"Get Woke, Go Broke" is Cope
Outcompete or Die
This is part of my series on Effective Populism. Read the introduction here.
Let’s keep this short and sweet: “Get Woke, Go Broke” is utter cope.
We do not live in some ideal world where you get to pick amongst infinite suppliers of goods, where there will always be someone willing to serve you when other companies are willing to screw you over.
In a world of increasing accumulation and consolidation, market power insulates the big players from substitutes and competition. They can do whatever they want.

This is important, because the Big Players also tend to recruit from the same sources (“prestigious” universities + each other). It is, to a degree, “incestuous”. What this means, of course, is that the mindsets propagated by those “prestigious” institutions, permeate the personnel of these companies after enough recruitment cycles.
One might even go further and argue that the people at these large players, with their cultivated LinkedIn profiles and well-practiced elevator pitches, tend to be more prone to oversocialization than others. I have no data on this. This is just a feeling/hunch.
It isn’t “Get Woke, Go Broke”. It’s “Get Woke because the employees want to and where else are you going to buy things from loser, lol f*ck you”. Not as catchy, but far closer to the truth.
These naive analyses are ultimately copes, and these copes occur for three reasons:
A genuine belief in the delusion of the Free Market, where the market will magically reward the “right people” for doing the “right thing”
The (sub)conscious allure of persecution: where you get the moral superiority of feeling like you’re right and better than everyone else while also the freedom of abdicating any real responsibility to make a difference.
Knowing deep down that it’s a cope and realizing the impotence of your side, and using “gotcha’s” in order to avoid admitting this to yourself.
Understand something:
Ultimately, if you want to defeat Blue Empire, you are going to have to break down the corporate realm. The corporate bootlicking wing of the Conservative coalition (and the growing “we’ll fellate you if you have enough brown people on your board of directors” wing of the Progressive coalition) needs to be destroyed without mercy.
The conditions of the Free Market (lots of small suppliers and buyers competing, none with significant market power, etc.) are not natural. Markets tend to undermine themselves. You need very particular starting and maintenance conditions to maintain a properly functioning market. This means an acknowledgment of the State’s inevitable/inescapable role in shaping the economy, and using this role to attempt to bring our economy closer to the conditions of the Free Market.
I may end up in an asylum, but each day I come closer to believing that the Market, operating properly, would have a set of conditions that would look close to "communism". The Center for a Stateless Society seems to agree (although they whiff horribly on the State-less part). I will expand on my insanity at a later point.
Anyways, if you want to beat Woke Capital, you can’t assume the Market will punish them. That’s not how it works. The only thing we can do is build alternative institutions and outcompete the current ones. That will likely include coordinated boycotts, etc. of Woke businesses. But that can only be done through organization, not handwaving away your responsibility by claiming the mystical forces of the “free market” will save us. No escaping your responsibility in this fight.
I hope you enjoyed. Join my email list and consider a paid subscription if you would like to support my work. I look forward to discussions in the comments.
The right claims to be about hard work, bootstraps, initiative, etc. But when it comes to organizing and securing institutional power, the right is incredibly lazy. The left took over everything because they worked their asses off.
There's some truth to it. I think we are underestimating the extent to which government is driving the woke movement in corporate America, not the other way around. Yes, they were still going woke under Trump, but they were just (correctly, in retrospect) hedging their bets. But take the heavy thumb of government (and by government, I would include the courts) off of the scales, and Get Woke, Go Broke would be more of a reality than it is now.