Member-only story
Is “Woke Capitalism” For Real?
Republicans are attacking big companies for pushing a progressive social agenda. Is this anything more than political game-playing?
After a chorus of Fortune 500 companies criticized Georgia’s new law imposing new voting-rights restrictions, and Major League Baseball pulled this year’s All-Star Game out of Atlanta, a chorus of Republicans responded by inveighing against what’s often called “woke capitalism” — big companies flexing their muscles in defense of progressive social causes. Donald Trump called on his followers to boycott a laundry list of companies that had come out against the Georgia law: “Major League Baseball, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS and Merck.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned corporations to stop behaving like a “woke parallel government” pushing “radical social agendas.” And Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a would-be populist, told a Fox News audience that “woke corporations” were trying to “tell you what to think.”
Given the stereotypical image of big corporations as bastions of stick-in-the-mud conservatism, it’s easy to dismiss the GOP’s anxiety over woke capitalism as an illusion or mere political game-playing. But in fact what Republicans are unhappy with is something real: a substantive change…
