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The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.
This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).
There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:
If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.
I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.
I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.
The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.
Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.
After lurking here, I find myself relatively confused. You're the first person I've seen attempt to disambiguate between progressivism and wokeness. What is the difference between wokeness and progressivism, in your mind?
Progressivism is the ideology of the PMC centre-left in the Anglosphere. You can see a certain commonality of thought, as well as an unbroken lineage of individual progressives, back to the turn-of-the-century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. The key constant ideas as I see it are:
Society is improving over time both materially and morally because of technocratic elites making correct decisions. We should strive to be on the right side of history.
Planning is possible and desirable.
Educated people should rule. Decisions which can be reduced to technical questions should be left to appropriately-qualified technical experts, decisions which have an unavoidable political component should be made by people with a broad education in morally correct thinking.
Education is good. More education is better.
There is too much economic inequality in the US c. 1900 or 2000. Slightly less economic inequality would be better, but not so much equality that the upper-middle-class can no longer enjoy an upper-middle-class lifestyle. 1950s US or modern Scandinavian levels of inequality are fine.
Separately from the inequality issue, real material deprivation (starvation/homelessness etc.) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it, first in our own countries and then globally.
Political violence (including war between countries) is very, very bad and we should try to eliminate it. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement about the best way to do this)
Highbrow art is a public good and should be subsidised. Lowbrow art and the preferred intoxicants of the working class are corrupting and should be banned if possible. (Also lots of intra-progressive disagreement about what is possible)
Traditional religion is bad.
Bigotry is bad. (Lots of intra-progressive disagreement over which discrimination is bigoted and which is justified - pre-WW2 progressives being pro-eugenics is the most famous example)
These ideas are culturally universal and good people all over the world are already American progressives, even if they don' t know it yet.
Because Marxist socialism never managed to build a mass working-class movement in the Anglosphere, Marxism in the Anglosphere is a weird sub-sect of progressivism. (This isn't true in Continental Europe, where most countries had nominally Marxist parties with mass working-class memberships organised through the unions.) There is clearly a correlation between weird sectarian progressivism (including, but not limited to, being a Marxist in the Anglosphere) and weird lifestyle experimentation such that Orwell as able to say, correctly, that
and still be mostly correct a century later. (He also includes teetotallers and vegetarians in the list in other writings). But most progressives wear suits to their boring middle-management job and listen to NPR/Radio 4 while commuting from their suburban homes where they raise 1.6 children in a monogamous traditional family.
Wokism is the specific hobby-horse that organised progressivism has taken up in the 2010's.
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