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Notes -
There is a recent poll on DEI[1][2][3]. DEI seems to be viewed more favorably than not.
A majority reject the following:
They agree that:
There are a number of questions about whether people should receive DEI training; a majority is in favor of DEI training in all cases, most strongly in the case of police officers (69% - 31%) and least strongly for private sector employees (64% - 36%).
The document provides some comparable numbers which are claimed to come from October 2024, but that appears to be a mistake; the previous polling on DEI was done in January 2024[4].
A lot of the public doesn’t have strong views on DEI. 92% of respondents have heard the phrase “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (up from 72% in January 2024), but when given the option “neither agree of disagree,” many respondents chose it. For the DEI training questions, “neither agree of disagree” was not an option.
When asked what the top three priorities of the Trump Administration should be, 2% selected ending DEI programs as the top priority, and 10% included it in one of the top three. 19% of Republicans, 6% of independents, and 2% of Democrats included ending DEI in their top three priorities.
The poll didn’t ask about people’s own experience with DEI, but I found a Feb. 2023 poll that did[5], which presumably gets a more knowledgeable pool of respondents. People who worked at a place that had a staff member whose primary job was to promote DEI said that having such a person was:
In the same poll, 56% of respondents said that “focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly a good thing,” 16% said it is mainly a bad thing, and 28% said it is neither good nor bad.
So DEI seems to popular but controversial, with one third of the country and 65% of Republicans saying that DEI discriminates against white people.
Links:
[1] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/2025-8
[2] Top line results: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FToplines%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025
[3] Crosstabs: https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/personal/poll_umass_edu/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?ga=1&id=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2FCrosstabs%20Views%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025%2Epdf&parent=%2Fpersonal%2Fpoll%5Fumass%5Fedu%2FDocuments%2FPoll%20materials%20uploaded%20to%20website%2FViews%20on%20DEI%2C%20Trans%20Rights%2C%20Higher%20Education%2C%20and%20AI%20National%20Poll%20%2D%20April%2022%2C%202025
[4] https://www.umass.edu/political-science/about/reports/january-16-2024
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/05/ST_2023.05.17_Culture-of-Work-DEI_Topline.pdf
It remains interesting that people are simply misinformed about the facts. DEI policies, factually, are discrimination against white people (and Asian people). They literally cannot accomplish their stated goals without doing so, they are definitionally policies that implement discrimination. That's not an ironclad argument for or against them from where I sit, it's just the starting point that we all need to be aware of in order to have these conversations.
The point of the linguistic judo has always precisely been not to have the discussion and indeed to make the discussion impossible to have or think about. And specifically stated as such by the people who coined all these terms.
Even the terms that make the acronym themselves are subversive language tricks to an Orwellian degree.
Have you ever heard people call initiatives or departments "100% diverse"? And what to say of "Equity", a term so transparently designed in a lab to supplant "Equality" because it sounds too absurd to normal people when you're justifying discrimination in the name of equality.
DEI is just Applied Cultural Marxism. And I'm allowed to say this because I learned about it in university in those terms before its activists started to pretend that correctly identifying their ideology is a conspiracy theory.
Can we have a survey on how that is perceived by the public mayhaps?
I’ve heard this term bandied about for years but never directly encountered someone who uses it. Can you explain what on earth it means?
Some potential meanings I’ve considered and discarded:
Most of the “applied cultural marxists” and postmodernists seem to outright reject Marx and any similarities in their thinking (e.g., oppressor and oppressed) seem to pre-date Marx.
So I’m left not understanding what people mean by it precisely. It seems to me at this point the phrase is meant to just tar by association, but I’d really like to hear if there’s something more meaningful to it.
Because people were using it back in the 80's and maybe late 70's, and when the term started attracting too much negative attention, they promptly started pretending it's a conspiracy theory.
Also, "never met someone who uses the term directly" is an argument that's applied extremely selectively.
Critical Theory proudly takes inspiration from both Marx and postmodernism.
Those are fairly decent nutshell descriptions, and there's no reason to reject them.
Can you point me to some instances of people self describing in that way from the 70s and 80s? That is the most compelling argument I think—that they described themselves this way until it became a liability.
I didn’t mean it as an argument, my point was I haven’t had to chance to ask someone what they mean so I’m eager to seize the opportunity.
If those are decent nutshell descriptions then let’s take “oppressor/oppressed analysis” for instance. What’s the justification for calling that Marxist specifically? Is the claim that he invented or pioneered it in the form of his class war analysis? It just seems incredibly vague making the tie to Marx specifically tenuous to me.
Emily Hicks, Richard R. Weiner, Douglas Kellner.
That Cultural Marxists themselves thought that they are taking inspiration from Marx:
This is extremely helpful and exactly what I’ve been looking for—thanks!
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