Skip to content

The Puzzle of Woke Capital

By any measure Amazon is one of the largest corporations in the world. It is also one of the most woke. In the days after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the company was among the first to announce millions of dollars in donations to Black Lives Matter and similar organizations to counteract “inequitable and brutal treatment of Black and African Americans.” One year later, Amazon Studios issued a new comprehensive “inclusion policy” establishing quotas for women, racial and ethnic minorities, lgbtq persons, and the disabled for creative teams, actors, story characters, and vendors. The company has long supported the Equality Act which would include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories in federal civil rights law, and since 2021 has taken up banning, shadow-banning, and delisting books on transgenderism by conservative authors. In 2022 Amazon announced it would fund employee and dependent travel for out-of-state abortions.

Yet even these progressive bona fides fall short of the demands of Amazon’s wokest employees. On June 1 of this year, Amazon’s official­ly recognized lgbtq employee affinity group, “Glamazon,” readied for its annual opening-day celebration of Pride Month at corporate head­quarters in Seattle. Gathered around a makeshift stage under a giant Progress Pride flag hung for the occasion, Glamazon’s pink-shirted members had hardly begun their speeches before some thirty fellow and former Amazonians rose up in counterdemonstration. Organized by the unrecognized employee group “No Hate at Amazon,” the protestors blew a siren, staged a “die-in” with transgender flag shrouds, presented a petition, and read a speech through a bullhorn accusing the company of “blatant rainbow-washing” and of propagating “a culture of hatred through the sale of transphobic books.”1 Rather than remove the protes­tors, Glamazon ceded the space and canceled its event.

Organized employee protests against employers are as old as the employment relation. In the pre-woke era, however, these were almost always over economic matters of wages, benefits, working conditions, and access to jobs. In the woke era, employee protests against bosses over cultural matters have taken center stage. As the issues of employee discontent have changed, so too have the tactics. Unlike the strike, the die-in at Amazon was not an attempt to wield material power. It was instead an attempt to manipulate emotions and reputations. In the previ­ous era, employees learned tactics in the union hall and on the picket line. Today they learn them in the lecture hall and on the quad.

Woke capital is coexistent with a professional-class labor force. Those with advanced degrees—the heart of the professional class—have long been the most culturally progressive Americans.2 In turn the most left-wing groups in the country are consistently found to be the most highly educated.3 College attendance is not simply correlated with greater moral progressivism but actually causes it in those studying the humani­ties, arts, and social sciences. College also causes greater moral absolutism among all students regardless of field.4 Particularly since the Republican Party’s populist turn under Donald Trump, highly educated professional-class liberals have pushed the Democratic Party ever left­ward on race, crime, immigration, gender identity, sexual harassment, free speech, and energy policy. Anywhere one finds a concentration of professionals—particularly in “creative” industries such as high tech, publishing, media, education, and the arts—one inevitably finds wokeness.5

At the same time, woke capital is also a consequence of the values and interests of the managerial class. Earning an MBA also makes its holders more morally progressive and morally absolutist.6 While sharing certain values with professionals, managers are also tasked with extract­ing value from such a labor force. American corporate managers have been manipulating “human relations” for a century. The rise of the service economy, the mixed-sex office, and “knowledge workers” has made the organization and application of “human capital” preeminent. Today the entire stock of official employee affinity groups, corporate identity affirmations and “listening tours,” managerial empathy, and corporate social values are evolutions of long-standing psychological and organizational tools by which managers seek to generate employee cooperation and labor productivity.

Woke capital has many nascent theorists whose accounts emphasize factors external to the corporation: the pressure of woke consumers; the demands of woke investors; a need for political and cultural legitimacy from the woke public or perhaps a narrower woke elite; the social justice demands of the woke state. While not exactly wrong, each of these falls short by failing to look deeply inside the corporation. Woke capital is the result of an interaction within the corporation between the professional and managerial classes. Its impulse is professional-class employees, especially in the creative industries, who press employers to serve their class interests in autonomy, personal fulfillment, and progressive social values. Managers, many with a professional background themselves, seek to order this skilled and powerful workforce toward capital’s demands for labor productivity and profitability while also pursuing their own interests in prestige and power. In addition, both classes are strongly influenced by the unusual and increasingly dysfunctional cul­ture of the American university, the institutional crucible of wokeness. All this leads managers to indulge professional employees’ cultural demands, enabled by preexisting therapeutic American business practic­es quite complementary to wokeness, as well as oligopolistic market conditions that provide fiscal buffers for corporate cultural activism. Only once the nature of these social forces and their interactions within the corporation are established can the external pressures of consumers, investors, public opinion, and the state be taken up. The foundation of woke capital is class relations within the corporation itself. The analysis of those relations must assume first place.

Making Sense of an Oxymoron

The phenomenon of woke capital is a compelling social puzzle. The term itself seemed an oxymoron when first popularized in the late 2010s. Wokeness is of the Left yet capital is a mainstay interest of the Right. Republicans have a long-standing and well-earned reputation as the more business friendly of America’s two major political parties, a status they are only too happy to celebrate. Corporate campaign donations generally favor Republican candidates. From a progressive left perspective, capital is the most socially regressive force in any capitalist society.

It is important to note, however, that corporate interest in political conservatism emphasizes economic matters such as low taxation and pro‑business regulation. From the 1960s until very recently, corporations have tended to tread lightly on social issues. Only a generation ago they positively feared entanglement in the politics of the emergent American “culture war.” This was even true of the famously once-conservative Walmart. While it may surprise younger millennials and Gen Z readers who only know the Walmart of pride parades, gun bans, and critical race theory training, the company was once so associated with small-town American culture that pollsters and politicians alike referred to American right-wing populists as “Wal-Mart Moms” and “Sam’s Club conservatives.” In the 1990s, Walmart was “a national Christian icon” known as much for selling pop evangelical theology tracts and censoring violent and sexually explicit albums and magazines as it was for low prices.7 Yet even during that peak of evangelical Christian political power, Walmart practiced its social values at home and kept quiet in public and before lawmakers.

Since the 2010s, however, capital has cast such old-fashioned caution to the wind, invariably throwing its considerable weight behind cultural progressives. Woke capital helped scuttle religious freedom bills in Arizona (2014), Arkansas (2015), Indiana (2015), and Georgia (2016). It frustrated Donald Trump’s early efforts to restrict immigration and refugee entry into the United States. It bankrolled ad campaigns and testified before the state legislature against transgender policies in Texas in 2022. It even used capital strikes against North Carolina in 2016–17 over the state’s so-called bathroom law, Georgia in 2019 for its abortion law, and Georgia again in 2021 for its election law. No Fortune 1000 firms are to be found on the other side. Even conspicuously culturally conservative corporations like Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby today discreetly stick to their knitting.8

As the phenomenon of woke capital has become ubiquitous, many explanations of its nature and function have appeared. Few of them are clearly wrong, but they do vary markedly on plausibility and comprehensiveness.

Corporations themselves largely advance a consumer demand account illustrated by the phenomenon of the Pride Whopper. Since 2014, fast food giant Burger King trots out an advertising gimmick every June to market its signature sandwich. Whether enclosed in a rainbow wrapper or served with “two equal buns,” the purpose of the Pride Whopper is not to actually sell Pride Whoppers (they are only offered in limited locations).9 The purpose is to advertise Burger King as a gay-friendly brand to homophilic consumers. Woke marketing, the claim goes, is a “best practice” affirming a desirable corporate identity as well as increasing sales in niche markets.10

Patterns of wokeness by industry give some prima facie support to this argument. Brands in entertainment, travel, banking, fashion, and alcohol lean most heavily into gay pride advertising. It is probably not coincidental that they also sell luxury goods to elites. Shoe companies and professional sports leagues reliant on black consumers adopt strong racial justice messaging. Rideshare, cosmetics, and dating app companies dependent on young affluent women turn out strongly against restrictive abortion laws. Companies in manufacturing and wholesale trade (such as construction, pipelines, and food production) with limited brand recognition tend to stay out of the culture war fray.

Despite such surface-level plausibility, the consumer-demand argu­ment has many limitations and holes. First, it tells us nothing about why brand-loyal consumers find wokeness so appealing. Second, the evi­dence is lacking that woke advertising and image projection actually generate higher sales. Third, it cannot explain the many (in)famous instances of woke advertising failure and blowback: Starbucks’s 2015 “Race Together” campaign flop encouraging baristas to strike up conversations with customers about race relations; Pepsi’s 2017 BLM-themed ad featuring Kendall Jenner as an agent of racial protest and reconciliation; Gillette’s 2019 ad condemning “toxic masculinity”; or State Farm’s 2022 distribution of transgender-themed books to elemen­tary school–age children.

Finally, the consumer demand case has no explanation for woke capital’s most interesting and puzzling marketing behavior, progressive social justice content directed toward a broad, decidedly non-woke audience. Consider Mondelez International, the parent company of Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, and Honey Maid, among many other brands, or Disney. Both are self-consciously “family brands” dependent on sales to parents of school-age children. Despite this demographic being among the least positive toward homosexuality and transgenderism, both corporations are strongly committed to LGBT-themed advertising and content directed toward them.11 Mondelez regularly uses queer advertis­ing themes for Oreo cookies, from “pride packs” and “pronoun packs” to a recent short film by Alice Wu about a young man coming out to his Chinese immigrant grandparents, each prominently featured on Oreo and Mondelez social media accounts. Disney is an even more remarkable case for the consumer demand theory. While producing LGBT niche and crossover content for years, the conglomerate has become more forceful in incorporating gay themes and characters precisely as its reputation sinks and the company is embroiled in political controversy. After intervening against Florida’s 2022 legislation restricting LGBT themes in education before third grade, Disney pledged to produce more gay characters in its children’s programming. This was backed up by the inclusion of a same-sex couple and kiss in Lightyear, a film produced by Disney subsidiary Pixar, as well as by a transgender man (identifiable by a transgender-flag T-shirt) recommending feminine pads in the Disney Animation Studios series Baymax!. Revenues and ratings for both give no support to the premise that such content is produced to satisfy broad consumer demand. In fact, there are ample instances of corporate wokeness—Amazon’s Rings of Power social justice rendering of J. R. R. Tol­kein’s Middle Earth and Sports Illustrated’s regular inclusion of elderly, obese, and transgender models in its annual swimsuit edition come to mind—that appear designed to positively alienate consumers.

A second account popular among academics, writers, and journalists is a diversionary theory of woke capital. The central claim here is that corporations don a mantle of wokeness so as to distract critics and cultivate legitimacy.12 Supposedly, corporations feign belief in social jus­tice causes because they are popular with the wider public. By covering one’s products with rainbows or donating corporate profits to racial justice causes, capital cultivates general social goodwill while simultaneously distracting the public from both particular and general acts of corporate malfeasance. Signature evidence for the diversionary theory is surely the 2017 Fearless Girl stunt by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA). In March of that year the multitrillion-dollar asset management firm installed a four-foot-high bronze statue of a young girl striking a defiant pose in front of the New York Stock Exchange building. The statue was placed on the eve of International Women’s Day facing (and seemingly staring down) the famous charging bull statue. According to SSGA, Fearless Girl symbolized female empowerment as did its newly launched “gender diversity” index fund under the stock exchange sym­bol SHE.13 The statue proved so popular with the public that its original one-week permit was extended to thirty days and then to a year. Only after twenty months was it finally moved, but only a short distance away to a different spot outside the Stock Exchange where it still stands today. Perhaps coincidentally, three weeks after State Street unveiled Fearless Girl, the U.S. Department of Labor announced the results of its four-plus-year investigation into the firm’s discriminatory labor practic­es, which notably included underpaying female executives. State Street wound up paying a $5 million settlement that was widely covered by the press.14

The diversionary theory is not so different from the consumer demand theory above and thus suffers from similar shortcomings. The most glaring is a general lack of evidence for its central empirical claim. Advocates of the diversionary theory simply assert that wokeness buys goodwill and legitimacy. Piling up instances of woke corporate speech, however, is no indication of how such speech is received. After all, signaling one’s virtue is hardly the same as being considered virtuous. Thus the diversionary theory makes a serious conceptual error mistaking justification for legitimacy. Two rather suspect assumptions also form the foundation of the diversionary theory. First is the premise that the general public is both highly woke and exceptionally gullible. The second is a standard modernist premise that “real” politics is about clashing material interests and therefore any conflict over culture and symbols is necessarily a “politics about nothing.”15 These two assumptions drive the tone and interpretation of evidence so much so that they reveal the diversionary theory to be less an explanation of woke capital than a moral critique of the American culture war and its participants.

A third theory of woke capital common among libertarians holds that it is a reaction to civil rights legislation.16 In order to placate the demands of the American federal government since 1964 and avoid cost­ly litigation, affirmative-action-become-diversity-become-wokeness has evolved into an indispensable organ of American corporate governance. Support for critical race theory, #MeToo, transgenderism, and every other contemporary progressive social cause is ultimately rooted in the corporate human resources and legal compliance bureaucracy, themselves the outcomes of the ongoing civil rights revolution. Woke em­ployee trainings, woke speech codes, woke harassment policies, and the like are all rooted in legal demands imposed by the state.

The inclusion of pressure from the state is an important contribution of the civil rights theory of wokeness. One should not, however, make too much of its insights. It is clear that many corporate codes of conduct and training regimes are based on overbroad interpretations of case law.17 Corporations, not the Congress or the federal bureaucracy, pio­neered the legal definitions of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity. Corporations happily expanded their affirmative action infrastructure in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the largest and most profitable firms. When the middle-class backlash against affirmative action came to fruition in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, support for civil rights demands never flagged among corporate leaders. Most Fortune 500 firms actually opposed the Reagan administration on affirmative action, and despite the federal government’s offer of regulatory relief, they never paused their efforts to recruit and employ more racial minorities and women. Large corporations routinely support the legal defense of affirmative action when they could just as well stay silent. In the biggest affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court in the past decade, forty-five Fortune 100 firms submitted a joint brief insisting that diver­sity is essential both for individual “success in the corporate world” as well as “business success” in “country and world economies that are increasingly diverse.”18 Civil rights law is not forcing American business to act against its will, at least not the largest and most profitable firms. Instead, capital is a willing supporter and even leader of cultural pro­gressivism.19

The investor theory of woke capital is a fourth account that improves upon the consumer, diversionary, and civil rights theories by beginning to look inside the corporation.20 This approach argues that an alliance of activist asset managers, shareholders, and financial regulators are the prime movers behind what many now call “stakeholder capitalism.” A combination of ideological capture, economic financialization, and a market-based (rather than bank-based) model of investment allows institutional investors and activist shareholders to use “environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria” as the price of access to capital. Regulators back up these structural and ideological forces with state power. In short, if the Securities and Exchange Commission together with BlackRock and its $10 trillion under management suggest corporations should lower carbon emissions, place more women on boards of directors, and expand transgender health care coverage, they do so.

While there do seem to be some narrow pecuniary interests behind ESG—for example, management fees are higher on ESG funds21—the “doing well by doing good” mantra lacks prima facie plausibility. How can “stakeholders” know better how to generate profits than capitalists themselves? How can enforcing social justice criteria possibly be more profitable than violating them? Notably, the investor theory of woke capital argues that it isn’t, at least not without the aid of the state. Instead, socially progressive regulators tip the scales toward wokeness and then reward private firms who carry out woke policies. In this approach, woke capital becomes an arm of the Democratic Party. Faced with a legislative agenda stymied in Congress, progres­sives “pass” it nonetheless through administrative law and private cor­porations.22

For some, like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, wokeness may simply be an ideological end in itself.23 For most, however, wokeness is attrac­tive because it is a form of rent-seeking.24 Regulatory capture is a common means for large, politically connected corporations to under­mine compe­tition and collect outsized profits. ESG standards and metrics impose fiscal burdens that cannot be borne equally. The largest and most globalized corporations are best positioned to absorb the labor, human resources, and legal compliance costs imposed by the ESG system. Thus they are the most likely to advocate for them, at least once the popularity of ESG had grown large enough to make its “tax burden” unavoidable.

While the investor theory of woke capital is overly narrow, it does make an important step in the right direction. It takes interest in what happens inside the firm, incorporating some observations on the structure of contemporary American capitalism. It includes the state and thus presents a tentative political economy of woke capital, while ideo­logical motivations are central if largely unexamined. What is most lacking in the investor theory, however, is an account of the social structures within which woke capital and even woke capitalism exist. A class theory can provide exactly that.

Theory of Woke Capital

The class dimensions of woke capital are simultaneously obvious and woefully underexamined. Wokeness as a culture, an integrated set of beliefs and social practices, has a history and an institutional locus. Its origins are in the American university, and its social location is the American professional class, the one more than any other created by and defined through the university. Wokeness is so associated with the highly educated that it is useful to follow Nick Burns and understand it as “the university ideology.”25 Yet as we all know, this culture did not stay contained within ivy walls. It easily crossed into the nonprofit sec­tor dominated by professional-class labor, including K–12 education, social work, and medicine, not to mention the vast network of NGO advocacy organizations. It passed to the for-profit sector through the same pro­fessional-class labor force in characteristic industries like law, media, publishing, finance, and high tech. By the mid-2010s, same-sex marriage, racial justice, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), abortion rights, environmental sustainability, transgenderism, and a hatred of the Rus­sian state had simply become the value set of all elite American institutions, save the handful, per O’Sullivan’s first law, that are self-con­sciously right-wing.26

Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning were the first to set out in detail the characteristic elements of woke belief and behavior.27 As early as 2014 they identified an emergent “victimhood culture” in the American university. Its distinctive features are a “heavy reliance” on third-party adjudication of grievances, campaigns for public support in disputes (especially via the internet), and a moral culture focused on “inequality and oppression.” The very opposite of an “honor culture,” in which status depends on a personal reputation for physical bravery and the settlement of disputes occurs (often violently) beyond third-party mediation or control, members of a victimhood culture seek status through weakness, attack the reputations of “oppressors,” and enlist authorities over even minor disagreements and social frictions, most notably those involving emotional harm.

Campbell and Manning emphasize the social structures that enable such a culture. First, heavy reliance on third-party adjudication exists only in the presence of powerful institutions exercis­ing clear (quasi-)legal authority that deters personal resolution of dis­putes. Such institutions can become so authoritative that they are enlisted to settle the most intimate of private grievances. Second, public campaigns for support exist within a structure of what Campbell and Manning call “slow and weak partisanship,” in which no one has mem­bership in strong preexisting support groups (such as clans or gangs) and authority is formally neutral. Under such conditions of “social atomization,” support for one’s cause can never be assumed and therefore must be intentionally cultivated. In turn, acquaintances and even strangers become just as valuable as friends and relatives. While authority is formally neutral, it is nonetheless tasked with adjudication. The fact that it seeks to determine whether an accusation is true or false makes it open to and subject to campaigning. Third, strong ideological commitment to the values of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” exist only within social structures already highly equal and diverse. As equality and diversity (at least in woke-defined categories) grow, ever-greater opposition to ves­tigial inequality and pre-woke homogeneity grows as well. Sensitivity to status slights against the “disadvantaged” or “oppressed” become most intense precisely at the frontier of the eradication of disadvantage and oppression.

Anyone familiar with American higher education can immediately recognize these social structures as definitive of the contemporary American university, particularly its most elite instances. The higher education bureaucracy devoted to holistic admissions, Title IX, sexual assault, DEI, speech codes, and the like all make the contemporary American university a quasi-legal authority governing all aspects of the everyday lives of its students. College students are a highly atomized population upon matriculation, especially at the most elite schools, coming from every corner of the country and from around the globe, separated from all preexisting social bonds, and structurally transitory. Nick Burns has observed in the pages of this journal how “medieval” much of the structure of American higher education is.28 The elite American university is a “totalizing community” in which resident students work, eat, sleep, recreate, and relax all under the watchful eye of a single hierarchical, integrated, and mostly unaccountable bureaucracy. This totalizing quality is precisely what enabled university Covid regimes to be the most draconian anywhere in the United States. The unaccountable and unrepresentative nature of the university’s governance structure cultivates in students a general submissiveness to authori­ty punctuated by momentary antidemocratic outbursts of defiance in the form of ethical criticism and overwrought lists of demands. This is heightened by the state’s grant of—and in some cases forcible demand of—juridical autonomy for the university. Through Title IX, the state has made the university rather than the state itself the primary adjudicator of sexual harassment and violence complaints among students. As a result, college students have been turned into a separate legal class subject to its own court system. The totalizing nature of the university is even realized in physical form. “Campus” is the footprint of the American university designating the area of a distinctive lived environment in which the economic, social, and cultural needs of resident students are fulfilled. The urban campuses of elite institutions such as Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California are even separated from the world by walls and gates much like a cloistered monastery.

The structure of higher education does not dictate a particular cultural content, however. Why is wokeness now the university ideolo­gy as opposed to the postmodern nihilism of the 1990s or the Marxism of the 1970s? In part this is due to a passion for equality that has overtaken American higher education, going so far as to eradicate the distinctions of campus social clubs and even of grades.29 This passion has both ideological and material attractions. It suits a university culture dedicat­ed to a therapeutic project of “wellness” and mental health for all.30 Amid the highest levels of inequality in a century, elite institutions in the United States perceive usefulness in an ideology that grants them a great moral purpose consistent with their progressive values while at the same time costing them nothing in terms of power and prestige. In fact, the greater the commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the greater the prestige! Wokeness is also driven by mundane material interests. “Historically underrepresented” groups gain access to the university—and especially to its most lucrative positions, programs, and faculties—through gender and racial equality, not class-based Marxism or political­ly impotent postmodernism. This is especially true among administrators, the most progressive and fastest growing employment sector in higher education, who also have the lowest commitment to the traditional educational and research mission of the university.31 As the ranks of administrators have swelled, especially at the most elite private institutions, so too has their ideology overtaken the university.32

Highly educated Americans take the distinctive university culture from their student days into the professional-class workplace. One can see this best in the NGO world wracked by an “internal reckoning” of purity spirals, cancellations, and staff revolts over questions of history and representation.33 The same cultural dynamics exist in the for-profit world where woke mid-level staffers force contract cancellations, man­ager resignations, and humiliating public apologies from CEOs.34 This culture thrives beyond the university in precisely those institutions that most resemble it. Young professionals in particular experience the corporation as something near to a totalizing community. Much as in college, most or even all of one’s friends and acquaintances come from work. The world overall is socially atomized, the nature not simply of individualistic liberal society but especially the experience of elites who congregate in urban centers far from precollege networks of family and hometown. A combination of long hours, unfamiliar cities, and child­lessness turns the office into the fulcrum of the (especially young) professional’s life.35 As during their student days, professionals expect their employers to reflect their own ethical sensibilities. Managers are turned into deans and college presidents, powerful unaccountable authority figures to be swayed by social justice appeals and social media campaigns. This is aggravated by the demise of voluntary cultural organizations like churches, fraternal bodies, community charities, and clubs. The workplace thus becomes the central—and for many, the only—site of social action.

Management is hardly innocent in this affair. Corporations have attempted to imitate a university-like environment to attract skilled professional-class labor since the 1940s. They build “corporate campuses” not only to evoke the community and purpose of higher education but also to imitate the university’s totalizing nature. As student life blurs the distinction between work and leisure, so does professional life on campuses that surround offices and workplaces with cafeterias, gyms, clinics, shops, game rooms, and green space.36 Officially sanctioned and sponsored (and monitored) employee affinity groups and internal Slack channels imitate university student groups and message boards. CEOs pontificating before their employees on the latest social justice outrage of the day are no different from college presidents informing the campus of its “values” after the very same incidents. High tech realizes the most extreme instance in which professional work becomes a religion and the office “the place where highly skilled Americans find their souls.”37

Similar institutional and social structures are matched with similar ideologies. Like the university bureaucracy, corporate management embraces diversity. Its commitment goes back to the 1960s. The civil rights laws of that period generated an explosion of “affirmative ac­tion” (turned “diversity”) best practices along with hundreds of thou­sands of new managers to practice them.38 By the 1990s the “business case for diversity” had become hegemonic among American capital despite not only its weak empirical but also legal footing.39 This does not mean that management is unperturbed by the cultural demands of professional-class employees. In many cases, diversity-become-wokeness has escaped managerial control, and there are ample instances of CEOs forced to assume woke positions they clearly preferred not to take.40 When management has the power to discipline labor, capitulating to it instead is puzzling. Yet consider the presidents of elite colleges and universities by comparison who routinely concede, at least in part, to woke demands from a constituency far weaker than professional-class employees.

For managers in both the for-profit and nonprofit spheres, there are no political or social incentives to resist wokeness. Anti-woke students or employees are few in number and highly marginalized in all professional-class settings; non-woke students or employees are largely passive and unorganized, making them far easier to ignore than activists. So long as woke demands have minimal implications for the core economic interests of the university or corporation, they are simply easier to grant than to refuse. In addition, managers are immersed in the same culture and generally share the same values as professionals, producing a built-in managerial inclination to sympathize with progressive complaints. Fi­nally, managers are most often creatures of the corporation itself and rise to power by endorsing rather than challenging elite cultural prac­tices and commitments. This is true even in supposedly conservative institutions like the military whose corps of generals and admirals are exceptionally attuned to “white rage,” police violence, gender equality, and transgender pride. Investor and former tech CEO David O. Sacks speculates that personality and character play an important role, observ­ing that entrepreneurs who found corporations are “disruptors” and potentially woke-resistant while second-plus generation managers of established firms are conditioned by their career path to “go with the flow.”41 Evidence supports Sacks’s intuition. Four corporations—Coin­base, Basecamp (now 37signals), Netflix, and Tesla—have made head­lines over the past eighteen months for depoliticizing their internal business cultures by suppressing wokeness. In each it has been the entrepreneurial founder still in control of operations who has carried out the policy.

Wokeness is not layered merely upon corporate diversity ideology. The deeper strata of American capitalist practice is the therapeutic. Sociologist Eva Illouz has shown how the American office has long been a space of therapeutic practices.42 American managers began introducing psychological theory and technique into corporations as early as the 1920s and were patterning conflict resolution practices after psychotherapeutic interviews as early as the 1940s. “Human relations” were born from deploying psychological insights into office settings as the service sector emerged and processes of production turned increasingly away from dealing with things and toward dealing with people. In turn, the formerly “masculine” field of work shifted decisively toward valuing “feminine” emotional skills such as communication, recognition, and cooperation. The project of the self, the centerpiece of the therapeutic, is not simply a project of the individual employee but of the employer as well. Silicon Valley’s mantra “bring your whole self to work” spread so easily throughout American business thanks to the preexisting therapeutic culture of American management more broadly. The member of the professional-class family, of course, has always been the normative client of psychotherapy, and the more highly educated, more liberal, more “creative,” more white, and more female the workforce, the more receptive to therapeutic managerial practices. Woke capital is well-grounded in both its social classes.

Disciplining Woke Capital

A good theory of any social phenomenon should be logically consistent and empirically valid. It should incorporate the insights of rival theories while going beyond them to incorporate new or previously unexplained phenomena. It should create order in our understanding of the social world. The reader can judge for herself whether the theory presented here meets those standards.

A good theory should also be useful and suggest avenues for effective action. Only in the last year have such avenues against woke capital begun to open up. The year 2022 was the first in which an effective backlash against woke capital could be found. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis stood down Disney and most of the state’s corporate sector in not only signing, but more notably publicly defending, initiatives against critical race theory, sexual identity and gender ideology, and “gender affirm­ing” medical treatment for minors. Because of Disney’s strong opposition, DeSantis even revoked state concessions to the company in a truly unprecedented move against woke capital. Texas governor Greg Abbott has more quietly challenged the power of woke capital by defending against corporate opposition his state’s (effectively) six-week limit on abortion-at-will as well as being the first in the country to restrict medical treatment of gender dysphoric minors. Perhaps as a reaction, the corporate response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the previously recognized constitutional right to abortion, has been surprisingly muted. To the extent any organized response has come at all, corporations have publicly pledged to financially compensate employees and their family members to procure abortions out of state. Only a very few have adopted the strident tones typical of woke capital in the recent past.43

Montana was the first U.S. state to attempt disciplining woke capital with a 2021 Attorney General’s Opinion finding that “racial segregation, race stereotyping, and race scapegoating” typical of critical race theory trainings is a violation of state and federal civil rights law. Florida followed with its Individual Freedom Act (the “Stop WOKE Act”), signed into law in 2022, an amendment to the state’s 1977 Civil Rights Act that places legal restrictions on workplace trainings in matters of race, color, sex, or national origin. These efforts could be exported to the rest of the country. An expansion of tort law so as to expose corporations to liability from their social justice activism is another policy that could be taken up at the state level.44 More ambitious but improbable suggestions include federal judicial reinterpretations of the First Amendment to overturn woke employee trainings and hostile work environment rules, or of the Fifth Amendment to overturn disparate impact liability.45

This theory of woke capital points to a much needed complementary response of disciplining the professional class directly. Professionals have two citadels of power. The first is the so-called nonprofit indus­trial complex (NPIC), the state bureaucracy intertwined with foundations, think tanks, private stand­ards bodies, private sector public service providers, and advocacy NGOs. In 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned the country of the existence of a powerful “military-industrial complex” of fused interests operating across the permeable boundary of the federal bureaucracy and civil society organizations (especially defense contractors, science bodies, and academia) beyond democratic control. Some­thing similar exists in the NPIC. Legal challenges to ESG standards as a violation of fiduciary duty, challenging the tax-exempt status of founda­tions engaged in political and legislative work, and requiring larger annual disbursements of foundation funds are all realistic policy options. Dismantling the administrative state and its civil society penumbra—“draining the swamp”—is a pipe dream, although the cultivation and placement of a conservative counter-elite within the NPIC may be a realistic hope. The recreation of Schedule F employees within the federal bureaucracy is a potentially powerful tool toward this end.46

The second citadel of professional-class power is the university itself. Tertiary education institutions have come to occupy a central and outsized position in contemporary American society and political economy. One result is that the American professional class simply has too many members and aspirants for American society to productively absorb. Downwardly mobile members of the professional class—those with high credentials and low income—are an especially problematic woke interest group.47 Applying the federal government’s gainful em­ployment rule to nonprofit colleges and universities, banning degree requirements for employment (“degree discrimination”), and diverting some public funds from four-year institutions to vocational education are all worthy policies. Reducing the size of non-teaching professional staff at public universities would likely be helpful as well. To target elite private institutions, the federal government should expand its excise tax on college investment income. States should consider introducing their own taxes on university endowments, rent-generating property, and the rest of higher education’s noneducational income to encourage such institutions to spend their resources in ways supportive of the wider public’s interests.

Reforming the American professional class is an order so tall, however, that it may not be possible through intentional policy. Its political and economic power may simply be too great, the roots of its culture too deep. Washington, D.C., the heart of the country’s nonprofit industrial complex, continues to be among the richest, most highly educated, and most progressive metropolitan areas.48 Despite much talk, no U.S. state has yet taxed the tremendous endowment wealth of its elite universities. Florida and Texas have been able to resist woke capital for a time primarily because they are large economies (fourth and second in GDP, respectively) with attractive investment environments. But both states’ governors face reelection in 2022. Everything accomplished one year through democratic means can be reversed by the same means the next.

Opponents of woke capital—populist Republicans, labor Democrats, independents—therefore must commit to a long-term democratic pro­ject that compels capital investment in productive middle-class jobs, shrinks the size and privileges of the professional class, and orients more regulatory power over contentious social and cultural issues to the states and less to the federal government. If such a project delivers on its promises, it could even reorient American politics away from the culture war axis, not because the war will have been proven pointless, but because it will have been won where it can be.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 3 (Fall 2022): 126–45.

Notes
1Speech at the 2022 Amazon Pride Flag Raising,” No Hate at Amazon (website).

2 See for example Aaron Zitner and Gabriel Gianordoli, “How Liberals Unite/Divide the Democrats,” Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2018. Professional-class Americans were pioneers on same-sex marriage in particular. See Darel E. Paul, From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2018).

3 In 2017–18, the organization More in Common used cluster analysis of the American electorate’s social and political beliefs to identify seven “hidden tribes” of American politics. The furthest left tribe was labeled “progressive activists,” who turned out to be the most highly educated at 27 percent with an advanced degree and 59 percent with at least a bachelor’s degree; the figures for the electorate overall were 10 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Not surprisingly this group also was the whitest, the least religious, and had the highest income. In 2021, Pew Research conducted a similar survey and analysis identifying nine groups. It labeled the leftmost group the “progressive left” and similarly found that it was either the most or second-most highly educated depending on the definition (bachelors or postgraduate degree); 48 percent of this group had at least a four-year degree compared to just 32 percent for the overall sample; 22 percent held a postgraduate degree versus just 14 percent for the overall sample. Among all groups the “progressive left” was the least religious, the most likely to contribute money and time to political campaigns, and the most likely to discuss politics. See Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Mirian Juan-Torres and Tim Dixon, Hidden Tribes: A Survey of America’s Polarized Landscape (New York: More in Common, 2018); and “Beyond Red and Blue: The Political Typology,” Pew Research Center, November 2021.

4 Miloš Broćić and Andrew Miles, “College and the ‘Culture War’: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes,” American Sociological Review 86, no. 5 (October 2021): 856–95.

5 Academic and management consultant Richard Florida is well-known for defining professionals as the “creative class.” See particularly The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Perseus Book Group, 2002).

6 Broćić and Miles, “College and the ‘Culture War.’”

7 Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 122.

8 Chick-fil-A is perhaps best known for its policy of closing on Sundays but has never lobbied for the return of blue laws. The company’s supposed opposition to same-sex marriage is based on the stances of charities supported by both the Chick-fil-A Foundation and the WinShape Foundation, the latter established by Chick-fil-A’s founder and his family. The company leadership itself never lobbied against same-sex marriage laws or constitutional amendments. Hobby Lobby famously sought an exemption on religious freedom grounds from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate but did not publicly protest or lobby for laws restricting contraceptives generally.

9 Anna Cooban, “Burger King Has a ‘Pride Whopper’ with ‘Two Equal Buns,’” CNN, June 7, 2022.

10 The United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and Human Rights Campaign all describe “corporate equality” metrics for LGBT inclusion as “best practices.”

11 For views of homosexuality by family type and fertility level, see Paul, From Tolerance to Equality.

12 Signature examples of this argument include Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (New York: Center Street, 2021); Carl Rhodes, Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality Is Sabotaging Democracy (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022); Michael Cuenco, “‘Victory Is Not Possible’: A Theory of the Culture War,” American Affairs 6, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 179–214.

13 Annalyn Kurtz, “State Street Takes on Wall Street’s Gender Gap,” Fortune, May 23, 2017.

14 Molly Redden, “How the Firm behind the Fearless Girl Statue Quietly Opposed Gender Equality,” Guardian, October 6, 2017.

15 Cuenco, “Victory Is Not Possible.”

16 Significant instances include Christopher Caldwell, The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020); Gail H. Heriot, “The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes toward Identity Politics and Free Expression,” Texas Review of Law and Politics (forthcoming); and Richard Hanania, “Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law,” Richard Hanania’s Newsletter, June 1, 2021.

17 James J. McDonald Jr., “Political Correctness at Work: How Much Is Too Much?,” Fisher Phillips, August 29, 2016; Allen Smith, “Workplace Policies Don’t Have to Be Too ‘Politically Correct,’” SHRM, June 19, 2018.

18 Fisher v. University of Texas (2013) and Fisher v. University of Texas (2016).

19 For an extended version of this argument, see Darel E. Paul, “Diversity: A Managerial Ideology,” Quillette, February 19, 2018; and Charles Fain Lehman, “The Genealogy of Woke Capital,” City Journal (Autumn 2021).

20 The most sustained version of this argument is Stephen R. Soukup, The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).

21 Cam Simpson and Siijel Kishan, “How BlackRock Made ESG the Hottest Ticket on Wall Street,” Bloomberg, December 31, 2021.

22 Soukup, Dictatorship of Woke Capital, 13–19; Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc., 141–56; Tom Cotton, “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” First Things, June 20, 2019.

23 According to Soukup, Fink is a “religious fanatic” and a “utopian/religious fundamentalist.” See Soukup, Dictatorship of Woke Capital, 2–3.

24 William Malcolmson, “The Problem with the Diversity Dividend,” Quillette, March 2, 2022.

25 Nick Burns, “America’s Medieval Universities,” American Affairs 6, no. 2 (Summer 2022): 153.

26 “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” See John O’Sullivan, “O’Sullivan’s First Law,” National Review, October 27, 1989, 14.

27 Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, “Microaggression and Moral Cultures,” Comparative Sociology 13 (2014): 692–726; Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, “Campus Culture Wars and the Sociology of Morality,” Comparative Sociology 15 (2016): 147–78; Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

28 Burns, “America’s Medieval Universities.”

29 Conor Friedersdorf, “Do unto Other Harvard Students,” Atlantic, July 13, 2017; Ginerva Davis, “Stanford’s War on Social Life,” Palladium, June 13, 2022. As long ago as 2012, the median grade at Harvard was A– and the modal grade A. Significant grade inflation has continued since that time.

30 Frank Furedi, “The Therapeutic University,” American Interest 13, no. 1 (September/October 2017).

31 Samuel J. Abrams, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators,” New York Times, October 16, 2018; Samuel J. Abrams, “How Did Universities Get So Woke? Look to the Administrators,” Newsweek, October 3, 2021.

32 In the academic year 2015–16, “The private nonprofit institutions with the most managers per 1,000 students tended to be highly selective. The median number of managers per 1,000 students was twice as high for four-year private nonprofit colleges as it was for four-year public colleges, and the median cost of managers’ salaries per student was nearly twice as high at the nonprofit colleges as at the public ones.” Chronicle Staff, “Which Colleges Have the Highest Number of Managers per 1,000 Students?Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2018.

33 Ryan Grim, “Elephant in the Zoom: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill,” Intercept, June 13, 2022; Thomas B. Edsall, “Democrats Are Having a Purity-Test Problem at Exactly the Wrong Time,” New York Times, June 29, 2022.

34 The instances are too numerous to catalog. Well-publicized examples include: Hachette Book Group cancelling publication of a Woody Allen memoir; the resignation of New York Times opinion page editor James Bennet; and the resignation of Philadelphia Inquirer chief editor and senior vice president Stan Wischnowski in 2020; the resignation of Alexi McCammond as incoming editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue in 2021; Penguin Random House canceling publication of a Norman Mailer collection; and Disney CEO Bob Chapek’s letter to LGBT Disney staff confessing, “I let you down. I am sorry,” in 2022.

35 The median age at first birth for college educated women in the United States was 32 in the cohort born since 1986. See Natalie Nitsche and Hannah Brückner, “Late, but Not Too Late? Postponement of First Birth among Highly Educated US Women,” European Journal of Population 37 (2021): 371–403.

36 Paul V. Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); Louise A. Mozingo, Pastoral Capitalism: A History of Suburban Corporate Landscapes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011); Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Doubleday, 2014); Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey, “Work Imitates Life,” Aeon, January 22, 2016.

37 Carolyn Chen, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

38 Frank Dobbin, Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Ellen Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

39 Kingsley R. Browne, “Title VII and Diversity,” Nevada Law Journal 14, no. 3 (2014): 806–30; Jason Yackee, “Targets of Opportunity? The History, Law, and Practice of Affirmative Action in University Faculty Hiring,” Wisconsin Law Review 2020, no. 6 (2020): 1199–1285.

40 The best recent example is Disney. See Darel E. Paul, “Woke Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Year Zero, March 30 2022.

41 Bari Weiss, “How Big Tech Is Strangling Your Freedom,” Honestly (podcast), March 29, 2022.

42 Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

43 Emma Goldberg and Lora Kelley, “Companies Are More Vocal Than Ever on Social Issues. Not on Abortion,” New York Times, June 24, 2022.

44 Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc., 71–79; Nanci K. Carr, “How Can We End #CancelCulture—Tort Liability or Thumper’s Rule?,” Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology 28, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 133–146; Pat Smith, “A Tort for ‘Cancel Culture,’” Ius & Iustitium, February 7, 2022.

45 Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc., 240–60; Hanania, “Woke Institutions Is Just Civil Rights Law”; Frank Resartus, “Defeating the Equity Regime,” First Things (May 2022).

46 Donald P. Moynihan, “Public Management for Populists: Trump’s Schedule F Executive Order and the Future of the Civil Service,” Public Administration Review 82, no. 1 (2022): 174–78.

47 Malcolm Kyeyune, “Planet of the Grifters,” American Affairs 5, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 213–24.

48 For a cautionary interpretation of the 2021 Virginia election results, see Darel E. Paul, “Why Glenn Youngkin Won Virginia,” First Things, November 5, 2021.


Sorry, PDF downloads are available
to subscribers only.

Subscribe

Already subscribed?
Sign In With Your AAJ Account | Sign In with Blink