The Arranged Marriage of Wokeness and Capitalism: A Selection from Vivek Ramaswamy’s Woke, Inc. (2021)

“What makes an arranged marriage work? My mom and dad’s marriage worked because people who knew and cared about them got them together after thinking hard about whether they’d be compatible. Each of their parents ran through an exhaustive checklist. The whole point of it all was to make sure that each of them would end up as happy as possible. And when the time came, the decision about whether to get married or not came down to whether they liked each other.

That’s not how wokeness and capitalism came to be intertwined. The way I see it, corporations were the ones who arranged that marriage, and they arranged it mostly to take the heat off themselves after the financial crisis. Get people talking about identity politics and they’ll stop talking about socialism and—perish the thought—communism. Robin DiAngelo, high-fee speaker and author of White Fragility, and other elite diversity consultants like her are no threat to big banks. But Karl Marx is. You can pay a diversity consultant good money to do the rounds giving bankers seminars on how whiteness is bad. It’s much harder to buy off a principled Marxist, and bankers would not like the seminars they would give.

So corporations embraced wokeness to give themselves cover from the financial crisis and to direct anger toward white men instead of capitalism. Yes, big business is a problem, they’d say, but what do you expect when it’s run by white men? We all know the patriarchy is the real problem, along with racism. Oh, now you want to say systemic racism is the problem? Yes, yes, very good. Systemic racism and systemic patriarchy. We condemn them. Look, we will build a statue for you. Just don’t say that systemic financial risk is a problem.

So corporations never truly loved wokeness, even as they embraced it and married it to capitalism. They always intended to use it. But wokeness never truly loved capitalism, either. There was nothing fundamentally woke about capitalism, no natural compatibility. When corporations started proclaiming that wokeness and capitalism were inseparable and offering money and status to anyone who could help spread that message, each side accepted the proposal not because there was any truth to it but because it was profitable.

I don’t just mean that the marriage of wokeness and capitalism was profitable to the woke in monetary terms, though it was. I’d love to see Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi disclose the speaking fees they’ve earned from preaching about white privilege and anti-racism to corporations. (It’s definitely in the millions of dollars, the only question is how many.) But the main thing wokeness gets out of this marriage of convenience is that it gets to use every major company as a platform to blast its message to the universe. Money was not the only dowry that corporations offered. What they really promised wokeness was a megaphone to turbocharge its message and make it mainstream. By turning wokeness into the default ideology of business, they offered to make it the default everywhere. In exchange, corporations got to wear the protective cloak of wokeness’s moral superiority. It was a cynical arrangement. . . .

The wedding of wokeness to capitalism offers a tempting, individually rational choice that harms the nation as a whole by handing corporations social and political power. They don’t truly have wokeness’s best interests at heart, and the two systems aren’t truly compatible. Wokeness and capitalism simply tolerate each other because each feels it can use the other. They will turn a blind eye to each other’s faults as long as they themselves can still benefit. But a marriage in which each side secretly has contempt for the other cannot end well.”—Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (2021)