The law that launched wokeism
An essay in American Affairs by the ever-interesting Richard Hanania on Vivek Ramaswamy’s new book Woke Inc. turns out to be much more than a book review. It’s actually a good overview of Hanania’s thesis (developed at more length here) that woke capitalism, and wokeism more generally, has its roots in the legal consequences and subsequent executive orders and related regulations that follow America’s Civil Rights Act in 1964.
“The main components of wokeness can be traced to legal developments in the 1960s and 1970s: among them the ideas that disparities imply discrimination; that offensive speech must be curtailed; and that people must be conscious of race throughout their daily lives. Surely wokeness has intensified in recent decades, but civil rights law can help explain why no institution wants to be the one to stand up to woke mobs. If every other company is making investments in DEI and inviting critical race theorists to speak, how does it look if yours is the one business that does not? This can be seen as a collective action problem, in that while businesses would have fewer costs if they did not have extensive HR and diversity bureaucracies, every individual company has an incentive to do at least as much as everyone else to prove to governments and the courts (as well as NGO activists, elite university graduates, the media, and so forth) that they are sufficiently fighting “discrimination.” One way to understand the “Great Awokening” of the last decade is that culture, aided by social media, is finally catching up to fundamental assumptions of the law.“
There’s much more that could be said on this topic, especially about how these legal changes interacted with America’s universities, given Hanania’s focus is the workplace. But as Hanania explores in this essay, the astonishing thing is how blind most people are to the legal background of the woke revolution. Railing about wokeism without understanding the core issues is a recipe for futility. Not that Hanania is exactly an optimist.
“A worldview that has captured every institution, from the federal government and health organizations to fashion magazines, is not going to be extracted from American society. […] This might be a depressing message, but when one side controls virtually everything, survival is the best any remaining opponents can realistically hope for in the short term.