The attack on DEI is a symptom of a dying empire.
It should surprise no one that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are under attack. The ruling class has always moved to crush anything that threatens its hegemony, and DEI, imperfect and often co-opted though it may be, at least gestures toward redistributing power. That alone makes it intolerable to a system built on exploitation.
If I may be totally crystal skull vodka clear: the state doesn’t oppose DEI because it “goes too far.” It opposes it because it hints, however faintly, at the idea that the world doesn’t have to be structured around hierarchy and domination. Not to mention white supremacy. And that is unacceptable to the ruling oligarchs.
Capitalism Needs Inequality
The entire function of capitalism is to extract, hoard, and concentrate wealth and power in as few hands as possible. It does this by ensuring that most people remain precariously locked into wage labor, burdened by debt, and desperate enough to accept whatever scraps they can get. Anything that challenges this precariousness, even symbolically, must be dismantled.
That’s why reactionaries frame DEI as an existential threat. It isn’t, in itself revolutionary but it’s a bureaucratic response to oppression, one that corporations and universities have sanitized for their own benefit. But even this mild reformism is intolerable because it introduces a dangerous idea: that maybe the world could be organized differently. Maybe power could be shared. Maybe the structures we take for granted — borders, police, profit-driven economies aren’t as inevitable as we’ve been told.
Fascism Follows Capitalism Like a Shadow
And so, in a moment of crisis when capitalism is fraying, when people are asking too many questions fascism steps in. It needs a scapegoat. It needs an enemy. DEI becomes an easy target, framed as the reason for every failure of the system itself. Wages are stagnant? It’s because of “woke hiring.” Schools are underfunded? Must be that “radical left agenda.” The empire rots from the inside, but rather than face that reality, the ruling class directs its fury at the very people it has always subjugated.
This is why attacks on DEI arent just bad policy; they’re part of a larger pattern. Austerity, book bans, anti-LGBTQ laws, police militarization — all connected. It’s the system shoring up its defenses, making sure that when the collapse comes, the people at the top stay right where they are.
DEI won’t save us. It was never meant to. It’s a bandage on a wound that capitalism keeps ripping open. But the fact that the state feels the need to attack it at all tells us something important: even small challenges to power make the system flinch.
So we dont mourn the loss of DEI as an institution. We recognize its limits, then go further. If equity is the goal, then we dont just tweak the system — we dismantle it. If inclusion matters, then we don’t just demand a seat at the table, we burn the table down.
Because fascism isn’t stopped by bureaucracy. Capitalism isn’t undone by compliance training. The fight for a just world has always been bigger than that, and it always will be.