The Dangerous Rise Of The Woke Corporation
15th July 2019
Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.
In the 20th century most business leaders were predictably conservative. Big money aligned with their class allies in the “party of property,” and some of those elements still back Donald Trump and conservative causes. Left-wing politics were left to their unions, academics and parts of the media.
But over the last twenty years most of the oligarchy — whose firms are overwhelmingly non-union — have embraced the progressive social and environmental agenda. The clear majority of wealthy donors support the Democratic Party while vast majority of the ultra-rich foundations — funded by the offspring of the Rockefellers and the Fords based on fossil fuels — now all tilt well to the left.
So deep-seated is gentry progressivism that a company like Nike quickly sides with a mediocre NFL quarterback who has worn socks showing police as pigs over an iconic image from the country’s founding. This could be one way that company, which relies on low-wage, largely un-unionized foreign labor in what the Baltimore Sun called “abysmal working conditions,” can sell itself as politically correct.