On President Donald Trump’s first day back in the White House, he issued an executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government. Its sweeping language forbids DEI “mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities,” and orders the termination of all DEI positions—hundreds if not thousands of roles. Trump and his allies are also trying to curtail DEI in corporations that contract with the state, colleges that get federal funds, and more.

The ambition of these anti-DEI efforts mirrors the earlier, heavy-handed push, including by the Biden administration, to embed DEI practices into almost all of America’s most important institutions. It also underscores just how widely and variably the term DEI is now used across society.

Americans have developed a bad habit of deploying DEI as if it has a clear meaning. The left’s elites praise DEI. The right’s elites attack DEI. Citizens debate DEI on social media. But often, they are talking about different things. Almost as often, they don’t notice that they are talking about different things. These failures to communicate flow from the fact that DEI has no universal or broadly shared definition.

[Josh Barro: Democrats need to clean house]

To a debilitating degree, the DEI debate is defined by Americans talking past one another, when instead they could use more particular language to describe their positions. Specificity would make it harder for any faction to impose its most radical ideas.

The problem with DEI begins with its most basic definition: “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Each of those terms can be defined in conflicting ways. For example, the Los Angeles public school system, which admits and teaches any child who enrolls, and Yale University, which deliberately rejects the overwhelming majority of its applicants, both claim “inclusion” as a core value. The trio of terms can be in tension with one another, too; Harvard pursued diversity in admissions, for example, by systematically treating Asian applicants inequitably. Yet after the summer of 2020, many institutions embraced DEI as a bundle—as if it were a single ethos. Among the entities that began touting that ethos were Amnesty International and the CIA, Philip Morris and the American Lung Association, the Catholic Church and NARAL Pro-Choice America, NASDAQ and the Bernie Sanders campaign.

In my reporting, I’ve encountered efforts dubbed “DEI” that have attracted little resistance, such as orchestras holding auditions behind a screen to avoid bias, or analyses of payrolls meant to ensure that men and women doing the same jobs were getting equal pay. I’ve also encountered efforts, particularly in higher education and nonprofits, that both liberals and conservatives spoke out against as coercive, retrograde, or nonsensical.

In the past, when DEI had more positive connotations, its vagueness gave the left cover to implement ideas that would have risked rejection if evaluated on their own specific terms. The DEI label failed to distinguish policies that aroused little opposition, such as Pride Month anti-bullying campaigns, from policies that were unpopular, such as allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams; policies that yielded a clear benefit, such as accommodating a disability, from policies long judged by scholars to be ineffective, such as workplace training sessions on race; and policies that were lawful from legally dubious policies, such as ideological litmus tests for professors at public colleges.

Over time, DEI grew into a multibillion-dollar industry. It purported to help marginalized people, yet directed most of its revenue and other benefits to members of the professional class. And even unpopular DEI initiatives persisted in institutions and spread to new ones because skeptics were scared: To critique anything called “DEI” was to risk being seen as antagonistic to progressives’ sacred values or being called out as a problematic bigot or even being fired.

[George Packer: The moral case against equity language]

A backlash was inevitable. And the failure of many DEI advocates to distinguish between the most and least sensible things done in its name laid the groundwork for the Trump coalition to go to the opposite extreme: Today’s undifferentiated attacks on “DEI” are as vague and ill-defined as statements of undifferentiated support for it.

That vagueness is allowing the right to conflate reining in “woke” excesses with nixing programs that most people support, such as outlays to train more special-education teachers, and programs that reflect values that most people share, such as National Guard participation in a Frederick Douglass parade. Some worry that Trump will even gut civil-rights enforcement under cover of an attack on DEI. At the very least, the label conflates distinct policies—say, racial quotas in hiring, on the one hand, and recruitment at historically Black colleges, on the other—that ought to be judged separately, given their different moral, practical, and legal implications.

If the MAGA right proves as unwilling to draw sensible distinctions as the woke left was, it, too, will provoke a backlash. Even the anti-woke conservative pundit Tomi Lahren recently wrote that “conservatives would do better not to immediately label anything and everything a product of DEI. It cheapens the argument to throw it around as a catch all.”

Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance recently participated in a culture-war fight that illustrates how the term DEI muddies more than it clarifies in civic discourse. After an airliner and a military helicopter collided over the Potomac River in January, both men speculated that DEI played a role in the crash, inspiring countless social-media arguments. Trump and Vance, in fact, were making completely different claims from each other. Vance, unlike Trump, made a legitimate point about problems with the FAA’s hiring practices. But if he wanted to convince the American public, including people on the left, that those specific practices were flawed, his blanket disparagement of them as “DEI” didn’t help his cause.

In a press conference the morning after the crash, Trump asserted that “diversity-and-inclusion hiring” was a factor in the accident. Many people thought Trump was assigning fault to someone supposedly hired because of their race or gender. But the text of that Trump appearance suggests that he was thinking of disability: The Federal Aviation Administration was “actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions,” Trump said. (In 2019, the FAA announced “a pilot program to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations.” Trump was the president at the time. No evidence suggests that disability played a role in the Potomac crash.)

A few days later, a Fox News interviewer asked Vance, “Do you have any evidence that any of those hires that were there at the controls Wednesday night were DEI hires?” Vance replied, “This is not saying that the person who was at the controls is a DEI hire. We should investigate everything, but let’s just say the person at the controls didn’t have enough staffing around him or her because we were turning people away because of DEI reasons.” Vance added, “DEI policies have led our air-traffic controllers to be short-staffed.” That staffing crisis is acute. And although the Potomac River crash has not been conclusively linked to it, the Associated Press obtained an FAA report stating that, at the time of the crash, “one air-traffic controller was working two positions.” According to The New York Times, the control tower at Reagan National Airport was “nearly a third below targeted staff levels.”

[Read: Is there anything Trump won’t blame on DEI?]

From Vance’s broad label of “DEI,” no one would guess the details of the FAA’s hiring practices for air-traffic controllers. He seems to have been referring to a controversy that arose in the Obama era. Until 2013, a civilian who wanted to become an air-traffic controller would complete a classroom program and take an aptitude test measuring ability with numbers, problem-solving, tolerance for high-intensity moments, and more. In response to a push from the Obama administration to diversify federal agencies, the FAA added a new requirement in 2014: a “biographical” assessment. Any applicant who failed to score enough points on it would be ineligible to be hired.

The strangeness of the questionnaire, which was later made public in court documents, is captured by this question from it:

The high school subject in which I received my lowest grade was:

Science Math English History/Social Sciences Physical education

The way the question was scored was not intuitive. Applicants received 15 points if they chose “A) Science.” All other answers received zero points. When scoring a questionnaire put in place to help advance diversity, the FAA apparently decided to reward poor performance in science. Another question asked about the number of college credit hours the applicant had taken in art, music, dance, or drama, and the scoring was even less intuitive. “Did not attend college” got zero points. “Zero credit hours” got five points. One to six credit hours also got zero points. Seven to 12 credit hours got four points. If you chose 13 or more credit hours, you got one point.

Almost 90 percent of applicants failed to pass the assessment. At least 1,000 qualified applicants were denied the chance to enter the profession due to the new hurdle, according to a lawsuit filed against the FAA. (The FAA has contested the suit, which is ongoing.) And once aspiring air-traffic controllers realized that they could be disqualified by a bizarre test, many ceased investing time and money in air-traffic-controller classes, and enrollment declined. In 2016, Congress passed a law banning the use of the biographical assessment.

Jack Despain Zhou, a former Air Force analyst who has done extensive reporting on the matter, has written that the episode was “one of the clearest and most pressing causes” for the air-traffic-controller shortage, because “as a direct result of it, the air-traffic control hiring pipeline was shattered.” Vance seems to have reached a similar conclusion. He is on solid ground in claiming that changes to hiring once made in the name of diversity cost the FAA qualified air-traffic controllers. But his use of “DEI” as shorthand for what went wrong was a vague, needlessly polarizing way to make his point, and failed to give his audience enough information about what happened to judge for themselves. I described the bizarre test and the context for it to several progressive friends who think of themselves as DEI supporters. All thought the test sounded nonsensical, not like something they’d defend.

[Adam Serwer: The great resegregation]

In this and other culture-war debates about DEI, rival camps would find more common ground if everyone avoided framing everything at the highest levels of abstraction. The question “Should we have DEI at the FAA?” is maximally polarizing. A less polarizing question might be: “What are fair test questions for aspiring air-traffic controllers?” Even a question that divides Americans, such as “Does racial diversity at the FAA matter?,” is at least specific enough to permit a debate on the merits, in which everyone understands what’s actually up for discussion.

In the board game Taboo, a player tries to get a partner to guess a given word, such as margarita, without saying tequila, lime, salt, skinny, or frozen. She might hint: “Mexican restaurants discount this drink on Mondays,” or “Jimmy Buffett got rich singing about this citrusy cocktail”––avoiding the “taboo” words. The AI researcher and writer Eliezer Yudkowsky urges “tabooing” words to help clarify their meaning. “When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all,” he has written. Simply “blank out the forbidden words and all their obvious synonyms,” he advised, and summon “the actual details” until you can replace the symbols with the substance.

To achieve the rigor of specificity, more Americans—from elected officials to university administrators to citizens debating on social media—should “taboo” DEI, as well as diversity and equity and inclusion. Doing so would force us to better understand our own claims and to make them more legible. It would help us better understand what others think, and to achieve sensible policies rather than careening between totalizing extremes.