The real obstacle for Trump’s campaign against DEI isn’t Democrats. It’s demography

CNN — The escalating drive from President Donald Trump and other Republicans against programs to promote greater diversity in education and employment is on a collision course with fundamental changes in the nation’s demographic make-up, particularly among the young. The pushback against diversity programs “is an attempt to entrench racial discrimination and disparities at every level of society and to horde power and influence among what will soon be a minority population of White people and the wealthy,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a leading civil rights organization. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Manuel Pastor, director of the Equity Research Institute at USC, agreed that Trump’s gains with minority voters came in part because diversity programs in education and employment don’t “always reach working-class people of color in real, concrete material ways.” And Pastor believes that the backlash against diversity programs intensified because too many morphed into formulaic workplace trainings that “became often more symbolic and about discourse and how about how people feel than they were about recognizing historic disparities and giving people a leg up into the workplace.” But, Pastor argues, none of that erases the core demographic reality that the US will increasingly rely for its future workers on kids of color who are on the wrong end of compounding disparities in educational and employment opportunity. I think there is no centralized control or bureaucracy that could effectively engineer those kinds of outcomes without serious unintended consequences.” Even if the rollback of diversity programs widens the gap between White and non-White young people, Butcher said, “I don’t believe that just because there would be different outcomes for individuals based on race that it necessarily represents racism.” Amid the furious counteroffensive against diversity programs from conservatives wielding such arguments, defenders of these efforts are likely to shift their arguments over time more from equity to economic grounds. One of the defining demographic realities of modern America is the enormous racial divergence between America’s youngest and oldest generations, a dynamic Frey has called the “cultural generation gap” and I’ve described as the contrast between “the brown and the gray.” Even as minorities have grown into a majority of the youth population, and advance toward becoming most of the working-age population, about three-fourths of seniors remain White.