4/9/21
The Republican Party may not have much of an agenda to sell to the public right now, but it does have an enemy with which to rally its troops: “woke capital,” or those corporations that have adopted progressive rhetoric on social issues and used their platforms to support voting rights or back movements like Black Lives Matter. “Parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, told reporters on Monday. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.” Some Republican critics of “woke capital” seem to understand the need to put some distance between their party and corporate America. Rubio, for example, has backed the effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., as a punishment of sorts for the company’s occasionally progressive messaging. “It is no fault of Amazon’s workers if they feel the only option available to protect themselves against bad faith is to form a union,” he wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “Today it might be workplace conditions, but tomorrow it might be a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.”
If Republicans are truly serious about standing up to “woke capital” — then there are a few other, larger, things they can do. For example, Republicans and conservatives could support the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. If signed into law, the act would override “right-to-work” laws and impose tough penalties on employers who interfered in employees’ attempts to unionize. Similarly, Republicans and conservatives could work to end “at-will” employment, in which workers can be fired for any reason. A higher federal minimum wage and a more robust social safety net would also work to strengthen employees vis a vis their employers. The less an individual worker needs to rely on market income to survive, the more he or she can pick and choose between jobs. We know, of course, that Republicans aren’t interested in any of this. McConnell might denounce actual corporate speech, but he is a major recipient of corporate dollars and a staunch defender of corporate spending in elections. “Woke” capital also does not actually exist. A Black Lives Matter advertisement does not make up for the McDonald’s exploitative relationship to labor and the environment. Capital is capital, and, culture war agitation notwithstanding, the Republican Party is more than willing to back its interests when it matters most.
