By Design

How race runs through the architecture of the Trump consolidation agenda, not as a side effect, but as the design

There is a widely circulated statistic about arts funding in the United States that, understood correctly, tells you almost everything you need to know about how the current regime actually works.

Roughly ninety percent of the revenue of arts nonprofits in America comes from earned income and private philanthropy - ticket sales, memberships, subscriptions, individual donors, and foundation grants. Federal funding, through the National Endowment for the Arts and its state partners, makes up a small minority of the sector’s total budget.

And yet the administration’s attacks on arts funding - the proposed elimination of the NEA, the dismantling of cultural grantmaking across federal agencies, the intimidation campaigns targeting arts institutions that resist - have been disproportionately devastating, and the devastation has been disproportionately racial.

This is not a paradox. It’s a tell.

The reason the small federal share does such outsized damage is that it’s the most democratic portion of arts funding. Private philanthropy clusters in wealthy coastal cities, around prestige institutions with established donor bases, and in networks built on inherited wealth and class connection. Federal arts funding, by design, goes somewhere else. It flows through state arts agencies to small and mid-sized organizations in places the private donor class does not typically reach. It supports community theaters in Detroit and Oakland, teaching artists in rural New Mexico, Indigenous cultural programs on reservation land, immigrant music organizations in Queens, Black theater in Atlanta and Minneapolis, Chicano muralists, Asian American film collectives, and the thousand small institutions that hold together the multiracial cultural life of the country.

Cut the federal share and the Metropolitan Opera barely notices. Cut the federal share and a Black community theater in its fourth decade of operation closes its doors.

This is not an accidental asymmetry. It is the architecture of the cut. And it is the same architecture that runs through the rest of the consolidation agenda.

The pattern

I want to use the arts example as an entry point into a larger pattern, because the pattern is what the public debate is mostly missing, and the pattern is what makes this regime different in kind from ordinary conservative governance.

Consider housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development was created, and has been shaped for fifty-five years, by America’s ongoing reckoning with racial discrimination in housing. Its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, its administration of public housing, its oversight of Section 8 vouchers, and its support for community development in historically redlined neighborhoods - all of this exists because private markets in housing were so thoroughly structured by racial exclusion that only federal intervention could provide a serious counterweight. Attacks on HUD aren’t neutral budget cuts that happen to fall on communities of color. They’re strikes at the institutional apparatus that was built specifically to address racial inequality in housing. The racial effect isn’t a side effect. It’s the function of the cut.

Consider entitlements. Medicaid covers a disproportionate share of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander Americans. SNAP serves a disproportionately nonwhite population. Head Start, housing assistance, WIC, the Child Tax Credit in its expanded form - each of these programs has an impact profile that is visibly racialized, because each exists in part to partially compensate for the accumulated effects of centuries of racial exclusion from wealth-building. Cuts targeted at these programs, while leaving other forms of federal spending untouched, are not race-neutral choices that happen to have racial consequences. The selection of which programs to cut is itself a racial selection.

Consider the gutting of civil rights enforcement. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, once the agency that brought cases against segregated police departments and unconstitutional prisons and discriminatory lenders, has been repurposed to pursue the reverse - cases against universities for admitting too many students of color, against employers for consulting the demographics of their workforces, and against cities for noting the racial patterns in their policing data. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been hollowed out. Fair housing enforcement at HUD has been effectively suspended. The specific tools that were built over sixty years to counteract racial discrimination are being retired one by one, not in a general downsizing of government, but with a precision that tracks their civil rights function.

Consider the federal workforce. And here I want to slow down, because this is the piece of the pattern most people do not yet see, and it is perhaps the most important.

The hidden ladder

The federal civil service has been, for the better part of a century, the single most important institution of Black middle-class formation in the United States.

This is a historical fact that is not often taught and not often said out loud. It begins with the post office, the first large employer that would hire Black workers into stable jobs with benefits and pensions, and that for generations supported entire Black communities by providing the one route into the middle class that private labor markets largely refused. It continues through the expansion of the federal workforce in the mid-twentieth century - the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, the General Services Administration, the Department of Defense civilian workforce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development - each of which, because of the legal requirements of equal opportunity employment and the relative strength of federal union protections, offered Black and Latino workers something they could rarely get in the private sector: a job with dignity, a pension, a pathway for their children.

The Black middle class in America is, to a degree most Americans do not appreciate, a civil-service middle class. In some cities - Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta - the federal payroll has been the economic backbone of Black professional and working-class life for three generations.

This means that when this administration sets about firing federal workers en masse, imposing return-to-office mandates designed to force attrition, reclassifying career positions as political appointments, and transferring federal functions to private contractors outside the reach of civil rights enforcement, it is doing something very specific. It is not merely shrinking the state. It is dismantling the single most successful ladder of Black middle-class mobility that the twentieth century produced, and creating the means by which the federal bureaucracy can be whitened and stacked with those loyal to the regime in power.

The racial effect is not an unfortunate consequence of a neutral efficiency project. The racial effect is the project, or one of the projects, running inside the larger one.

The same logic applies to the targeting of public-sector unions, which have a disproportionately Black membership; to the attacks on public universities, which have been the second most important ladder; and to the assault on the teaching profession, which has similar demographic texture. Each attack looks, on its surface, like a general critique of “bureaucracy” or “the blob” or “waste.” Each attack, in practice, falls with targeted weight on the specific institutional architecture through which people of color have built economic security.

Two things at once

Once you see the pattern, you begin to see that the regime is doing two things simultaneously, and they reinforce each other.

The first is political mobilization. The coalition that put this administration in power is held together, in significant part, by a politics of racial grievance - a sense, cultivated over decades by conservative media and increasingly shared by elite political actors, that white Americans have been unjustly displaced by the rising multiracial majority and that the state has been captured by nonwhite interests. To sustain that coalition, the regime has to keep producing evidence of its racial commitments. The masked ICE raids, the DEI purges, the assault on diverse universities, and the visual theater of deportation - all of this is racial content production, aimed at convincing the base that the grievance is being addressed.

The second is structural. The opposition to this regime is, demographically, overwhelmingly multiracial. It contains the majority of Black voters, the majority of Latino voters, the overwhelming majority of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, the majority of Indigenous voters, and the majority of white voters under forty, along with the majority of college-educated white voters across age groups. This is the coalition that will have to defeat the regime if the regime is to be defeated. And the regime knows it.

Which means that many of the structural attacks we are witnessing - on the federal workforce, on civil rights enforcement, on the arts, on public universities, on HUD, and on entitlement programs are attacks on the institutional infrastructure of the opposition. They weaken the economic base of the multiracial middle class. They defund the cultural institutions that sustain multiracial civic life. They dismantle the enforcement mechanisms that protect multiracial participation in public institutions. They hollow out the federal presence in exactly the communities where the opposition coalition lives.

This is not incidental damage. It is pre-positioning for the next phase of the fight.

A regime that attacks the arts is doing one thing. A regime that attacks the arts, HUD, Medicaid, SNAP, the civil rights division, the federal workforce, public universities, public-sector unions, fair housing enforcement, and community development funding, all in the same eighteen months, is not doing one thing. It is doing one large thing, with many moving parts.

The one large thing is the construction of a political order in which the multiracial opposition coalition is structurally weaker than it was before, and in which the institutions that have supported multiracial democracy for sixty years have been removed from the playing field.

Why this matters

Two implications, briefly, because the diagnosis matters for strategy.

The first is that a pro-democracy movement that frames this regime primarily in terms of “chaos,” “corruption,” “authoritarianism,” or “incompetence” is missing what is actually happening. All of those descriptions are accurate and should be shared with the public. None of them, however, captures the racial architecture. A politics that cannot see the architecture will not dismantle it. The damage being done right now will outlast this administration unless the pro-democracy movement understands what is being damaged and names it.

The second is that a restoration to the pre-2024 status quo will not undo the architectural damage, because the architecture being targeted was itself already weaker than it needed to be. HUD was underfunded before Trump. The NEA was underfunded before Trump. Civil rights enforcement was already over-stretched. The federal workforce was already under attack. Public-sector unions were already under attack. Medicaid was already a political football. A pro-democracy agenda serious about the architecture would not aim to restore 2024. It would aim to build what 2024 failed to build - a durable institutional infrastructure of multiracial democracy that does not depend on which party is in power to survive.

The arts funding case is a small example that tells a large story. A cut that looks like ten percent of a budget lands as the destruction of the democratic share of that budget. A pattern of such cuts, across agencies, across programs, and across the institutional fabric of the state, is not a coincidence. It is a design.

Race is not a side effect of that design. Race runs through it, all the way down.

The pro-democracy movement needs to say so, plainly, and often. The damage is already underway. The architecture of consolidation is being built in real time. And the only movement that can stop its construction, and eventually reverse it, is one that sees it clearly enough to name what is actually being done.

That naming is the work. Let’s do it.