Mammon’s Progress
Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy
The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business by Stephen R. Soukup
Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality Is Sabotaging Democracy by Carl Rhodes
Of all the manifestations of woke ideology in contemporary America, corporate wokeness is the most insufferable. We are all by now familiar with the culturally homogenous ad campaigns celebrating diversity, the rich and powerful extolling equity, the progressive martinets lauding inclusion. Every June we are witnesses to the titans of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the rest of the Fortune 500 parading their virtue down the main streets of American cities. Only the vigorous pushbacks against Disney and State Farm have seemingly jolted woke capital into giving second thoughts to its never-ending jamboree of social justice.
So ubiquitous has the phenomenon become that three books on woke capital have been published in just eighteen months. Although written from rival political perspectives —conservative (Ramaswamy), libertarian (Soukup), and social democratic (Rhodes) —these books nevertheless agree on much. All see woke capital as the culmination of the long-extant “corporate responsibility” movement that emerged in the post-World War II era. All agree that wokeness is a political and economic boon to the capitalists who practice it. All believe that woke capital is a fundamental threat to democracy. All advocate for the separation of politics from economics as the cornerstone of any policy solution.
The Diversionary Theory
All three likewise offer an explanation of woke capital. Oddly enough, Ramaswamy the conservative and Rhodes the progressive advance much the same argument. Both adopt what I refer to as a diversionary theory of woke capital, insisting that capitalist wolves don the sheep’s clothing of wokeness in order to distract critics and cultivate legitimacy.
Ramaswamy repeatedly uses words like “scam,” “charade,” “illusion,” “smoke screen,” and “whitewash” to describe the social function of corporate wokeness. Rhodes, too, claims that “corporate morality” is mere “posturing” meant to “divert attention” from both individual malfeasance and the larger social maladies of neoliberalism. When left-wing Rhodes calls wokeness “the perfect distraction,” serving “the maintenance of the social legitimacy of corporate capitalism,” he is in perfect sync with the right-wing Ramaswamy, who sees “wokenomics” as the use of “progressive-friendly values to deflect attention from its own monolithic pursuit of profit and power.”
Unfortunately, the diversionary theory of woke capital is light on both logic and evidence. As a causal claim, it functions more as a moral critique rather than a social-scientific explanation. Both Ramaswamy and Rhodes take corporate hypocrisy as sufficient evidence for the theory; both single out Amazon’s woke philanthropy (around Black Lives Matter and climate change respectively) in particular as a simple coverup of the corporation’s poor labor conditions.
On claimed effects, Ramaswamy and Rhodes likewise insist, without presenting any evidence at all, that the championing of woke causes elevates corporate prestige and legitimacy. Strangely enough, they seem in agreement that left-wing positions on hot-button culture-war issues like race, immigration, feminism, sexuality, and transgenderism are all quite popular and that the honest adherents of wokeness are easily duped into granting corporations carte blanche to proceed at will in the American economy. This baseless assumption is necessary for the diversionary theory to work logically, but simply recording what a speaker speaks is no evidence of what a hearer hears. These authors never even consider whether the masses actually believe corporate virtue signaling, much less are willing to grant goodwill and legitimacy to firms on that basis.
The Wilson-Waldo Ideal
Darel E. Paul is Professor of Political Science at Williams College. He is the author of three books, including From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage (Baylor University Press, 2018). He tweets regularly from @Darelmass.
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more from the online archives
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30.2—March/April 2017
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