By Ken Craycraft, Catholic Herald.
In my February column for the magazine – written prior to the inauguration of President Trump and Vice President Vance – I wondered if the political and cultural tide may be turning in the United States. I offered a tentative “maybe”, based upon an analysis of voter responses to big-ticket issues in the campaign, such as abortion and transgender ideology. As I write these words a few frenetic weeks into the new administration, I have modified my answer to a resounding, “yes”. A seismic shift in political and legal institutions is occurring that may have enduring cultural effects.
Political theorists debate whether culture is downstream from politics, or vice versa. Do shifts in cultural moods and sentiments lead to instantiation in law and politics? Or do political and legal institutions produce inevitable alterations in cultural temperaments and attitudes? While there are elements of reciprocity in the relationships of culture and politics, I don’t have any doubt that cultural dispositions follow political and legal institutions. Culture is downstream from politics. The extent it sometimes appears otherwise is the measure of a coalescence of resistance to the legally instantiated cultural status quo.
When the resistance seizes control of political and legal institutions, the cultural shift will follow. This is what the first month of the second Trump administration represented. Through a series of executive orders (EOs), the president began to establish a legal and regulatory regime that represents resistance and portends a cultural shift. Two policy areas (of several) illustrate this change of direction: the death of diversity, equality and inclusion frameworks (DEI) and the evisceration of the transgender cult.
On his second day in office, President Trump signed an EO entitled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” It might rightly be called “destroying the DEI golden calf”. So-called DEI measures have permeated every aspect of American life: political institutions; corporate governance; employment hiring, promotion and retention; the armed services; all levels of education, both public and private. The priority of demographic “identities” over competence and qualification has had a corrosive effect on both institutions and the civic atmosphere in the US.