Woke Capitalism — The Next Generation

National Review Online, March 12 2021

The stakeholder capitalism advocated by the Business Roundtable, the World Economic Forum (“Davos”), and other groupings of oligarchs on the make, is, at heart, an expression of corporatism, an ideology based around the idea that society should be run in a way that recognizes the importance of interest groups rather than individuals. Thus, when it comes to determining what a company is for, shareholders are just one group of “stakeholders” who have to compete for management’s attention.

Corporatism can be a relatively benign influence — its traces are all over the formation of West Germany’s social market economy — or it can be something infinitely more sinister: It was a mainstay of fascist (or proto-fascist) theory (if not necessarily practice) both in the inter-war years and, more obliquely, in Argentina under Perón. Arguably, it has become the unspoken economic ideology of a regime in Beijing that increasingly looks more fascist than communist.

The structure of corporatism is one thing, but the uses to which that structure is put do not have to follow any one prescription. It is quite possible to have a corporatism that is drifting away from democracy but which has no interest in jackboots or the exaltation of the nation state. While those building the emerging corporatist state in the U.S. (and elsewhere in the West) may be busy designing it in a way that bypasses the ballot box, their objectives are more red (or reddish) or green than anything that Mussolini would have supported. We can see this in the way that stakeholder capitalism intertwines with both “socially responsible” investing and the related phenomenon of “woke” capitalism.

In the case of the last, companies may attempt to rebrand themselves as woke, perhaps through what they sell, or how they sell it. If this is a purely a cynical exercise in marketing designed to, say, win over a millennial client base, that might be something to be applauded, if nervously (propaganda has consequences), but something deeper appears to be going on. It is increasingly obvious that more and more companies are, quite genuinely, going woke, and that this is no longer confined to what was once (wrongly) thought as the harmless HR department, but is rising far up the management chain. And it is an ascent that shows no signs of slowing down. On the contrary, as younger generations who have been through the reworked universities of the last decade assume greater power within corporate America, this process is likely to intensify. The idea that people will grow out of it will prove, I suspect, to be wishful thinking. It is true that youthful conviction (mercifully) can often fade, but self-interest rarely does, and playing woke is likely to be the route to promotion, power, and cash, not only for now, but for the foreseeable future, as this way of thinking becomes more deeply entrenched within corporations.

Understanding that fact makes an already disturbing article by Bari Weiss for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal more worrying still. The whole piece (the title, “The Miseducation of America’s Elites” is something of a spoiler) is well worth reading in full but, when looking at the changing American corporation, I would focus on this. To set the stage, Weiss opens with a group of “well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.”

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)

This Harvard-Westlake parents’ group is one of many organizing quietly around the country to fight what it describes as an ideological movement that has taken over their schools. This story is based on interviews with more than two dozen of these dissenters—teachers, parents, and children—at elite prep schools in two of the bluest states in the country: New York and California . . .

That fear is shared, deeply, by the children. For them, it’s not just the fear of getting a bad grade or getting turned down for a college recommendation, though that fear is potent. It’s the fear of social shaming. “If you publish my name, it would ruin my life. People would attack me for even questioning this ideology. I don’t even want people knowing I’m a capitalist,” a student at the Fieldston School in New York City told me, in a comment echoed by other students I spoke with. (Fieldston declined to comment for this article.) “The kids are scared of other kids,” says one Harvard-Westlake mother.

Much of the article is devoted to the discomfort of the parents, “trapped” (I suppose by credentialism: the importance of getting their kids into the right university) into shelling out large sums to educate their children in a manner of which they profoundly disapprove (although, as Weiss notes, this sort of teaching — to use a kind word — “is increasingly prevalent at the local public school”).

As for the children themselves, some will be damaged, perhaps severely, by the nonsense that they are taught, but as there are, I imagine, many bright kids among them, they will, for the most part, learn what to say, and what not to say. Some will believe, and others will work out how to fake that belief and fake it very well. And then, prep schools being what they are, many of these youngsters will go to elite colleges, where the process will be intensified — wash, rinse, and repeat. And they will emerge as even more-fanatical believers, or as doubly deep-dyed cynics who have grasped that wokeness may be nonsense, but that it is also for winners.

Weiss:

Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. . . . Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond.

And “beyond” for these princelings often includes positions in America’s leading businesses, where the rules too are changing:

Bain & Company is tweeting about “Womxn’s History Month.” . . . Coca-Cola employees were recently instructed to “be less white.” You cannot buy or sell the newly problematic Dr. Seuss titles on eBay. This ideology isn’t speaking truth to power. It is the power.

The ambitious and the talented will get the message.

Woke capitalism looks like it is going to be here for a while.

The above is taken from National Review’s Capital Note, March 12, 2021