Will Conservatives Actually Do Anything about Woke Corporations? – by Zaid Jilani – I N Q U I R E
One conservative I talked to staked out a middle ground, arguing that woke capital is a real problem but that legislation may not be the best approach to it.
Vivek Rawaswamy, the founder of Roivant Sciences and the author of Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America s Social Justice Scam, which charts the corporate embrace of woke activism, joined Flaig in praising Rubio s intentions. I applaud somebody in Washington, D.C&.for spawning the conversation about a problem we need to have, he said.
Rawaswamy isn t opposed to all government intervention. He s a proponent of Section 230 reform to combat Big Tech censorship and thinks political viewpoints should be added to non-discrimination law. But he remains skeptical that the issue of corporate wokeness has a legislative solution.
It misses the fact&that the problem of woke capitalism, assuming you view it as a problem, isn t just limited to a woke executive that betrays the interest of shareholders, he told me, noting that it s often shareholders themselves who demand that companies take a political position.
Ultimately, in Rawaswamy s view, there are limitations of using symptomatic therapy to treat a more fundamental cultural cancer. The ultimate answer is going to have to be a cultural cure to a problem that is fundamentally cultural in nature.
There’s a solution to the problem of Woke Capital; I just don’t know what it is. The problem with national legislation on this problem — itself a bad idea — allowing shareholders to sue directors for political stances they take, is that courts would have to say what counts as political and presumably make judgments about when those stances had gone wrong, at least as I understand this proposal. That’s a really terrible idea. Nice thought though.