When President Joe Biden attacked Georgia’s Election Integrity Act of 2021 as “Jim Crow on steroids,” corporate America swiftly swung into action. Bank of America, BlackRock, CitiGroup, Coca-Cola, Delta, Facebook, Home Depot, Merck, and Microsoft all issued statements condemning Georgia's law. Major League Baseball caved under this corporate pressure, even moving its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver in protest.
So how did corporate America get this so wrong? Why did corporate America get so stupidly, blindly woke? Foss and Klein first note that there is no evidence that executives or the broader public have suddenly signed on to the woke agenda. Nor is there any evidence that woke corporations outperform unwoke corporations. In fact, there is some evidence the opposite is true.
Chief executives may be incentivized to go along with the woke policies because: 1.) they don’t have the expertise to push back, 2.) it is safer to go along with the woke agenda than oppose it, and 3.) because the woke agenda has no direct connection to business performance, CEOs can easily inflate claims of their own performance by implementing new woke performance standards and claiming to have met them.