There are plenty of situations where wokeness is the problem. But it’s not the cause of every problem.
It’s a fundamental conservative belief that ideas matter. Wokeness is an idea, so it matters. It shows up most often in mob mentality in powerful institutions. Contrary to claims from the Left, it can be defined, as Wilfred Reilly has done succinctly.
Like any political term, “wokeness” has many different uses, but competing definitions of ideas do not make them useless or pointless. As Jeff Blehar wrote, “Wokeism is a proper term reasonably describing several related epiphenomena regardless of whether we are all in 100 percent agreement on how to exactly to define it.” And as Noah Rothman pointed out, wokeness is pretty obvious in practice.
It’s because wokeness is a real idea that should be contended with that conservatives must avoid applying it in situations where it isn’t relevant. One such situation recently is the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.
Kenin Spivak persuasively makes the case today for Capital Matters that SVB’s failure wasn’t about wokeness. Yes, the company pursued DEI and ESG initiatives and filled its corporate publications with various forms of woke babble. But that wasn’t what caused the bank to collapse. Spivak writes:
SVB collapsed because instead of focusing on the unglamorous, unforgiving business of banking, its management and board wanted to be part of the “in crowd.”
Many other banks pursue DEI and ESG initiatives and fill their corporate publications with various forms of woke babble. They didn’t go under, though, because they didn’t make the boring, basic banking mistakes that SVB did. The desire to be part of the “in crowd” left SVB with an undiversified customer base that was prone to herd mentality. It failed to protect itself from interest-rate risk. It collapsed because it wasn’t very good at banking, not because it was woke.
Another example is the conversation around ESG. As Andrew Stuttaford has argued more times than possibly anyone else, the fundamental problem with ESG is not wokeness. It’s that ESG undermines the property rights of investment owners. It’s that ESG’s relative, stakeholder capitalism, undermines mechanisms of democratic accountability and moves the U.S. closer to corporatism. It’s that “sustainability” has spawned an industry of rent-seekers that suck value out of Americans’ hard work.
There are plenty of situations where wokeness is the problem. But it’s not the cause of every problem, and blaming it for things it isn’t responsible for doesn’t help the argument against it.