“Corporate America’s rush to cancel those it dislikes should trouble you,” wrote Sen. Josh Hawley (New York Post, 1/24/21), after leading the charge to overturn the 2020 election cost him a book contract.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R.–Mo.), one of the right-wing ringleaders of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, told Fox News’ Sean Hannity (2/5/21) he is under attack—not by federal law enforcement, civil rights groups or ANTIFA, but by “woke capital,” a cabal of left-wing business elites using their commercial might to silence conservatives and promote cultural liberalism.
In his front-page New York Post rant (1/24/21) against “cancel culture,” Hawley painted a dystopia where an “alliance of leftists and woke capitalists hopes to regulate the innermost thoughts,” and where conservatives’ love of church and the US electoral system is under attack from “left and the corporations.”
It sounds a bit strange; after all, the right usually chastises the left for its anti-corporate politics and for promoting socialism. But Hawley and Hannity are hardly alone: Tucker Carlson of Fox News (10/9/20) sounded the alarm about “woke capital” more than a year ago, and in the middle of the Trump administration, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (2/28/18) explained that corporate campaigns against the National Rifle Association or the Trump administration’s demagoguery affirm
cultural conservatives in their feeling of general besiegement, their sense that all the major institutions of American life, corporate as well as intellectual and cultural, are arrayed against their mores and values and traditions.
The right-wing Spectator (9/8/20) said that corporate America has “lurched along” with the Democratic Party’s “lurch left on cultural issues.”
Murdoch media is reviving the phrase “woke capitalism” in the early days of the Biden administration. The New York Post (2/6/21) claimed that so-called woke corporations thwarted the “will of the people” in 2016 when the threw their support against state-level anti-LGBT legislation, and that of late they flex their
corporate muscles to deplatform, silence and even bankrupt apps like Parler, where users’ views about politics happen to vary, even slightly, from progressive orthodoxy.
The Wall Street Journal (2/5/21) blames the falling popularity of big business among Republicans to “managers…assign[ing] polarizing left-wing political texts to employees”—not on Donald Trump’s frequent attacks on corporations that anger him.
A Wall Street Journal editorial (2/5/21) lamented that “many Fortune 500 firms took the Black Lives Matter protests as an opportunity to pivot hard to the left,” while “Amazon [and] Nike donated large sums to progressive activist groups.” The editors went on to claim that “managers started to assign polarizing left-wing political texts to employees and adopted new racial hiring preferences.”
No matter that “racial hiring preferences” means ending discrimination, which is justice, not a sop. For the paper, this was an inexcusable sin by the companies: “They were bypassing the political process and intervening directly to transform highly contested parts of American life.”
What many of these pieces get right, especially the Times and Spectator articles, is that many corporate overtures to diversity, racial justice and progress are marketing gimmicks that don’t actually address structural economic inequality, and, at worst, are meant to distract from any kind of class reckoning.
This prompts the question of why, then, does conservative media care so much? After all, none of these pieces ever quantify to what degree the nation’s top firms have thrown their resources behind any kind of progressive agenda. These pieces tick off some names and some examples, but simply never line them up against how much money finance and industry pour into every election cycle.
Oil companies lobby against environmentalist policies, and Wall Street firms want less government regulation. A look at Fortune 500 companies shows names like Walmart, one of the biggest advocates against organized labor, and Home Depot, whose co-founder Bernie Marcus is well-known advocate for the Israeli right.
Or take last year’s vote in California, where a proposition was approved by voters to deny gig workers basic employment protections. According to the Los Angeles Times (10/16/20), these so-called woke companies voted with their economic interests to support the proposition: “Uber with $52 million and Lyft, $49 million. Delivery companies have also kicked in big: DoorDash has spent $48 million and Instacart, $28 million.”
Does corporate promotion of LGBT rights or diversity in hiring outweigh all this? These media don’t tell us.
At first glance, it’s easy to write off this outcry as oversensitive whining: Conservative editorialists and producers are fine with corporate spending and political influence as long as it meets the interests of the Republican Party. Start supporting gay rights or Black Lives Matter, though, and all of a sudden corporate America has gone too far.
One gets a sense of these editorialists’ John Birch Society–style paranoia that even our CEOs and boards of directors have fallen under the spell of “cultural Marxism.” And let’s not forget that for the cultural right, finance (based in New York City), big tech (based in the San Francisco Bay Area) and entertainment (Los Angeles) are capitalist sectors associated with blue state geography that is culturally out of touch with “real America.”
But much like woke signaling for corporations can be read as cynical public relations, so too is this a branding campaign for the right. Since the 1990s, the American left has built its momentum on anti-corporate anger, from the Seattle WTO protests to the college anti-sweatshop movement to Occupy Wall Street. This energy protesting inequality and the influence of big business on policy making gave rise to the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The right is playing catch-up: “We’re anti-business, too!” The Republican Party can’t really afford to defend corporate rapaciousness, like it did under President Ronald Reagan. Instead, it is looking toward a rebranding where it can channel anti-business rage toward standing athwart social progress on race, gender and sexuality.
Does anyone really think that the Murdoch media empire wants to see a politics that unites the poor and underpaid against the ownership class? Take Hawley, who the right-wing media have made their poster child of populist revolt: He has a lifetime legislative scorecard of 5% from the AFL-CIO, supported the anti-union “right to work” campaign and opposes increasing the minimum wage. Meanwhile, the US Chamber of Commerce gives him a 56%, which isn’t that high for a Republican, but compare it to scores for real economic populists like Sanders (18%) or Sen. Ed Markey (26%). Hawley’s top donors include investment firms, manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry.
The overuse of this contradictory phrase “woke capital” is a clear indication that right-wing media are trying to steer anti-corporate animus away from the interests of workers and the poor. Don’t fall for it.
Featured image: Fox News‘ Sean Hannity (2/5/21) interviewing Sen. Josh Hawley.
The joke of “woke”
How naive is Ari? He wrote, ” “racial hiring preferences” means ending discrimination” Racial hiring preferences are the very definition of discrimination. If you want to sew division, tell one group they can’t do something because of the color of their skin (either direction).
Ari never refuted woke capital, he just tried to show that conservatives have other benefits. As if to say, they have this advantage over here, why look at this thing they are complaining about.
Nice slight of hand, but we all know your style Ari
When you are part of the group who is being “balanced out”, it may feel like discrimination, but that is exactly how white/CIS/Christian privilege works: saying we have been systematically eliminating these folks from the work force, so now we are going to systematically target them for hiring is about correcting historical injustice.
Claiming that leveling an unlevel playing field hurts you personally, may be true. It just isn’t automatically an injustice.
Nice obfuscation. Discrimination works both ways. Discrimination is wrong even if you think you’re doing good. If you want to sow division, implement more one sided policies. Your thinking is what Thomas Sowell (a black man) calls first order thinking. Implementation of affirmative action only causes people fear of being sued. What do they do next? They find an excuse not to hire a black person. That only harms the people you intend to help. What about the black how honestly earned their job or way into college? They will always wonder if they earned it due to their abilities or due to the color of their skin. How does that play on their own measure of self worth? How do others then treat that person? The cloud of doubt will forever be hanging over them. Well meaning, but harmful laws.
UNCF, NAACP, Black Caucus, BET, Black History Month. All wrong. There would be blood on the streets if somebody started UWCF, NAAWP, White Caucus, WET, or White History Month. If you are every curious if an idea is sound, swap out the parties and see how it sounds.
Yes…..play the “a black man said this” so therefore it represents the opinions of all black people or it answers all their concerns.
Affirmative action doesn’t “only cause people fear of being sued”. It also results in people who haven’t been hired, being hired, which in turn changes the dynamics of workplaces. In the company I work in, we have recently diversified, hiring a few more women, and our first black engineer, who is also a recent immigrant.
I can tell you that the tone & tenor of conversations has changed for the better. That diversity of experience matters. People in the department have shared differing life experience and it has made the whole department stronger.
I was part of the hiring process and I don’t regret a thing.
As for “swapping out the parties”, sure: would you like to swap out 300 years of systemic oppression of blacks with that for whites? Oh, right, then you aren’t talking about an equivalent swap now are you? Of course not: you are saying it is unfair in a system the rewards white males, to do anything that corrects for females & black/brown, because the white males will be “victims”.
Its just that your argument is based on ignoring all the data that shows that even if we did this 100% of the time, it wouldn’t change all the advantages of generations of wealth accumulation. That would take 5 generations to correct, and nobody is trying to do it. They are just trying to make workforces more diverse at the upper levels.
Let me guess, you also “don’t see race/color”, do you?
Here is an interesting article on this topic:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/jaysondbradley/2021/02/cancel-culture/?fbclid=IwAR0Si7M-BNCNEWJirLxeukyo5CAac43bzadzxgYbogJuBnfshSprAqd9e6k
Diversity makes us stronger crap? There is no proof of that. What makes us stronger is rewarding excellence. Merit based systems. If you hired a black engineer, you probably hired a software engineer (hardly an engineer) from Ethiopia. I’ve interviewed many of them. They don’t have the rigor that engineers from the US have. You just feel good about yourself. You did nothing to address what a person feels when they learn that they are a minority hire and not hired because of their merit. You said nothing to address the resentment when a person is turned down because they weren’t the right skin color. Sure you felt good about yourself. You believe you did good. You have no care at all as to the harm you did to innocents.
I cannot change history. I can change the present. We can examine if the NAACP should be around or if a NAAWP should be around. Your argument is disingenuous.
You cannot tell me if the tone or tenor of those that that kept quiet on the hire is. You cannot tell me the tone or the tenor of somebody who didn’t get hired is. You can only tell me the tone and tenor of those who think they are good people because they hired a black immigrant is. So?
You cannot tell me the tone and tenor of the black man is who doesn’t get hired because some other manager doesn’t want the headache of possibly being sued is. Your myopic world of feeling good because you hired a guy because he was black is disgusting. Tell him he was hired in part because he was black. Tell me his tone and tenor then. You won’t have the courage to tell him that. BTW, why didn’t you hire an old, gay, handicapped, female black engineer? Are you an ageist, homophobic, pro-handiabled bigot?
Duh, typical capitalist propaganda. Pretty stupid over-generalization. Many white people have not participated in “300 years of wealth accumulation.” But deflect the injustices of a system that denies education and therefore opportunity to all who are not wealthy regardless of skin color by reducing economic iniquity to a matter of color. The purpose is to prevent workers from uniting by sowing racial animosity and pretending all white people, regardless of poverty, enjoy the advantages of participating in “300 years of wealth accumulation.” So young adults who, regardless of skin color, can’t pay the unconscionable cost of college, are excluded from the professions, because the plutocracy blinds mainstream Americans with the smokescreen of racialism.
As said below^^, I am also against Woke because of the crude intolerance in the groups. This is no good fight against racism.
But racism is simply an age old fact. So swapping of those initiatives is no good example, I think? Simply because patriarchy, slavery, and suppression of so many, people of color, the poor, communists, anarchists, the ridiculous truth that women had no right to vote (!) and more – are all facts.
It is a difficult question “how to enable more say black people” to study better and get good jobs. Take the example of the New York Philharmonic. Since ages – I always found this a great idea – new musicians were hired “blind” by the orchestra. All play in a room. All listen. Nobody knows who is playing.
Now I think by 2018 groups complained this would lead to lesser transgender people or others getting into the world renowned orchestra.
Difficult, is it? In my view “we take everyone who is really good” is just the right thing. And in case – not many want to play classical music^^ – say black people felt under-represented – there should be teachers or groups training kids from early on. To break the “rich white people got better teachers and poor get none” problem. If I would be a conductor I would love to conduct an orchestra with only poor people of all diversities in it. And Mahler 2, this would be my heaven^^. But not because I wanted to shout “hey we are woke”. Simply because it would be so beautiful and music is – for all who love it – for all, it can speak to each and everyone who likes music.
But this all has not much to do with Woke. Woke is intolerant, and seems to destroy the Left in parts.
To tell how it also could be by staying with the ( really,I always hear sarcasm when I admit I love it) classical music. In 1969, leftist poet Robert Bly told poet Tomas Tranströmer about a huge leftist demonstration. Really huge. Hundreds of thousands. Suddenly a few members of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra went on stage, after many speeches and rock bands. (No, wasn’t Woodstock^^). They played a Beethoven quartet, surely some slow movement. They got a really incredible applause! Nobody had expected them. All were so happy, our leftist poet got the shivers even months later.
This is something where we have to go again to. Not being self-righteous and mainly about to “cancel”. A lot of “woke” people are not even Leftists, they are often just followers, but I end my long comment – I could tell quite more “shitstorm” stories done by the Woke. They are not without power, sadly enough. They kill parts of the Left, and we can fight better against racism and for all poor. We should, too^^.
Who ever thought that capitalists were liberals (in the classical sense)?
This is simply wrong. We know about right wing nightmares. But it is not true that “woke” had no power.
Both, the ugly right and the postmodern groups who shout like this: https://twitter.com/jesscluess/status/1333906316247457794?lang=en
– and there are hundreds of those – are totalitarian. They are 2 different camps. Nothing to compare, only that both are against all what a Left stands for – tolerance and a good life for all, to begin with.
In this twitter-Mob (by the way, Twitter is capitalism, and monopolist) you have, as one of thousands of examples, people who want to shout that Shakespeare, Goethe, all they dislike from the oldest times are “a danger” for our children. The group doesn’t want to add wonderful authoresses and authors from all continents to schools. How wonderful this is, and it goes on since decades, after so much suppression!
No, they wanna “cancel”. And if some authoress of children’s books is shouting into their faces (I found her shouts dumb, too) – this endless shitstorm was the answer. A litany of religiously sounding people doing witch hunts. Nothing less. Bamm bamm bamm. Horrible.
We all know who the reactionaries and conservatives are. But it doesn’t make this “woke” posh middle class intolerance better by comparing them to Fox news reactionaries.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/02/11/how-privilege-and-woke-politics-are-destroying-the-left/
Here is an example what leftists can get when they just ask questions about woke.
It is a totalitarian group with a totalitarian ideology instead of people fighting, like we on the Left do, for more diversity, against racism.
And this good fight, by the way, is going on since many decades. Martin Luther King jr wouldn’t have liked Woke and many intolerant groups at all. They are indeed nothing we should defend, because a Left with such a mindset was – no Left.
They have power, and in many campuses. In schools, and in the media. I don’t want to be a part of a left who hates and hates, like they do, instead of fighting for all.
Obama is right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHLd8de6nM
‘This Tweet is unavailable’ – damned Woke!
Yes, woke capital is real.
If Woke would be about the fight against racism, or against biased views – it would be fine. Yet it is about “canceling”, and it is deeply intolerant. It is not powerless, if you look at the universities or into many media.
At the same time it would be ridiculous if conservative states would make laws to suppress Woke. This would mean those conservatives were precisely as much against free and open debates for all people on earth as Woke is. They would in other words fight Woke with Woke’s weapons of intolerance, “canceling”, throwing out people who disagree. But this happens inside Woke, and so criticism against it will not stop.
Why you defend Woke escapes me. The Left does not need intolerance. It needs to fight intolerance…
Wow, this is really disappointing!
I used to be a fan of FAIR, a publication which once did great work, so it’s especially sad to see it become little more than another clone of MSDNC!