Stacey Abrams discusses her new novel at the Sixth & I Synagogue on July 24, 2025, in Washington, DC.
(Shannon Finney / Getty Images)
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has expanded its attacks on America’s most vulnerable communities. From the horrific Republican tax and budget bill that plunges the working classes into debt and supercharges masked deportations, to the executive orders demonizing the homeless and prohibiting algorithmic justice in AI, Republicans have moved to eradicate their deepest fear: a multiracial, multiethnic democracy.
Republicans are implementing a blueprint to displace democracy with a government powered by Christian nationalism and techno-fascism. Conservative estimates count at least 10 million people having their healthcare ripped away. Immigrants are being stripped of due process, with a staggering $75 billion allocated to ICE over the next four years. While the unhoused and under-resourced are villainized, the richest will benefit from the largest generational wealth transfer in US history.
And it’s not happening in isolation.
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From the Supreme Court to state legislatures, cable news to college campuses, we’re witnessing a coordinated campaign to undermine key pillars of American democracy. Its aim is clear: deny dignity, silence dissent, and dismantle progress—especially when it’s led by women, people of color, immigrants, the disabled, LGBTQ+ communities, and the working poor.
Loaded terms like “waste, fraud, and abuse” are applied to disabled veterans navigating a broken system, but not to billionaires siphoning our data to feed AI. Politicians and pundits rail about tightened budgets, misplaced priorities, or “local control.” But look closely—their favored policies claim neutrality but shift the burden to the most vulnerable.
The instinct is to see these as separate, concurrent attacks. Yet, modern history shows that when autocrats break democracy’s back, they do it through complicity, civil service cuts, and unchecked expansions of power. And as democracy flails, the perpetrators must give the public a target for their despair.
The scapegoat of the moment is DEI.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have been attacked at lightning speed—from public universities to corporate boardrooms. Executive orders ban disability targets, states censor books on slavery and Native resistance, and candidates demonize transgender children in ads and speeches. What terrifies autocrats in formation is not the melange of community—it’s the power we have when we build, fight, and rise together.
Destroying DEI has a clear motive: to stop Americans from seeking common cause. It’s easier to target an acronym than admit our putative leaders don’t believe Black and brown kids deserve to see themselves in the stories they learn. That slashing mental health support for LGBTQ+ teens is more palatable than accepting their existence. That it’s better to lose money than admit that diverse teams yield higher profits.
When we erase truth from classrooms, deny care, or strip legal identity, we don’t just harm the intended targets. We hollow out democracy for us all.
Across the country, states are blocking knowledge, censoring history, and criminalizing honest teaching about race and gender. The mission of those who oppose DEI isn’t safety—it’s silence. Fallen democracies from Germany in the 1930s to Hungary today repeat the pattern: Autocracies must quash communities whose stories challenge the myth of a perfect past.
Healthcare has also become collateral damage in this assault. The Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing hospitals to deny emergency abortion care—even when a pregnant woman’s life is in danger—is a calculated blow to bodily autonomy. The same forces attacking DEI programs are stripping away reproductive rights, defunding community health clinics, and undermining the Affordable Care Act.
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They frame this as fiscal responsibility or religious liberty. It’s a refusal to value lives outside a narrow definition of “deserving.”
And then there’s the unraveling of civil rights.
The court’s rollback of voting rights, its embrace of “colorblind” legal reasoning, and its attacks on LGBTQ+ protections are not about fairness—they are about erasure. About removing the few tools we have left to level the playing field and pretending that history no longer shapes our present.
These decisions signal to millions of Americans: Your identity is negotiable, your rights conditional, your presence undesirable.
Meanwhile, Republicans are rapidly consolidating powers that will be hard to wrest back. Congressional calls for mass deportations and the sweeping criminalization of dissent are becoming features of America. These ideas may have seemed fringe once. Now they’re at the heart of government policy.
Authoritarianism doesn’t always look like a coup. It can arrive through a slower drip of cruel intentions dressed up as common sense. Not tanks in the streets (though we have seen that too), but textbooks rewritten, rights boldly revoked, and the most vulnerable turned into scapegoats.
It’s easy to despair. It’s understandable. But we are not powerless—and the principles of DEI are too important to lose without a fight.
Communities, students, workers, legislators, and organizations like American Pride Rises, which I founded, are coming together to defy these attacks and build what’s next. We proudly assert that DEI is not a threat—it is a promise. We say that true patriotism demands that we fight for everyone—whether they like it or not.
This is our charge: In the face of uniformity, unfairness, and exclusion, we must promote DEI as an essential defense of democracy. In doing so, we build real opportunity into our systems, our schools, our courts, and our country. Our highest patriotism refuses to accept any less.
Democracy demands diversity, and the American dream thrives on equity and inclusion. DEI is democracy in action—with liberty and justice for all.
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