Woke corporations are consistent: They sing the hymns of the regime religion.
Timothy P. Carney
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Especially in June, when every major corporation flies gay pride and transgender pride flags and sells books celebrating these lifestyles, conservatives in the media point out the awkward inconsistency of these companies.
Here’s Jim Geraghty, last week. Here’s my colleague Chris Tremoglie on Tuesday, making a similar point about the Dodgers’ celebration of an anti-Catholic drag-queen group.
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Pointing out the hypocrisy of woke corporations is good because it shows that the executives don’t actually believe their rainbow causes are as righteous or as crucial as they like to claim.
But charges of hypocrisy typically leave me a bit cold for a few reasons. Sometimes, as Jeremy Lott argued about 20 years ago, hypocrisy is simply being half right, which is better than being all wrong.
It’s true that corporations that attack states for trying to keep gay porn out of classrooms have no trouble doing business with Saudi Arabia, which criminalizes homosexuality. But do we want those corporations to be consistent and rally for gay middle-school porn in Saudi Arabia? No. Nor do we want to praise their behavior in Saudi Arabia.
There is a better critique of these companies than pointing out their inconsistency: pointing out their consistency.
When Target peddles trans-normative clothing and pushes the Rainbow Religion in its United States aisles, it is preaching the official religion of America’s ruling class. Target would never do that in Pakistan or China, because those countries have a different official religion. Target is consistent, you see: It follows the elite cultural tide.
(My brother John laid out a version of this argument on Fox Business the other day.)
People say politics is downstream from culture, and that may or may not be true. It is certainly true that corporate America is downstream from culture.
So here’s why conservatives should be upset: When Target and other corporations take stock of American culture they see that wokism and the Rainbow Religion are to the U.S. what Sunni Islam is to Saudi Arabia.
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In other words, while religious people and cultural conservatives still exist in massive numbers, we are seen to have no cultural power. Corporations have no more interest in being sensitive to Christians in the U.S. than in being sensitive to Uighurs in China or gay people in Pakistan.
That ought to be upsetting to conservatives. We have thoroughly been driven from the commanding heights of American culture.