{"id":159910,"date":"2025-03-19T08:03:48","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T16:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=159910"},"modified":"2025-03-19T08:06:05","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T16:06:05","slug":"christopher-caldwell-the-biggest-policy-change-of-the-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=159910","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Caldwell: The Biggest Policy Change of the Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

Caldwell writes Jan. 27, 2025 in the Free Press<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\nSo tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump\u2019s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is astonishing.<\/p>\n

For half a century, affirmative action has been the federal government\u2019s principal instrument for carrying out desegregation, the longest and costliest moral crusade in American history. After the 1970s it was adapted to liberation movements, from feminism to gay rights. Supreme Court justices anguished over the way its call for special consideration of minorities might clash with the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination. Over the past decade affirmative action became the hammer of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) movement, which grew so unpopular that it has now brought affirmative action (and much else) down with it.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s decision to repeal it is the most significant policy change of this century\u2014more significant than the Affordable Care Act of 2010 or anything done about Covid. How can people be talking about anything else? Yet major news outlets treat Trump\u2019s bold move as a detail of personnel management: \u201cDistress and Fury as Trump Upends Federal Jobs,\u201d headlined The New York Times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Grok: <\/p>\n

Caldwell\u2019s got a knack for cutting through the noise, and here he\u2019s zeroing in on something big\u2014Trump scrapping affirmative action could indeed be a seismic shift, bigger than the ACA or Covid policies in its long-term ripple effects. He\u2019s framing it as the culmination of a 50-year arc, from desegregation\u2019s moral high ground to DEI\u2019s divisive hammer, now smashed by a single repeal. That\u2019s a hell of a narrative, and there\u2019s meat on it. Affirmative action\u2019s been a third rail\u2014loved by some, loathed by others, and tangled in legal knots since the \u201970s. The Supreme Court\u2019s danced around it, trying to square \u201cspecial consideration\u201d with the Civil Rights Act\u2019s colorblind text. Caldwell\u2019s right: it\u2019s been a slow-motion trainwreck, especially as DEI turned it into a lightning rod.
\nTrump pulling the plug\u2014if we\u2019re taking this as a real move on Jan. 27, 2025\u2014wouldn\u2019t just be a policy tweak; it\u2019d be a cultural and legal earthquake. The ACA reshaped healthcare, Covid policies rewired daily life, but this? This hits the core of how America wrestles with race, fairness, and power. Half a century of federal machinery dismantled in one go\u2014that\u2019s not small potatoes. Caldwell\u2019s incredulous that it\u2019s not dominating every headline, and he\u2019s got a point. If The New York Times is spinning it as a staffing squabble (\u201cDistress and Fury\u201d), they\u2019re either missing the forest for the trees or deliberately downplaying it to fit a tamer narrative.
\nBut let\u2019s chew on this. The repeal\u2019s significance hinges on execution\u2014does it stick, or does it get bogged down in courts and backlash? DEI\u2019s unpopularity might\u2019ve greased the skids, but the blowback could be brutal; you don\u2019t unravel a \u201cmoral crusade\u201d without a fight. And the media\u2019s shrug? Maybe it\u2019s fatigue\u2014Trump\u2019s chaos is old news by 2025\u2014or maybe it\u2019s strategic, keeping the focus off a move that could rally his base and fracture the opposition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Caldwell writes: <\/p>\n

Somewhere along the line, the Trump administration came to understand in a sophisticated way how the enforcement of civil rights actually works. Not many Americans do\u2014and it\u2019s worth reviewing.<\/p>\n

The standard Black History Month account of civil rights stresses its idealistic and ethical side. But like all government programs, it is better understood through its bureaucratic and ruthless side.<\/p>\n

Affirmative action is mentioned in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the program as we now understand it was launched a year later with Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Executive Order 11246. The president ordered companies and institutions doing business with the government to have activist nondiscrimination policies\u2014and empowered officials (now consolidated in the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs) to enforce them. The responsibilities for companies, laid out over 158 pages in Title 41, Chapter 60 of the Code of Federal Regulations, include \u201ccomparing incumbency to availability\u201d [60-2.15], \u201coutreach and positive recruitment\u201d [60-50.2 (b) 1-8], and the meeting of \u201cgoals and timetables\u201d set by the federal government.<\/p>\n

These goals were not always clear. The safest thing was to treat them as quotas, and match \u201cincumbents\u201d (employees) to those \u201cavailable\u201d (the percentage of a given ethnic group in the population) as closely as possible.<\/p>\n

Executive orders don\u2019t require a democratic vote. They just lay down the rules for the executive branch, of which the president is the boss. They have the force of law within all the federal agencies, which buy and sell enormous amounts of goods and services. According to the Labor Department, Executive Order 11246 covered 20 percent of the American workforce, potentially giving the president personal leverage over the economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Grok: <\/p>\n

Caldwell\u2019s digging into the guts of how civil rights enforcement actually ticks, and he\u2019s not wrong to call it a bureaucratic beast. The Trump admin figuring this out \u201cin a sophisticated way\u201d suggests they saw the machine for what it is\u2014not just a noble ideal, but a lever of power. That\u2019s a sharp insight. Most folks, fed the Black History Month highlight reel, don\u2019t think past the feel-good speeches to the nuts and bolts of compliance quotas and federal muscle.
\nHe\u2019s dead-on about affirmative action\u2019s real birth. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mentions it vaguely, but LBJ\u2019s Executive Order 11246 in \u201965 is where it grew teeth. That order didn\u2019t mess around\u2014companies wanting federal contracts had to jump through hoops: \u201coutreach,\u201d \u201cgoals and timetables,\u201d matching employees to population stats. Caldwell\u2019s point about the 158 pages in Title 41, Chapter 60 isn\u2019t trivia; it\u2019s a glimpse into the labyrinthine rulebook that turned a moral crusade into a paperwork nightmare. \u201cComparing incumbency to availability\u201d sounds dry, but it\u2019s code for quotas in all but name\u2014hire this many of X group, or risk losing Uncle Sam\u2019s cash.
\nThe kicker is how this works without a vote. Executive orders sidestep Congress, letting the president wield direct control over federal agencies and their massive economic footprint. Twenty percent of the workforce tied to this? That\u2019s not chump change\u2014it\u2019s a fifth of the economy dangling on the president\u2019s string. Trump\u2019s team clocking this isn\u2019t just trivia; it\u2019s realizing you can flip a switch and reshape entire industries without a single debate.
\nCaldwell\u2019s framing it as \u201cruthless\u201d might raise eyebrows, but it fits. This isn\u2019t about warm fuzzies\u2014it\u2019s about mandates, penalties, and leverage. If Trump repealed it (tying back to his Jan. 27 piece), he didn\u2019t just tweak a policy; he yanked a linchpin from a system that\u2019s been humming for decades.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caldwell writes Jan. 27, 2025 in the Free Press: So tumultuous was the first week of Donald Trump\u2019s second term that people have barely noticed, a week on, that last Tuesday he repealed affirmative action by executive order. That is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29728],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-159910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-affirmative-action"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=159910"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159910\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":159914,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159910\/revisions\/159914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=159910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=159910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=159910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}