‘ Woke’ corporations still all about bottom line

Here are two stories about corporate America’s current role in our politics and common life. In one, the country’s biggest companies are growing a conscience, prodded along by shifts in public opinion and their own idealistic young employees, and becoming a vanguard force for social change — with the recent disassociations from the NRA by major airlines and rental-car companies just the latest example.

In the other story, corporate America just performed another bait-and-switch at the common good’s expense — making a show of paying bonuses and raising wages after the passage of the corporate-friendly Republican tax bill, but actually reserving most of the tax savings for big stock buybacks, enriching shareholders rather than employees.

These are not two stories, though; they’re different aspects of the same one. Corporate activism on social issues isn’t in tension with corporate self-interest on tax policy and stinginess in paychecks. Rather, the activism increasingly exists to protect the self-interest and the stinginess — to justify the ways of CEOs to cultural power brokers, so that those same power brokers will leave them alone in realms that matter more to the corporate bottom line.

In every era, businessmen ask themselves: What am I required to do to make money unmolested by the government? Between the Depression and the 1950s, threatened by communism and facing powerful unions and a New Deal-era majority willing and able to regulate and redistribute, corporate America reconciled itself to a family wage for its malebreadwinner workers and a certain modesty in how its upper echelons were paid.

Over time, though, free trade and globalization made that postwar system less economically viable; the decline of labor and the collapse of the New Deal coalition made it less politically necessary; and the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s made its implicit moral values (heteronormativity for workers, a kind of penny-pinching puritanism for bosses) seem less congenial and more oppressive. And so we entered a period of corporate hegemony in both political parties, with fewer political compromises required for doing business.

But there are other ways to compromise besides on wages, and at an accelerating pace our corporate class is trying to negotiate a different kind of peace — one in which a certain kind of virtue-signaling on progressive social causes, a certain degree of performative wokeness, is offered to the activist left pre-emptively, in the hopes that it blunts efforts to tax or regulate our new monopolies too heavily.

Much of this signaling is sincerely motivated. I’m sure that lots of people in the corporate ranks at Delta or Alamo sincerely abhor the NRA.

But a certain amount of cynicism is also in order. It’s worth noting, for instance, how Tim Cook’s willingness to play the social-justice warrior when the target is a few random Indiana restaurants that might not want to host hypothetical same-sex weddings does not extend to reconsidering Apple’s relationship with the many countries around the world where human rights are rather more in jeopardy than they are in the American Midwest.

The interesting question is whether this works. It won’t be fully tested until the next time the Democrats hold real power, when we’ll get to find out whether more than a token portion of the Trump corporate tax cuts will get rolled back — or whether corporate wokeness will suffice as a concession to the new spirit of liberalism, enabling the easy relationship between corporate America and the Democratic Party to endure.

If it does it will offer partial confirmation of an argument that James Poulos proposed in The Hedgehog Review last year: that the hollowing out of all the old communities in American life has left the corporation as one of the last plausible vessels for communitarian yearnings, offering in branding and employment and consumption “a fixity that we struggle to find within ourselves or in the consolations of love, faith or honor.”

“As much as we fear corporations gone wild,” Poulos concludes, “we love corporations that love us.” And in a rich society people might prefer that their brands prove this love by identifying with favored social causes rather than through the old-fashioned expedient of paying their workers a little bit more money.

The win-win scenario for woke capitalism can’t last forever. But it might be quite the racket while it lasts.