Move fast and break things. That's the original operating philosophy of Facebook founder and Meta mogul Mark Zuckerberg, and it seems to be the operating procedure of President Donald Trump in these first weeks of his second term.
That makes a certain sense. In a largely successful society, unrocked by revolution, institutions come to be in need of repair, revamping and reconstitution. Just as tools rust, barnacles adhere and roofs leak, institutions and professions, government agencies and private industries need to be reformed or even abolished.
The high-tech firms that now dominate the American -- indeed, world -- equity markets moved fast and broke many of the business plans of many long-established entities in the early 2000s. Now, with the sudden support of many of their leaders, Trump in his first two weeks of his second term is moving fast and breaking things.
And so far with surprisingly little backlash. As these major changes go into effect, it's a fair question to ask about the long-term consequences.
Start with Trump's executive orders dismantling the misnamed diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus. Opponents started changing the names of DEI programs, and someone in the Air Force said the order required nonmention of the Tuskegee Airmen. That's a variation of what the late Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters called the "shut down the Washington Monument" strategy, to which incoming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quickly put the kibosh.
More importantly, Trump's executive order repeals the 1965 Lyndon Johnson order that got the government and large parts of the private sector fighting racial discrimination with racial discrimination. DEI bureaucracies and enforcement were stepped up after the death of George Floyd in May 2020. Now private companies, subject to lawsuits for discriminating against Asians and whites, are scrambling to defund their DEI commissars.
Not many will miss them. Polling, and referenda in California, has shown large majorities disapproving racial preferences. Controversy over Black Lives Matter's leaders' purchase of a $6 million house and the implosion of Ibram X. Kendi's academic center suggests a weariness even among DEI recipients.
DEI repeal seems likely to be, as Christopher Caldwell writes, "the most significant policy change of this century."
Likely in second place are the highly publicized deportations of criminal and other illegal immigrants from so-called sanctuary cities. Illegal border crossings, already vastly reduced last spring when then-President Joe Biden, facing defeat, started using powers he had said he didn't have and changed the open-borders policy evidently inspired by those in-this-house-we-believe-no-hu
Now illegal border crossings are reduced to a trickle, and Trump's first-term "Remain in Mexico" policy seems back in force. Trump's X post Sunday afternoon threatening 25% tariffs and visa shutdowns had Colombia's left-wing president reversing within minutes his ban on incoming deportees. Venezuela's left-wing president reciprocated preemptively this week.
My bet is that the threat of further deportations and workplace enforcement will prompt hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to, as Mitt Romney put it in 2012, "self-deport" to the Americas and Middle East, just as the housing market collapse prompted similar numbers of illegal immigrants to self-deport to Mexico after 2006.
That effect may be reduced if the courts, as I think likely and justifiably, reject Trump's assertion that the 14th Amendment does not confer birthright citizenship. The excesses of Biden immigration policy have reduced public support of and Democratic politicians' demand for the mass legalization advanced as necessary for compromise immigration bills in decades past.
A third change that didn't get front-page headlines but is likely to endure will come from incoming Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's overturning of the Biden electric vehicle regulations. These were effectively, though not labeled as such, bans on gasoline-powered cars in the 2030s.
This may cause short-term problems for Detroit-based auto manufacturers who have been muscled to ramp up production of money-losing EVs. But over the longer run, they're likely to be grateful: It's easier to sell cars consumers want.
In the meantime, the case that outlawing gas-powered SUVs will preserve the planet is being undercut by events. Whether EVs reduce emissions depends on how the electricity that powers them is produced, and the artificial intelligence boom threatens huge increases in demand for electricity, fulfillable perhaps only by emission-emitting coal.
Simultaneously, the Los Angeles County wildfires have shown that the green policies for which California politicians preen themselves don't cut net emissions if those politicians don't fulfill their less glamorous duties to fill reservoirs and cut back flammable brush.
Not all the Trump initiatives are likely to be successful, and his Democratic and journalistic opponents, as the reaction to his aid cutoff proposals showed, are ready to pounce on any ambiguity or weakness. But it's striking so far how subdued the response has been to the volley of Trump's recent actions.
The DEI lobby, which bulldozed corporate America, the open-doors immigration lobby, which purported to speak for the nation's fastest-growing electoral bloc, the climate control lobby, which muscled past concern over purple Michigan's electoral votes -- all these forces prevailed utterly in setting Biden administration policy and succeeded mostly in setting the boundaries of permissible debate.
Now, as Trump moves and breaks things, they are responding not with a bang but a whimper.