Woke Soup

As regular readers may know, I worked for a defense contractor in the heyday of the Reagan defense buildup. I started my engineering career on a navy jet program, then moved to space division where I worked on a couple Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka "Star Wars") programs.

Having the "list-maker" gene somewhere in my DNA, I started tallying the acronyms I encountered on a near-daily basis. By the time I joined the sizable swathes of Boomer/Gen-X cohorts departing the defense world at the end of that profligacy, my spreadsheet (it eventually ended up in Excel), had grown to over 4,000 entries.

Yes, the military and government love their acronyms. So does Congress. Every major bill's title is a golden-shoehorn-worthy demonstration of fitting fanciful language into a catchy acronym.

Clearly, there must be something in human nature that likes the brevity acronyms offer. That penchant for alphabet soup long-ago migrated over to the private sector. Today, we have DEI, ESG, AGW, LGBTQIA2+, BLM, and many more assaulting our senses from all directions.

When all those (inter-connected) cultural initiatives could be paid service without much impact on our daily lives, many of us rolled along. Some embraced the ideals wholeheartedly, some said "sounds nice, I don't mind." While some warned against risks, pitfalls, and corruption, some objected to some of their goals, and some found the whole enterprise to be disruptive and destructive, most still shrugged at them.

But, indeed, when they were simply buzzing that, like gnats, could be waved away, few offered real resistance.

Now, however, with the fiscal and liberty chickens coming home to roost, that resistance is becoming a real thing.

Public polls have shown that people are happy to be "green" when it doesn't cost them anything, but most wouldn't even concede a few bucks per year to combat climate change. The C-suite bigwigs in Corporate America didn't heed that message, and have been tubthumping (and investing billions) about their companies' climate bona fides. Plus their "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" quota-fills. Plus their "Environmental, Social, and Governance" efforts. Recently, however, there are signs that the masses are getting tired of it all, and waking up (pun intended) to the costs of Woke.

Woke-soup activist investors were rebuffed at Chevron and Exxon Mobil's recent shareholder meetings. Their green proposals suffered bigger defeats than in previous years. This should be a warning klaxon to other big companies that are in a mad rush to go green by spending billions of shareholder dollars on products and initiatives that not enough consumers want. Ford, losing an average of $60K on each electric vehicle it sells (and underwriting those losses with gas car sales), could face a massive shareholder revolt if its gamble that EVs will either be embraced in the next few years, or coerced into consumers' driveways by the government, goes south.

None of these letter initiatives promote either cultural harmony or corporate success. The cultural ones started out with good intent - BLM was a positive movement for about five weeks before it became a money-making, agitprop-spewing racket. The LGBT movement was about acceptance before it was hijacked by trans-activists hell-bent on coercion and a massive, reality-rejecting rewrite of human cultural norms and the language itself. DEI was about breaking down old biases before it became an industry unto itself (and one that adds no value while sucking up otherwise-productive capital). ESG is a rebranding of "stakeholder capitalism," which argues that people who have no investment (and therefore no risk) in a company should have a say in how that company is run, and again burning otherwise-productive capital.

People are very tolerant of others' excesses and disruptions... until they themselves are affected. Women, treated possessively by the Left (if you don't stand with Team Blue on all things, you are a gender traitor), are revolting against the invasion of their athletics, their locker rooms, their sororities, and their lavatories by people with XY chromosomes. Shareholders are rejecting expensive ESG, DEI, and AGW initiatives. Consumers of TV and movie entertainment are increasingly rejecting the ham-fisted "diversifying" of legacy content and characters. Hollywood has imposed a "diversity" rule for movie eligibility for the Oscars, no matter that its recent efforts have produced ever-lower interest (and ratings) for that annual exercise in self-indulgent excess. Truckers in Canada and farmers in The Netherlands have engaged in massive protests against livelihood-destroying "green" policies.

This cultural barrage can be traced to a single inflection point: Biden's win over Trump. For those who've forgotten (or who remain wrapped up in the "stolen election" folderol), Trump's last couple months on the campaign trail were a train wreck. His debate performances were abysmal, his wild-man antics veered into non-compos-mentis territory, and he did an absolutely awful job at presenting his first-term successes to the public. Biden and the Left took a narrow victory (and ignored the warning offered by the seat losses in the House) as a mandate to go woke-wild. Corporate America, awash in rent-seekers and cowards who routinely bent the knee to the Twitter mob, hopped on that wagon, ignoring the same signals against excess.

The nation does appear on the cusp of rejecting that excess.

Unfortunately, and I'll explain why "unfortunately,” the next Presidential election will be interpreted as a signal as to the direction of the nation. If Biden wins again, the Left will continue, and even accelerate, its coercive campaign to bend the nation to its will, no matter that such a victory would likely be a re-rejection of Trump (the polls and gambling markets show that Trump, despite being the current front-runner for the GOP nomination, is the candidate most likely to lose to Biden) rather than an affirmation of Biden's performance. The realities don't matter, only the victory does. Which is why, despite it being something that many of his supporters don't want to hear, I urge the Trump crowd to think strategically. Any of several other GOP candidates will give you Trump's good policies - and even better - without bringing the Trump baggage. That baggage is the biggest gift to Biden and the Left, because it will flip swing voters away and prompt many right-leaning voters to stay home.

The nation wants to reject woke-soup. Its opportunity to do so will be the Republican Party primaries. The voters’ selection of the GOP nominee will be the next inflection point.