Bye, Bye American DEI
The reckonings have been swift and dizzying.
A dramatic and decisive shift is sweeping through corporate America, as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives crumble in the face of legal scrutiny, economic reality, and shifting public sentiment. What was once considered the inevitable march of corporate progressivism is now being reversed with stunning speed.
Citigroup has eliminated race-based hiring quotas. Bank of America has followed suit. Goldman Sachs has abandoned its diversity mandate for IPOs. BlackRock, once a champion of DEI, has quietly stripped references to its diversity programs from corporate filings. Deloitte U.S. has told employees working on government contracts to remove gender pronouns from email signatures. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are rolling back DEI commitments as federal contractors. Even Amazon and Google, longtime standard-bearers of corporate progressivism, have purged DEI language from their reports and workforce policies. PBS has shuttered its DEI office entirely.
What happened? Reality asserted itself.
DEI programs, long protected by corporate inertia and the threat of activist pressure, have now run up against two immovable forces: the law and the bottom line. The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions made it clear that race-based decision-making in hiring was legally questionable at best. President Donald Trump’s executive order banning race and gender discrimination in federal contracting turned that into a direct threat to corporate balance sheets. Suddenly, compliance departments and general counsels had to take a hard look at policies that had long been implemented with little concern for legal exposure.
Meanwhile, DEI’s economic toll was becoming harder to ignore. Despite years of corporate executives insisting that diversity initiatives boosted the bottom line, those claims never quite added up. Shareholders were left wondering why companies were prioritizing ideological agendas over maximizing returns. Employees grew resentful as hiring and promotions were increasingly dictated by identity rather than merit. Consumers, once silent, became vocal opponents of activist-driven corporate policies. The backlash was inevitable.
This isn’t just a political correction. It’s a preference cascade—a moment when people and institutions rapidly abandon an ideology they once publicly supported but never truly believed in. History is full of such moments, where dominant narratives, long maintained through social pressure and enforced consensus, suddenly disintegrate.
The medieval kings of Europe, for centuries, paid lip service to pagan gods while privately considering the growing influence of Christianity. Then, as soon as a key ruler—such as Clovis I of the Franks—converted, others quickly followed, exposing how fragile the old order had really been. Corporate America’s embrace of DEI functioned the same way: upheld not by deep conviction but by the fear of reputational ruin. Once a few key institutions abandoned it, the illusion of universal commitment crumbled overnight.
The fall of communism in Eastern Europe followed a similar trajectory. The regimes of Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia seemed invincible—right up until the moment they weren’t. When Poland broke free in 1989, the chain reaction toppled East Germany, then the Soviet Union itself. The institutions of corporate DEI operated on the same model—an ideology enforced through intimidation and groupthink, rather than genuine consensus. The moment legal and economic incentives changed, corporations fled from it just as quickly as Eastern European states abandoned Marxism.
Perhaps the most striking parallel, however, is with the rapid collapse of the eugenics movement. In the early 20th century, eugenics was considered the height of scientific progress, endorsed by leading intellectuals, politicians, and business leaders. Then came the horrors of World War II, and suddenly eugenics became a discredited ideology. Its former champions rewrote history, distancing themselves from the cause they had once fervently supported. The same pattern is emerging now with DEI. Companies that once prided themselves on their diversity pledges are quietly deleting the language from their websites, erasing references in annual reports, and pretending they were never all that invested in the first place.
LGBTQ flag and Black Lives Matter banner on gym doors, Manhattan, New York. (Joan Slatkin/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The media, predictably, is still catching up. The same outlets that once insisted the corporate DEI revolution was irreversible now publish cautious stories about companies “re-evaluating” their commitments. But the scale of this shift goes far beyond a temporary recalibration. This is not a pause. It is a full-scale retreat, a regime collapse.
And it’s not just DEI that is falling. On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and founder of Amazon, announced that the paper’s opinion pages will now be dedicated to defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Bezos declared that opposing viewpoints can be “published elsewhere.” The left’s hold on our cultural institutions is being broken just as its hold on corporate America and Washington, D.C. has fallen.
Of course, no entrenched ideology surrenders overnight. DEI has spent years embedding itself into corporate HR departments, government agencies, and university bureaucracies. The activists, consultants, and executives who built their careers around it will fight to preserve it. They will litigate, regulate, and pressure corporations to reverse course. They will frame this retreat as a “temporary setback” rather than a lasting correction.
But the problem for DEI’s defenders is that preference cascades, once set in motion, do not reverse themselves easily. The same companies that once feared activist outrage now fear consumer backlash and shareholder scrutiny. The political winds have changed, the legal landscape has shifted, and the economic incentives are no longer in DEI’s favor.
And this retreat from DEI and related left-wing policies is not just a political reaction. It is a structural correction. The same forces that fueled the rise of these policies—activist pressure, legal blind spots, and corporate groupthink—have now collapsed under the weight of scrutiny.
Which means this shift is unlikely to be reversed. Unlike the left-wing ideological wave of 2020—which was fueled by emotion, activism, and media hype—this movement is driven by lawsuits, economic reality, and consumer behavior. DEI was an imposed orthodoxy, sustained by the fear of bad PR and the inertia of corporate groupthink. Once that spell is broken, there’s no putting it back together.