The Rise of Woke Capital - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Ross Douthat, The New York Times, Feb. 28, 2018

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Excerpt:

[T]he hollowing out of all the old communities in American life has left the corporation, however mistrusted and even vilified upon occasion, 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. ...

[I]n a rich society people may 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.

Or some people may prefer it, at least — the professional classes, blessed with material comfort, and those groups designated as being on the official winning side of history. For others,  ... it  confirms the blue-collar suspicion that liberalism is no longer organized around working-class economic interests, and it encourages cultural conservatives in their feeling of general besiegement, their sense that all the major institutions of American life, corporate as well as intellectual and cultural, are arrayed against their mores and values and traditions.

Between them these trends and sentiments will help sustain the Republican Party even as it lurches deeper into demagogy and paranoia — by making a vote for the G.O.P. the only way to protest a corporate-backed liberal politics that seems indifferent to the working man and an ascendant cultural liberalism that has boardrooms as well as Hollywood and academia in its corner.

But of course so long as this same Republican Party remains itself pro-corporate in its economic ideology — as the Trumpified G.O.P., despite his populist forays, has determinedly remained — the corporate interests themselves stand to lose little from these polarizing trends.  [JB emphasis] Their wokeness buys them cover when liberalism is in power, and any backlash only helps prop up a G.O.P. that has their back when it comes time to write our tax laws.

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