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Last week, my company released its 3rd annual DEI report. It consists of a laundry list of DEI achievements, some questionable statistics, and inspiring messages from very well-paid executives.
Performance reviews are another feature of this time of year. Conventional wisdom holds that getting a good review depends on meeting your pseudo-self-defined goals for the year—and, by implication, on setting achievable ones. With that in mind, our executives set measurable, sensible goals with every expectation of meeting them.
That was a joke. The goals were 1/2 women and 1/3 people of color. We were reasonably close on the latter, not that this required any particular change. But our goal for gender parity was hilariously out of line with the ~1/4 we currently have. I could propose various reasons why an engineering- and manufacturing-heavy corporation that makes devices for killing people might not employ so many women, but that’s not really the point. No, this is not a serious goal. It’s advertising.
My company is not particularly woke. It repeats some of the phrases and buys into the aesthetic, but it’s clearly not ideologically captured. If there are true believers, they sure aren’t in charge. DEI is valued insofar as it keeps us from alienating potential talent and potential customers—and no more. At the end of the day it’s not going to shoot itself in the foot in service of equality or equity.
I believe this is true of the vast majority of corporations in the US! Identity politics are a small part of the business signaling that goes on every day. It’s directly proportional to how much the product is a cultural symbol rather than a material good. Apple products or Amazon media or Super Bowl ads are more likely to publicly proclaim their diversity because they’re selling an idea. It does not require true believers, though they help with credibility. The idea itself is what benefits from woke signaling.
This has implications for the trajectory of DEI. Debating whether woke ads are going to increase or alienate support is missing the point. That sort of identity politics is downstream of the culture war, and should not be used to make predictions about “peak woke.” It represents corporate ability to score points off the prevailing winds, not ideologues’ level of infiltration into corporations.
Defense contractors are wildly biased towards veterans. Our hiring is more likely to involve some sort of aggressive patriotism; their scruples are more likely to support selling drones and bombs. Sometimes this even has an advantage of rapport with customers. But this is an end, not a means. It would be a mistake to predict growing evangelism for veterans due to our obvious ideological capture. Likewise, reading DEI reports as a foothold in the culture wars is missing the point. They are a specific form of advertising, and follow the popularity of idpol rather than driving it.
Maybe I misread your intent, but I'd think that the ideological capture of defense contractors and the like by the American military demographics is a basis for expecting future dynamic changes?
The people who entered the US military immediately after 9/11 or during the Iraq Wars are currently reaching their 20-year retirement windows, which is to say the first generations of retired senior-NCOs and field-grade (or even flag) officers whose experience was defined entirely by the Iraq War are in the last few years actually hitting the post-military job markets. From my understanding of the American military-to-civilian pipeline, career retirees tend to immediately go into networked positions of management or influence, brought in by their established networks of veterans and/or for their established credentials in organization management. This is now a significant, experienced, and culturally significant demographic pipeline of people who have more or less been preoccupied with global / outside the American culture bubble contexts for the last two decades. They will be entering upper-levels of governments, business, and even running for office on veteran credentials, against equivalent careerists who operated in entirely different cultural cultivation dynamics.
Well, I saw 'now', but this is just the career officers retiring. They follow the people who left early, and became contractors or consultants or other things. These are people who are already scattered across middle-management. Including, yes, contractors. The senior-level-to-senior-level pipelines would only magnify the influence of those already in the system, I'd think.
I'm not sure where I'm going or what I'd specifically expect, but I'd say that we're still far too early to rule out any sort of demographic/composition impact of the western veteran communities on their corresponding government/military-industrial complexes. In some ways it never stopped, but in other ways we're just starting a process where the people who were at the very bottom of the military totem poles 20 years ago are now just starting to be present and have a cultural impact in... wherever you think Veterans end up most.
Which may not be numerical or concentrated or influential enough to matter. But I'd totally not be surprised if pro-Veteran evangelism only increases as more people who stuck it out from the start of the War on Terror start the senior leader transitions to private sector.
Your theory strikes me as plausible.
It doesn’t reflect the current disposition, which suggests a pretty diluted effect. If it didn’t happen in the last 15 years as the post-Gulf War cadre wrapped up, would it now? Not sure how many career officers there really are. But they could be much more concentrated outside of our engineering-heavy division.
My intent was to make analogies to woke capital. Veteran dominance in the defense sector emerges from real or perceived synergy, plus a healthy dose of network effects. It’s not an attempt to coopt power structures for the wider culture war. We hire a lot of veterans and run some charity, but we’re not taking on a role of convincing everyone else to do the same.
Likewise, I think DEI initiatives in most corporations are driven by the usual signaling and profit motives, rather than by ideological weaponization. The presence of DEI in a company is a weak proxy for that company actually waging the culture war, much as the favoring of veterans only weakly predicts what a company will do outside of its business.
Other commenters have given me a lot of reasons why a weak level of capture/normalization of DEI should be considered threatening. The fact that decades of military-industrial feedback have failed to hollow out the industry into an evangelist shell—that suggests woke capital has a ceiling.
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