Over the past decade, conservatives in the US have frequently accused the country’s corporate leaders of being too “woke” – a term they use to pejoratively describe Corporate America’s espousal of progressive socio-legal values and policies.
Right-wing pundits have long peddled a narrative that public institutions and corporations in America have sold out to an assortment of “liberal, leftist, and communist” principles. These entities, the pundits claim, seek to pressure Americans into adopting radical and dystopian reimaginations of gendered and racial relations.
This right-wing critique has taken on several forms and institutions. In the workplace, this frustration manifests against affirmative action frameworks such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. DEI, at least on paper, seeks to promote representation for historically marginalised people in the workplace and academia.
Within academia, the inclusion of Critical Race Theory in school curriculums has upset conservatives. Finally, in the entertainment industry, Hollywood has been a near-perpetual target for pushing a “woke agenda” to the public.
However, a lot of the critique has been directed toward the censorial impulse of Big Tech, and more specifically the modern town square – which is to say, social media.
Before Twitter was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, the people running the platform were often characterised by right-wingers as being tough on free speech and partial to the agenda of the Democratic party. This narrative made Musk a free speech evangelist in the eyes of the Global Right when he bought Twitter (now known as X) and relaxed speech rules on the platform.
While Musk captured the spirit of America’s right-ward shift early and began cashing in on it, it did not take long for his peers in the tech industry to follow suit.
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Open AI chief executive Sam Altman tweeted that he had a change of heart about Donald Trump, and that despite not agreeing with him on everything, he now believes that the new US president would “be incredible”.
Days before Trump’s inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, made an appearance on the popular, politically centre-right podcast – The Joe Rogan Experience. Conveniently preparing for America’s shifting political landscape, Zuckerberg announced his plans for scaling back content moderation and fact checking on Meta platforms Instagram, Facebook and Threads.
It was a clear response to the American Right’s anger with fact-checkers and the misinformation crackdowns by Big Tech during Joe Biden’s presidency, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organisationally, Meta recently promoted Republican Joe Kaplan to be the company’s chief global affairs officer and appointed Dana White, a close associate of Trump and chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to its board of directors.
Meta and major American corporations such as Amazon, Target, Walmart, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere and McDonalds have begun winding down DEI initiatives. Some of these companies began ending these programmes even before Trump’s executive order to dismantle DEI was issued.
This shift is particularly notable given that several of these organisations have previously routinely engaged in DEI initiatives and styled themselves as being inclusive spaces for minorities and LGBTQ+ people.
In fact, after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020, corporate America pledged almost $50 billion to combat racism.
It is a special case of insincerity that these very organisations which (at least, superficially) professed so much support for progressive causes are now rhetorically and materially cosying up to the American Right. Only a few days into Trump’s presidency, Corporate America has already begun chameleonising into something palatable to the ruling ideological current.
In 2021, following the confirmation of Biden’s victory as the 46th US President and the January 6 Capitol riots, Meta and Twitter found it politically and culturally expedient to suspend Trump from their platforms.
Today, even under the most damning circumstances, such a ban is unlikely to occur on a major social media website. At Trump’s inauguration, the front rows were filled by smiling Big Tech CEOs such as Musk, Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Apple’s Tim Cook, among others. With Trump’s popularity clear as day, no matter how contradictory to their previously professed organisational principles, his new directives are almost bound to be met with unquestioning obedience by the corporate class.
This reversal by Corporate America is not particularly surprising. Big Capital does not have any inherent moral character or popular ideological project. The only ideology it truly professes is aiding the system that allows its survival and drive for profit. Given this, Corporate America’s concessions to progressive and regressive forces are largely driven by what it perceives as the mutually beneficial marriage of its commercial interests and the popular ideological position of any given time.
Major American corporations such as Ford, General Motors and Chase Manhattan worked with Nazi Germany. Car maker Henry Ford even lobbied to keep the United States out of World War II. Today, the Ford legacy is known less for Nazi collaboration and more by its cars and the philanthropic work of the Ford Foundation, which has even sponsored black activists such as James Baldwin.
Given this historically evident duplicity and the incredible metamorphising abilities of big businesses, the assertion that corporations are “woke” is fallacious. Corporate America professes no ideology except for the confluence of its monetary interests and the politics the American people happen to elect. Trump’s second term has laid this fact bare once again.
Ethan John Rajesh is a political researcher, photographer, and incoming Master’s student at Freiburg University.
