The Great Bundling

M uch of the angst on the right these days is driven by the explosive growth of woke progressive politics within major institutions. We see it on Wall Street, in commercial businesses, universities, Hollywood, the media, public schools, sports leagues, publishing houses, and even the military. Some of those institutions were once broadly liberal; others were mostly apolitical or vaguely center-right. Abruptly, after less than a decade, they are suddenly in the visible grip of an illiberal political cult with its own distinctive vocabulary and its corrosive fixation on race and other forms of group identity.

To understand the challenge, it is useful to think in terms of bundling. In and of itself, bundling of multiple products in a single package is a common enough practice. Most consumers are familiar with it, and businesses such as cable-and-Internet companies and home-and-car insurers often advertise it as a selling point. In a competitive market, bundling is fine; with enough competition, bundling itself is competitive, and companies will bundle only those products that people want to buy as a package.

In antitrust law, however, bundling is what happens when a company with monopoly power over one product takes advantage of the demand for that product to get its customers to also buy a second product — the bundled product — by selling the two together. That creates two types of harm. For consumers, bundling can mean that they are forced to buy something they don’t want in order to get a thing they can buy only from one seller. For competitors, bundling allows the monopolist to dominate the market for the bundled product. The Justice Department’s theory in its antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft two decades ago, for example, was that Microsoft was using the market power of the Windows operating system to cause Internet Explorer to dominate the competitive market for web browsers. In that case, the market took care of it over time.

Bundling is precisely what is happening with woke politics, and why it is so insidious: It is regularly bundled with things that have particular value and are not easily replaced, in order to force it upon unwilling buyers. If you offered people the choice to buy a visit to Disney World with or without the company’s woke politics, most people would choose “without.” The same would be true if you offered them a Harvard education, a pair of Nike sneakers, a job at J. P. Morgan, a can of Coca-Cola, a coffee at Starbucks, or a ticket to the NBA playoffs.

In almost none of these cases did wokeness build the valuable product. Walt Disney built an empire of movies and theme parks that offered Americans and the world a broadly shared ideal of the childhood imagination. Yale Law School was an elite credential long before it had mobs shouting down speakers. Nike built its brand back when Michael Jordan was quipping that “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Today’s Wall Street banks were built by the sorts of people who rooted for Gordon Gekko and Sherman McCoy and read The Art of War and Liar’s Poker as how-to books. The valuable institutions in American life were built by people of all political stripes, but very few of the things of genuine value that they created were developed as tools for intolerant, race-and-sex-obsessed leftists to achieve escalation dominance in the culture wars.

But the woke activists have attached themselves to whatever properties are least easily replaced by a competing substitute, precisely with the aim of short-circuiting the capacity for consumers, workers, and investors to choose an alternative. Don’t like Harvard? Build your own. It will only take 400 years to build up comparable prestige and endowment. Don’t want to watch Star Wars on Disney+? Create your own copyrighted Star Wars universe that you’ve already been watching for four decades. Mad at Major League Baseball? Start your own league (complete with exemption from the federal antitrust laws) that happens to already have the same 151 years of history in which you’ve invested.

There is a reason why you don’t see the same florid displays of wokeness from your typical Fungible Widget Company whose product competes with a perfect substitute with no cultural or historical component. Airlines and car and cigarette companies have been less easily captured for this reason. It is precisely those institutions that have built and conserved some form of unique social or cultural capital, or that have some kind of government-entrenched immunity from competition (whether it be copyright protection, subsidies, or a public-service monopoly) that are most targeted for takeovers and hardest to disentangle.

The progressive freakout over Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter has been so melodramatic because a lot of people assumed that Twitter had become one of those large-installed-base natural monopolies whose network effects would be prohibitive for a competitor to replicate. Nobody considered that an investor who wanted to change Twitter might just have the money to buy the whole company.

Free markets are about willing buyers exchanging with willing sellers. Free speech is about willing speakers reaching willing listeners. A lot of what we see now as woke capital is actually the result of government pressure, and a lot of woke education is government officials in monopoly public schools indoctrinating a captive audience of children. The entire apparatus of woke infiltration of major institutions depends on avoiding the competitive dynamics — either in political competition or free markets — by which people get to choose what they want, and what they don’t. In searching for solutions, we should be thinking about how to address the problem of bundling so that woke ideology has to fend for itself in the marketplace of ideas and products without holding hostages.