the skills of today’s DEI officers are that adaptable. But they should have to find out.