Rinse and Repeat: The Death and Rebirth of Progress

Ah, yes. The grand American tradition of progress, followed swiftly by the equally grand American tradition of panicking about that progress and trying to slam the brakes. If you listen closely, you can hear the same old record scratching its way through history—only this time, it’s labeled “DEI Crackdown.”

Donald Trump and his merry band of cultural arsonists have decided that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are the new great evil—just like universal suffrage once was, civil rights always has been, and, for a brief period, the idea that child labor should be outlawed. It’s an old trick: take something that threatens entrenched power, dress it up as a moral catastrophe, and ride the backlash until enough people are scared to death that America is being “ruined” by fairness.

But let’s not pretend this playbook is new. Let’s hop in our metaphorical time machine—careful, no DEI consultants helped build it—to the early 1900s, when another wave of social progress had the ruling class clutching their pearls so hard they practically turned them into dust: women’s suffrage.

Yes, the idea that women should be allowed to vote sent a panic through the nation’s most serious, furrow-browed men. The arguments against it? Oh, they were gems. Some swore it would “erode traditional society” (sound familiar?). Others insisted it was “government overreach into the natural order” (ringing any bells?). And, of course, there was the timeless claim that “this is reverse oppression, men will become the victims!”—which is basically the 1920s version of today’s “DEI is actually discrimination against white people” routine.

So what did these defenders of the status quo do? They launched a counteroffensive of manufactured outrage. Political leaders demonized the suffrage movement as a Marxist scheme, newspapers churned out fearmongering op-eds about “woman rule,” and corporate donors funneled cash into anti-suffrage campaigns under the guise of protecting American values. The movement was labeled dangerous, radical, un-American—a virus infecting the very fabric of society.

And yet… after all the fury, all the legislation trying to stop it, all the hand-wringing about how it would lead to national collapse—women still got the vote. Because, as history so often proves, manufactured outrage has a shorter shelf life than actual progress. The fear fades, the propaganda loses steam, and eventually, even the most stubborn traditionalists are forced to admit that civilization hasn’t crumbled just because a new demographic got a seat at the table.

Which brings us back to today’s grand panic: the systematic dismantling of DEI programs. The effort is being framed with all the old hits—it’s a threat to meritocracy! It’s an attack on traditional values! It’s government overreach! And just like suffrage, just like civil rights, just like every other moment in history when power was asked to share the room, the response is the same: ban it, demonize it, suppress it.

But here’s the thing about crackdowns on progress: they don’t last. You can slow it down, you can bury it under mountains of political bluster, you can even convince a few people that fairness is a communist plot. But eventually, reality wins. Because the thing about progress is that once people have had a taste of it, they remember what it’s like, and they don’t go back quietly.

So go ahead—ban DEI programs, outlaw discussions of systemic bias, and pretend the problem disappears if you just forbid people from acknowledging it. History says otherwise. History says this is just another rinse cycle. And if history is any guide, we already know how this one ends.

The only question left is how long the rinse cycle lasts before we’re forced to hit repeat.