The rise and -- hopefully -- fall of wokeism

October 5, 2022. Micahel Lind describes the problem in complete detail. The opening paragraphs:

“On or around December 1910, human character changed,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed. Within a few years, what had been obscure concepts in politicized university departments like gender studies and ethnic studies became orthodoxy not only in the academy, media, and the nonprofit sector, but also in the boardrooms of national and global corporations, banks, and in professional associations like the American Bar and Medical associations.

In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about. Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. By the time it rescinded the law, HB 2, in 2017, the state of North Carolina had lost billions of dollars thanks to simultaneous boycotts by the National Basketball Association, the National College Athletic Association, Deutsche Bank, PayPal, and other corporations and financial institutions.

Below, read the author's recommendations on how to fix it.

The triumph of the 21st-century entryists is as fragile as it is sudden and comprehensive. The greatest threat to wokeness is the lack of direct government regulation of the private sector entities whose chokepoints they have seized. So how can democratic government thwart the schemes of the sectarians who have burrowed into the private and nonprofit sectors?

One response to entryism that is doomed to failure is debate. Self-described “classical liberals” who call on social media platforms, professional accrediting agencies, nonprofits, and universities to embrace “viewpoint diversity” are wasting their time. It is no more possible to persuade the commissars in corporate HR departments, professional accreditation agencies, social media platforms, or university diversity offices to allow nonwoke views than it would have been to persuade Trotskyist conspirators who had infiltrated and captured a labor union during the Cold War to be open to debates among Trotskyists, Stalinists, social democrats, and libertarians. Having entrenched themselves in massive, powerful bureaucracies, these zealots will not willingly relax their grip on bureaucratic chokepoints. Why should they?

Equally doomed to failure is the idea of creating all-new institutions to replace the major, centralized commercial and nonprofit institutions that have been hijacked by secretive activists. Good luck with that. Try creating a nonwoke alternative to Twitter, or YouTube, or the American Bar Association, or Harvard University. Success is unlikely and would take decades or generations—during which time the entryists will have burrowed even more deeply into the institutions they have captured.

Alas, only one solution to the threat of woke hegemony can possibly work: a massive and permanent expansion of the regulatory powers of American government. Because of the longstanding ideological habits and precommitments of those who broadly agree with the above diagnosis of the problem, this is typically the last solution that occurs to them. Paradoxical though it may seem, however, political intervention is necessary to depoliticize the institutions that have already been diverted from their limited missions and competencies. Reluctant but determined intervention by the elected branches of government can compel neutrality on the part of professional and commercial institutions that have been captured and weaponized by the new entryists.

In America’s federal system, occupational and professional licensing as well as much financial regulation takes place at the state level. Each state has broad powers to assume democratic control over education, professional accreditation, and commerce and banking, by ending its delegations of government power to self-regulating private agencies and corporations.

The institutions with chokepoints that are most vulnerable to capture by the new gatekeepers are private: universities, professional accreditation organizations, social media, and financial platforms. These private institutions have been delegated vast powers on the basis of an implicit promise that they will be viewpoint-neutral and sector-specific. For example, the ABA’s legitimacy in accrediting American law schools, and the power of state bar associations to define the requirements for practicing law in a state, are based on the premise that bar associations will make their judgments solely on the basis of technical legal standards—not politics, religion, or personal or group identity. Likewise, banks and other financial institutions, including those online, are legitimate only to the extent that they accept all customers who engage in transactions that are allowed by law.

Banks and other necessary public accommodations cannot and should not be allowed to accept or reject customers solely on the basis that their managers like or dislike their opinions or disapprove of particular transactions, like legal gun sales or selling hats proclaiming that “Trump Won!” Bank managers, like professional accreditors or university deans, are technicians who have no legitimacy as moral arbiters of society.

If the delegation of authority by the government to private institutions empowers the activists who capture those institutions, then the solution is to repeal those delegations of authority and replace them with direct government regulation. The power of the AMA and ABA and other private associations to license professionals should be revoked. Professionals of all kinds should be licensed by government boards that are appointed by elected officials and subject to legislative oversight, and whose decisions are subject to judicial review.

Major social media and fintech platforms present a different issue: They have been allowed by policymakers of both parties to regulate themselves. The self-regulation of Google, Amazon, Twitter, and other platforms should be ended and replaced by government regulation by commissions overseen by elected officials.

What form would online platform regulation take? To begin with, the terms of service for particular kinds of online transactions would be identical for all vendors and written by legislators or by public commissions answerable to legislators and visible to the public. No longer would you be required to “accept” take-it-or-leave-it terms of service as a prelude to accessing an online website or using an online business. You don’t have to sign a form agreeing to complex and arbitrary terms of service to board an airplane or create an account with the local public utility, because those industries are regulated in the public interest by democratic government.

In addition to one-size-fits-all terms of service imposed by the public sector on all firms in an area, each sector should have a customer’s bill of rights. These would include protection against the denial of services on the basis of opinion or partisanship. We do not allow telephone companies to abruptly end your call and cancel your service if they overhear you say, “A transwoman is not a woman” or “I read a recent peer-reviewed study that said COVID vaccines have little to no effect on viral loads.” A traditional bank cannot decide to close all of the accounts of customers who vote Republican. Why do we allow equally important platforms to do so?

Even those accused or convicted of crimes should be allowed to access online media, commercial, communications, and financial platforms without discrimination. Convicted prisoners are allowed to make phone calls from jail. Should phone companies decide on their own to end that government policy? Of course not. In a free society, powerful private actors cannot be allowed to engage in additional, private punishments of those who have already been punished by the state.

Even more sinister, illiberal, and un-American is the practice of private companies blacklisting individuals who have been accused of crimes but not convicted. The secret government “No Fly List” shared by American national security agencies is clearly unconstitutional, as well as tyrannical. Private sector blacklists of suspected communists, Black Americans, homosexuals, and others have been all too familiar in the past—and are generally presented in public discussion as clear examples of wrongdoing. Private sector blacklists, including those directed against people deemed insufficiently woke by companies and banks, should be outlawed, and those affected by them should be empowered by law to sue those businesses and banks into bankruptcy in government courts.

In the case of public schools and state universities, created by state legislatures, the authority of the legislature to regulate curriculum and teaching in order to prevent radical ideological minorities, whether left or right, from capturing and indoctrinating captive students can hardly be questioned, even though university entryists will use cries of “academic freedom” to defend their current monopoly.

What about private universities? As nonprofit institutions, private universities are showered with subsidies by American taxpayers in the form of generous tax expenditures. If private institutions want to impose any particular ideology on their faculty and students, they should be free to do so—on the condition that they lose their nonprofit status and are redefined as for-profit corporations, subject to federal, state, and local taxes. With an endowment of over $50 billion run by highly paid professional money managers, Harvard University has often been described as a hedge fund with a college attached to it—so why shouldn’t its profits be taxed at the same rate as those of JP Morgan and Bain Capital?

The obvious objection to expanding the power of the states and the federal government to eliminate control by the new entryists over key social and economic chokepoints is the libertarian belief that government itself is the enemy. One response might be that the belief that private enterprise would be more inherently fair than a state grounded in the democratic process and the rule of law is what got us into this mess in the first place.

It is also the case that, contrary to popular belief, the federal government does not have vast plenary powers. The federal government chiefly influences state and local policy by means of “fiscal federalism.” The Obama administration abused fiscal federalism when radical activists ensconced in his Department of Education made federal funding for K-12 schools contingent on public schools adopting controversial gender ideology.

The best way to prevent the federal government from using this kind of economic blackmail against state and local government institutions, of course, is to keep woke parties and politicians and appointees out of power in Washington, D.C. If that fails, states should refuse federal funding that comes with strings attached, rather than submit to blackmail by tiny cadres of activists who have infiltrated and captured specific federal agencies like the Department of Education.

Increasingly, state governments led by anti-woke elected officials have begun using state power to check the ideological excesses of corporations and banks. Far from being an assault on liberty, this is a healthy and overdue reassertion of democracy. Elected officials answer to citizens. Corporations and nonprofits answer only to their boards of directors and shareholders or donors. And as entities that can exist and do business only because of government charters, corporations and nonprofits must follow rules promulgated by representatives of the people.

Will anti-woke governments commit abuses in responding to the abuses of woke companies and nonprofits? No doubt they will sometimes. But if they do, their misdeeds will be easily identified and have clear remedies, unlike the hidden decisions of vast private bureaucracies. Abusive legislators and governors can be voted out of office, unlike the obscure individuals who belong to Facebook’s self-regulating bureaucracy.

It might be objected that, whatever may be the case in other countries, American government officials at all levels lack the competence to engage in reasonable regulation of accreditation agencies and internet platforms in the public interest. But it would be a mistake to assume that the corporate and nonprofit staffers who now perform these functions are more competent or less corrupt themselves; we simply cannot see what they are doing, while public governance is subjected to public scrutiny and criticism. We don’t need Singaporean technocrats or Prussian bureaucrats; ordinary legislators and appointees who must conduct their work in the light of publicity will do. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

In other eras, and in other countries, public tyranny has indeed been a major threat to individual freedoms. In the United States, in the third decade of the 21st century, the private tyranny of universities, professional associations, and tech platforms is a greater threat than the tyranny of an oppressive state. When it comes to reducing the power of the new entryists in the private sector, the restoration of our liberties requires an expansion of democratically accountable government.