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60 years of progress in expanding rights is being rolled back by Trump − a pattern that’s all too familiar in US history

Philip Klinkner
James S. Sherman Professor of Government, Hamilton College

Rogers M. Smith
Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

The Conversation: For many Americans, Donald Trump’s head-spinning array of executive orders in the early days of his second term look like an unprecedented effort to roll back democracy and the rights and liberties of American citizens.

As we have written, American history is not a steady march toward greater equality, democracy and individual rights. America’s commitment to these liberal values has competed with an alternative set of illiberal values that hold that full American citizenship should be limited by race, ethnicity, gender and class.

The most famous example of this conflict is the Jim Crow era after Reconstruction, when many of the political and legal rights gained by African Americans in the Civil War era were swept away by disenfranchisement, segregation and discrimination. From roughly 1870 until 1940, democracy and equal rights were retreating, not advancing, leaving what was described in the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson as “the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

Today, the Trump administration is seeking to roll back America’s commitment to equality and engaging in a broad effort to limit – if not outright deny – the rights, liberties and benefits of democracy to all Americans.

Progress, then rollbacks

The biggest gains in African American rights came during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II and the Cold War, when the United States confronted enemies that Americans believed contradicted its liberal values – the British monarchy, Southern slaveholders, fascist dictators and communist tyrants. The United States highlighted its commitments to democracy and human rights as a way of contrasting itself from its enemies.

But once the pressures of war faded, America’s illiberal values reasserted themselves. With the end of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the movement for greater equality stalled and many of the previous gains were rolled back.

The onset of World War II and then the Cold War forced Americans to renew their commitment to democracy and human rights for all Americans. This period is often described as the Second Reconstruction.

Like the First Reconstruction a century earlier, the federal government helped to ensure civil and voting rights for African Americans. These efforts laid the groundwork for advancing the political and civil rights of women, other racial and ethnic groups, immigrants, disabled persons and, eventually, members of the gay and lesbian community.

But like the First Reconstruction, these changes generated intense backlash.

Bigger than anti-DEI

Since the demise of the Cold War over 30 years ago, the Republican Party has increasingly sided with those seeking to roll back the gains of the Second Reconstruction.

Even before Trump first ran for president, the Republican Party began adopting nativist, anti-immigration policies. In 2012, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, the landmark 1965 law barring racial discrimination in voting that was one of the signal achievements of the Second Reconstruction.

In 2016, Trump rose to the Republican nomination by expressing and amplifying the racist and xenophobic views of many white Americans, including the claim that Barack Obama was born outside of the U.S., that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, and that the U.S. should close its borders to anyone from Muslim countries.

Since his second inauguration, Trump has mounted a full-scale effort to undermine the policies of the Second Reconstruction. This effort has been masked as an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion – or DEI – policies. According to Trump and other critics of DEI, these policies are themselves racist, since they allegedly single out white Americans for shame and scorn.

As scholars of race and American politics, we believe that, overall, DEI initiatives have combated racial discrimination and expanded the pools of talented people who can contribute to the nation’s progress.

The Trump administration’s effort to end DEI programs is really an attack on decades of efforts by the federal government to make good on the promise of America: to engage in rigorous nondiscrimination efforts and open up opportunities for all.

One of Trump’s first executive orders, which prominently featured abandonment of DEI policies, also repealed a 60-year-old executive order signed by President Johnson mandating “affirmative action” to end widespread discrimination by the federal government and its contractors >>>