The Rise of Woke Capitalism
To Americans conditioned by the Cold War, the all-powerful state seemed the biggest threat to liberty. We grew up reading Orwell in high school and hearing news accounts of defectors from communist countries who testified to the horrors of life under total government control. Besides, American culture has always prized the lone individual who stands out from the herd. The most iconic American—the cowboy—testifies to this enduring value.
The American conservative tradition, unlike that of Europe, has been philosophically antagonistic to the state. Yet recognizing that the Soviet Union and its allies were a genuine threat, postwar conservatives resigned themselves, putting up with big government as a necessary evil to protect American freedom.
But they didn’t have to like it. To many on the Right, especially libertarians schooled by the novels of Ayn Rand, corporations seemed the natural opponent of the leviathan state. As institutions of private enterprise, corporations were seen by conservatives as more naturally virtuous than the state. The Cold War might have compelled conservatives to make peace with Big Government, but they were willing to accept Big Business as a bulwark against a too-powerful state—and on the global front, as an important weapon in advancing American soft power against Soviet hegemony.
Though liberals are less inclined to sanctify business than conservatives, the end of the Cold War brought about the conversion of leading liberal politicians—think Bill Clinton and Tony Blair—to the gospel of market globalization, already fervently accepted by all but a cranky fringe of Republicans. Over the past quarter century, globalization and technological advances have enabled a staggering expansion of corporate power.
Now an elite club of global megacorporations are more powerful than many countries. Walmart has more annual revenue than Spain and more than twice as much as Russia. ExxonMobil is bigger, revenuewise, than India, Norway, or Turkey. As international strategist Parag Khanna says, in a world where Apple has more cash on hand than two thirds of the world’s nations, “corporations are likely to overtake all states in terms of clout.”1 In an America that now runs on the internet, five companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google—have an almost incalculable influence over public and private life.
At the same time, Big Business has moved steadily leftward on social issues. Standard business practice long required staying out of controversial issues on the grounds that taking sides in the culture war would be bad for business. That all changed in a big way in 2015, when the state of Indiana passed a religious freedom bill that would have given some protection to businesses sued for antigay discrimination. A powerful coalition of corporate leaders, including the heads of Apple, Salesforce, Eli Lilly, and others, threatened economic retaliation against the state if it did not reverse course. It did. Since then, lobbyists for national and international corporations have leaned heavily on state governments to pass pro-LGBT legislation and to resist religious liberty laws.
The stereotype that college students leave their liberalism behind on campus when they graduate into the “real world” is badly outdated. In fact, today’s graduates are often taught to bring their social justice ideals with them and advocate for what is called “corporate social responsibility.” True, nobody has a good word to say for corporate social irresponsibility; like “social justice,” the phrase is a euphemism for a progressive cultural politics. As author Heather Mac Donald has written, “[G]raduates of the academic victimology complex are remaking the world in their image.”2
In her 2018 book, The Diversity Delusion, Mac Donald explored how corporate human resources departments function as a social justice commissariat. Nearly 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have diversity offices, she reports, and the corporate mania for “equity, diversity, and inclusion” informs corporate culture at many levels, including hiring, promotion, bonuses, and governing the norms of interaction in the workplace.
Some multinational corporations impose progressive cultural politics on workplaces in more socially conservative countries. Several Polish employees of the national branches of world-renowned corporations told me that they have felt compelled to participate in LGBT activism inside their companies. As Christians, they believed endorsing Pride violated their consciences, but given economic conditions in Poland, they feared refusing to conform would cost them their jobs.
There is nothing wrong, of course, with trying to create workplaces where people are treated fairly, and judged according to performance. That’s what we call “justice”; social justice, as we have seen, is not the same thing. Mac Donald found little to no empirical evidence to support social justice strategies within the corporate world. Despite this, these supposedly hardheaded business executives ignore the bottom line when it comes to diversity programs and corporate social responsibility initiatives. It’s as if these rites and catechisms were more an expression of religious belief than a response to real-world conditions.
The embrace of aggressive social progressivism by Big Business is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last two decades. Critics call it “woke capitalism,” a snarky theft of the left-wing slang term indicating progressive enlightenment. Woke capitalism is now the most transformative agent within the religion of social justice, because it unites progressive ideology with the most potent force in American life: consumerism and making money.
In his 2018 letter to investors, Larry Fink, CEO of the global investment company BlackRock, said that corporate social responsibility is now part of the cost of doing business.
“Society is demanding
