Fall of the idols: at last the US is reclaiming a culture of sanity

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.

Ostensibly to address past inequities, DEI programmes have instead led to massive incompetence and poisoned public discourse. As the EO puts it, DEI has created “an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system”. Because of these malignant programmes, “the American people have witnessed…the disastrous consequences of illegal…discrimination that has prioritised how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing”.

In wake of the sweeping EO, DEI policies and institutions have rapidly collapsed. Corporations have eliminated their bloated DEI departments. The armed services have ceased DEI re-education programmes. Departments of the federal government are in the process of closing DEI offices and dismissing the ideological grifters who administer them. Federal contractors have also begun to dismantle their corrosive DEI offices and policies. Higher educational institutions are the most resistant, but the threat of withholding federal funds will induce them to follow suit. There are lawful ways to address present inequities, but this can only be done after smashing the altar of DEI.

Furthermore, President Trump also signed EOs entitled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” and “Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports”. Together, these orders have dealt a blow to one of the more perniciously wicked trends in American public life: the cult of transgender ideology.

The former directive orders the heads of every federal department and agency to cut off research grants and other financial support to clinics, hospitals or medical professionals who persist in mutilating surgery or other pernicious “gender affirming” procedures on minors. It also directs the Department of Health and Human Services to cease Medicare reimbursement to hospitals that perform them. Because of their dependence on federal funds, so-called paediatric gender clinics stopped their work. While some states have filed lawsuits against the EO, the threat of cutting off federal funds has yielded immediate results.

The latter directive bans educational institutions from receiving federal funds unless they protect girls and women’s sport and private spaces from biological men who say they are women. This order also had immediate impact. The day after the order was signed, the National Association of Collegiate Athletics, which governs the vast majority of university athletic programmes, barred men from competing in women’s sports, and directed their member institutions to comply.

This reverses a trend in which men have denied women their rightful places on sports podiums and intruded into their restrooms and dressing rooms. My hope is that the federal government will now support girls and women who have sued various athletics federations to strike male performances from female record books and restore girls and women who have been cheated out of their rightful places in them.

Resistance to the poisonous culture of DEI and transgender ideology has prevailed. Now it’s the role of new laws, regulations and policies to shift the culture back to moral and political sanity. I am cautiously hopeful.

Photo: US President Donald Trump signs the “No Men in Women’s Sports” executive order in the East Room at the White House, Washington, DC, 5 February 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.)

Ken Craycraft is Professor of Moral Theology at Mount St Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati, Ohio.

This article appears in the Lenten March 2025 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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