Vivek Ramaswamy
Daniel Kennelly
August 26, 2021 @ City Journal
Vivek Ramaswamy is a biotech entrepreneur, founder, and executive chairman of Roviant Sciences, and author of Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He recently spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly about the origins of the corporate embrace of “social justice” and why he believes there’s no place for politics in business.
How do you define “wokeism” in the book?
Wokeism is a belief system which holds that the social universe is
governed by invisible power structures based on genetically inherited
characteristics. This belief system makes a moral claim on those
“empowered” to wake up to these invisible power structures and to
correct injustices arising from them.
Critics often allege that wokeism is a form of Marxism. They have a
point, but they’re off the mark. Like wokeism, Marxism was also based on
the idea of invisible power structures governing social relationships,
but Marxism posits that these power structures are based on economic
relationships. By contrast, wokeism replaces economic power structures
with genetically inherited ones.
So that’s the long version. In short, being “woke” means obsessing
over race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change, too.
That’s probably the best definition I can give.
When (and why) did corporations begin to adopt this quasi-religion?
The fountainhead was the 2008 financial crisis. After that,
corporations were viewed as the “bad guys,” and the old Left wanted to
redistribute money from corporate fat cats to poor people. Agree or not,
that’s what the old Left had to say.
But a newly ascendant wing of the Left—the new woke Left—had a
different theory. To them, the real problem wasn’t economic injustice.
It wasn’t poverty. Rather, it was racial injustice—and misogyny,
bigotry, and so on.
That presented the opportunity of a generation for Wall Street and
big business. If you’re Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street is a tough pill
to swallow. But the new woke demands were easy: applaud “diversity and
inclusion,” put some token minorities on your boards, and muse about the
racially disparate impact of climate change after flying on a private
jet to Davos.
They jumped at the opportunity. But they didn’t do it for free: their
implicit demand was that the new Left look the other way when it came
to leaving their power intact. And it worked for both sides. So in a
nutshell, after 2008, a bunch of big banks got in bed with a bunch of
woke millennials. Together, they birthed woke capitalism. And they put
Occupy Wall Street up for adoption.
Soon, Silicon Valley did the same thing—censoring or “moderating”
content that the woke Left didn’t want to see on the Internet. But in
return, they expected the woke Left to demur when it came to leaving
their monopoly power intact. The rest of corporate America then followed
suit.
What is “stakeholder capitalism,” and what role does it play in the corporate embrace of woke politics?
“Stakeholder capitalism” is the idea that corporations should not
only serve their shareholders but also advance other social causes. It
used to be a challenge to the system. Today, it is the system. Milton
Friedman might have worried that the expansion of politics to infect
business would make businesses less efficient. I share that concern, but
my principal concern is the inverse: that the expansion of business
into politics represents a threat to the integrity of American democracy
itself. Why? Because it demands that a small group of business elites
use their economic power to settle political and moral questions that
ought to be settled through the open exchange of ideas in our democracy.
That might be how Old World Europe worked, but America represents the
rejection of that elitist worldview.
“Stakeholder capitalism” is the intellectual progenitor of corporate
wokeism. It was the response to Occupy Wall Street and the old Left:
instead of taking the risk that the old Left would defang capitalism
through the political process, stakeholder capitalism and corporate
wokeism offered to address the concerns of the new Left not as an
alternative to capitalism, but through capitalism itself.
The consequences are staggering, and I think we are only beginning to
understand some of them. For example, once a corporation becomes a
vector for advancing a social agenda, progressives don’t have a monopoly
on pulling the strings. Sovereign nations—China, above all—have learned
that they, too, can wield power as a nebulous “stakeholder” of a
business under the new “stakeholder-centric” model. That’s one of the
untold stories that I lay out in the book, and the details are downright
frightening.
You write that the corporate dedication to social-justice
causes is, for some, cynical and opportunistic—a modern form of
“capitalist excess.” Yet you also regard it as one of today’s “defining
challenges.” How does it threaten American democracy?
The idea that a small group of elites should settle normative
questions behind closed doors is a cultural rejection of democracy.
Capitalism works according to a one-dollar, one-vote system. That
determines which products get voted to the top of Amazon’s bestseller
lists, or which directors are selected to serve on the board of a
corporation—and that’s okay. But democracy is supposed to work on a
one-person, one-vote system, where each person’s voice and vote is
unadjusted by the number of dollars that he or she controls in the
marketplace. Stakeholder capitalism violates that principle by
conflating market power with power properly exercised in the marketplace
of ideas.
And democracy loses in another way. We live in a divided polity right
now, and we depend on an apolitical private sector to bridge those
divisions—whether we’re Democrat or Republican, black or white. Major
League Baseball used to provide one of those apolitical sanctuaries. The
NFL used to provide one of those sanctuaries. The workplace used to
provide one of those sanctuaries. But as the private sector becomes
politicized, we lose the solidarity that is itself a precondition for a
thriving democracy.
How can we roll back the tide of corporate wokeism?
There’s no silver bullet. The solution requires a combination of
legal solutions, policy solutions, and—most important of all—cultural
solutions. In my book, I discuss solutions in all three categories. I
view legal and policy solutions as symptomatic therapies, but what we
really need in our country is a cultural cure—a revival of a shared
American identity that runs so deep that it dilutes wokeism to
irrelevance. What does it mean to be an American in the year 2021? I
can’t remember a time when we more badly needed an answer to that
question. The absence of an answer is the black hole at the center of
our nation’s soul, and when you have a void that runs that deep, that’s
when bad things start to fill it.
Today, corporations prey on our hunger for purpose and our moral
insecurities to make an extra buck, much as a Virginia Slims
manufacturer may have preyed on the adolescent insecurities of teenage
girls in the 1990s. Banning corporate behaviors isn’t the answer. The
real solution is to fill our moral hunger with more substantial fare.
That’s really what the book is about.
Photo: akinbostanci/iStock
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I'm now a retired former owner of a pest control company, and I was heavily involved in my industry's affairs serving actively on four industry trade association boards in my state.
One of the things I tell owners is if they don't involve themselves in their industry's trade association, they don't have a clue what's going on, and one of the things one learns is there's a serious difference in the views of small business owners and large corporations.
Large corporate entities like regulations and taxes because it impacts small business owners far more than large corporations, helping to eliminate competition, and that goes back in America to 1791 with the passage of the Whiskey Act.
The tendency to think large corporations are fundamentally conservative in their values and business philosophy is a serious error in judgement. As allies I found the chemical manufacturers to be ...at best... leaky vessels, appeasers who threw us under the bus regularly to appease activists in and out of government, especially the activists who infest the EPA bureaucracy. These large corporations even corrupt the trade associations that were created to protect their industry, many times turning them into catspaws for big government intrusion and abuse. And that's true for all industries, especially the legal profession in this nation with the bar associations being not much more than kangaroo courts trying to destroy anyone who's not on board with leftist insanity, and the Arizona Bar has some issues that should concern everyone.
If we want a fix, we must heavily purge the federal bureaucracy, and the recent SCOTUS Chevron decision helps to do that, including eliminating entire departments such as the Department of Education, another Jimmy Carter disaster, which is what Trump wants to do because it has wasted billions of dollars failing to properly educate American children, to the tune of over 260 billion dollar in 2021 alone. The court may wish to undertake eliminating another unconstitutional decision called the Feres Doctrine, it's long overdue.
As a side bar, recently Trump and Musk had a sit down discussion that just about broke the internet, one the left on both sides of the pond demanded not be shown by the way, because they want to "save democracy". Imagine that.
Musk is all into this global warming idiocy, and Trump made it clear he wasn't. When Trump abandoned the Paris Treaty on climate change the White House called Jay and said the President decided to take his advice on that. Here's my Jay Lehr file. He was an amazing man.
If failure to perform is the criteria for eliminating Departments, bureaus, agencies, etc., then it's my view we can dump over 80% of the federal government, and the only consequence is we'll save an enormous amount of money. No one could possibly convince me the nation needs 438 agencies and sub-agencies in the federal government. We need to "massively" cut their funding in the budget.
One of the readers named Eric commented saying, and I think he said it well, from my perspective, the corporations seem to be in the same boat that every western nations finds itself in. Western governments are NO LONGER acting in the best interests of their nations or its inhabitants and corporations seem to be doing the same. Their blanket support for the left’s political parties/policies/social agendas etc isn’t in the best interests of the corporations or its shareholders. In fact, in most cases, it’s directly the opposite.