My X publication criticizing American Compass’s populist economic agenda caught the attention of Senator JD Vance who wrote two long publications answering it While my post focused on popular opinion, I was also concerned that populist critics of “woke capital” focus too much on capital and not enough on awakening.
This materialist explanation argues that the problem is to “wake up” corporate malfeasance so they don’t have to deal with workers’ rights or antitrust. . . and so we can fight it by adopting economic policies that companies don’t like.
Senator Vance responded to this point: “in the wake wash, you would probably acknowledge that it happens, but you don’t like the American Compass solution.” This explanation is so ubiquitous that it is treated as self-evident.
In 2021, Compass US policy analyst Wells King, now on the senator’s staff, he wrote “A new one [woke] The initiative may work as a kind of PR game to obfuscate the embezzlement.”
Tucker Carlson the same way argued that corporations promoted Robin D’Angelo’s White fragility because “it absolves them of their crimes. . . Apple and health insurers and credit card companies get away with it because the real problem, Robyn D’Angelo tells them, is white racism.
Chris Rufo he wrote that Ibrahim Kendi became popular “translating ivory tower theories into . . .[a] business-friendly narrative.” In his book Woke Inc.Vivek Ramaswamy argues that this strategy was a reaction to the economics-focused protests of Occupy Wall Street:
“Unlike Occupy Wall Street, the ‘wokeness’ called on its practitioners to wake up to the privileges certain people (usually straight white men) are born with…rather than the inequities stemming from others factors, such as, for example, the exercise of corporate power”.
This explanation is not limited to right-wing populists. Marxist University of Pennsylvania professor Aldolphus Reed, argued that “modern anti-racism functions more as a misdirection than a justification [class] inequality than a strategy to eliminate it”.
Adam Swerver he wrote in the Atlantic, “many corporations have used an inclusive gloss to sell their products, even as they insist on exploitative conditions for their workers.”
These explanations seem plausible, but crumble under cursory scrutiny. If Corporate America thought woke activists would support their economic agenda, then D’Angelo and Kendi are bad choices. According to D’Angelo, “Capitalism is so tied to racism” because “capitalism depends on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit above all else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what’s most racially equitable “. Kendi’s seminal book How to be an anti-racist has chapters on “Class” and “Racial Capitalism”. He then stopped seeing “poor blacks as the product of racism and not capitalism.” learning “It is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.” He too lawyers for organized work.
Kendi and D’Angelo became popular among academics and woke journalists who influence HR and DEI in large corporations. These diversicrats have no coherent economic ideology and no interest in promoting the economic health of the company.
Corporations didn’t need to invent the wake to distract Occupy Wall Street. As Ramaswamy acknowledges, the protesters already embraced identity politics over economic goals and had an internal racial quota among their leaders. Occupy, like virtually all post-World War II socialist movements in the US, linked social liberalism to its economic agenda.
There are, of course, some cases of indisputable awakening, especially among Democratic politicians. Hillary Clinton’s criticized the Bernie movement’s focus on economics asking, “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow…would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” However, the misguided invocation of social issues to distract from a problem (especially one caused by a white man) does not demonstrate great strategy. When he first faced allegations of sexual harassment, Harvey Weinstein answered that he wanted to focus on eliminating the NRA. This is not to say that Hollywood leftism was a disguise to anticipate #MeToo.
Regardless, Bernie’s national political career is over and now all six Members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress are non-white woke. Corey Bush it began as an advocate for Black Lives Matter. Jamal Bowman framed his successful primary against his boomer white male incumbent as a racial criterion. AOC’s framed in the same way her main as fighting misogynistic white men and made Abolish ICE her main issue.
Corporations can take vigilante actions to appease Democratic politicians and bureaucrats. For example, Penn Entertainment forced its subsidiary Barstool Sports will fire popular anchor Ben Mintz for quoting a rap song with the N-word. According to Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, Penn was afraid of incurring the wrath of blue-collar state regulators. While the distinction may be subtle, the government coercing a company into awakening, often called jawboning when it involves censorship, differs from the awakening narrative.
In recent years, the awakening has strengthened the economic left. BLM hysteria and corporate de-platforming significantly hurt Donald Trump in 2020 and contributed to his narrow defeat. President Trump was consistently more pro-business than Biden. In the readjustment, political fields were favored antitrust, consumer protection, financial regulationi organized work, Biden’s regulators are particularly anti-corporate. Big Tech meddling in the 2020 election got them Lina Khan.
Motivations aside, the awakening has not been good for corporations. Arguably, the two most woke companies in the most awake sector are Google and Netflix. By any metric, they compensate their employees very well in terms of both pay and lifestyle. However, by promoting social justice policies and recruiting hundreds of rent-seeking radicals, they have allowed unionization“exits” based on political issues (#MeToo on Google i Dave Chapelle on Netflix), i leaks for political reasons to journalists
The materialist explanation of awakening seems rhetorically convenient. Portraying this as a corporate strategy to disenfranchise workers rather than a concern for marginalized groups seems to take the left’s moral high ground. I used to make these kinds of arguments myself:
However, I think this argument has the same flaw as “Democrats are the real racists.” Absent a 180 on issues like crime and affirmative action, it seems complacent and disingenuous to accuse Joe Biden of racism over some awkward jokes and 30-year-old vows. Likewise, the GOP will never outdo the Democrats on labor or financial regulation.
Moreover, this explanation undermines a key legal and political argument against corporate awakening. ESG abandons the long-standing corporate law principle that a company should maximize shareholder value. Under traditional corporate law, executives cannot impose their own social agenda at the expense of shareholders, a form of virtue signaling. agency costs.
Sen. Marco Rubio, who has leaned toward economic populism in recent years, introduced the Mind Your Own Business Act, which would do “require corporate directors to demonstrate that their “woke” corporate actions were in the best interests of their shareholders to avoid liability for breach of fiduciary duty in shareholder litigation over corporate actions related to certain social policies.” While I doubt its viability, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis does threatened a state pension fund shareholder lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch over Bud Light’s transgender ads.
If the awakening is a Machiavellian corporate ploy to avoid paying employees a living wage, then boosting left-wing social activism is in the shareholder’s interest and his proposed law would be powerless. If waking up means going broke, or at least a grossly negligent waste of money, shareholders may push back, even under the management-friendly business judgment rule.
Furthermore, reinforcing these narratives discourages profit-seeking capitalists from reforming woke companies. While Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter for profit and faces unique challenges, cutting the bloated workforce certainly helped his bottom line.
If we want conservative politicians, shareholders and executives to reform, we should abandon how good rhetoric and embrace economic reality.
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