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Paul Ramsey was once the leading voice in Christian ethics in our country. Now, largely forgotten beyond the academy, his insights are needed more than ever as we find ourselves caught between twin temptations: a Reinhold Niebuhrian resignation to the “lesser of two evils” and a Dietrich Bonhoefferian belief in “necessary exceptions” to our best moral reasoning. In his 2015 book, Power and Purpose: Paul Ramsey and Contemporary Political Theology, Adam Hollowell presents a Ramsey who can guide us through this Scylla and Charybdis. Ramsey, sharing Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer’s concerns for political responsibility and protecting the vulnerable, offers an alternative to the all-too-common assumption that Christian faithfulness sometimes requires the abandonment of moral norms.
According to Hollowell, the relationship between creation and covenant drives Ramsey’s ethical reflection. Unlike our run-of-the mill schemas that deploy unnatural dichotomizations of natural and supernatural, justice and love, thus keeping theology at arm’s length from political thought, Ramsey instead brings these things together through his exploration of the unity of creation and covenant.
Drawing upon Karl Barth’s declaration in the Church Dogmatics that creation is “the external basis of covenant” and covenant “the internal basis of creation,” Ramsey affirms, with Barth, that “covenant is the goal of creation [and] not something which is added later to the reality of the creature.” That is, there is no “natural” to be cordoned off entirely from the “supernatural.” After all, the destiny of human nature is to be in covenant with God, or as Thomas Aquinas would put it: to be friends with God. It is the separation of the two, nature and grace, then, that is unnatural.
Likewise, Ramsey says in Christian Ethics and the Sit-In that justice and love are “ultimately inseverable.”Justice is the external basis of love, protecting creation and preserving the possibility of love, which is found in covenant with fellow man. Love is the internal basis for creation, the reason why justice is necessary to preserve love’s place. Both, not just justice, are public, political principles. This means that Ramsey is comfortable exhorting the state to enshrine love in its laws; in fact, justice requires it.
So how does a loving state go to war? As Ramsey insists in The Just War: “what justified also limited.” For Ramsey, love justifies the use of force to protect innocent third parties. But precisely because the justification comes from love, the justification is not limitless. War without limit is a failure of love. Though it may sound odd, limits to war are a form of enemy love!
This is not a refrain to be found in the work of Niebuhr. Love is something the state can only ever approximate; instead, it must settle for earthly justice. Political actions are always marred by the Fall and so in politics we must choose between the lesser of two evils. There is no avoiding sin (sometimes called “dirty hands”) in the public realm. Responsible human beings must acknowledge the necessity of sometimes committing evil, even if it’s the least bad option.
Ramsey, however, takes Paul’s remarks in Romans 3:8 to bind Christian consciences in politics every bit as much as in church and private settings. The apostle condemns those who propose to “do evil that good may come,” which Ramsey generalizes to mean that “it can never be right to do wrong for the sake of some real or supposed good” (The Just War).
Instead of the lesser of two evils, then, Ramsey insists that the Christian pursue the “greatest possible good.” While a Niebuhrian and a Ramseyan might use “least possible evil” and “greatest possible good” to describe the same action, the semantics are important. Christians are not consigned to deny God in every action but are freed to choose the good, to claim otherwise is to deny the significance of the Holy Spirit and God’s promise to deliver Christians from temptation. It is not as if God’s power and promises become invalid as soon as one empties out of the sanctuary into the city square. Ramsey believes in the possibility of faithful Christian presence in the political realm.
Nor does Christ-like love prevent Christians from exercising coercive, even lethal power. This is one of Bonhoeffer’s mistakes. Unlike Niebuhr, his one-time professor at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer believed that the Sermon on the Mount laid out the pattern of life for Christians, not just in the privacy of the church—as Niebuhr believed—but under every “divine mandate” (the language Bonhoeffer came to prefer in his later work): family, government, church, and work. Christians, he took the Sermon on the Mount to teach, were forbidden from any kind of violence, even when acting as agents of the state, even in defense of others. Caught up as he was in conspiracies to kill Hitler, Bonhoeffer ultimately considered himself culpable of murderous intent. However, Bonhoeffer thought that Christian faithfulness in this uniquely urgent and dire situation require that he willingly take on sin (by conspiring to kill Hitler) in order to protect the victims of the Nazi regime.
In his late, unfinished work, Ethics, Bonhoeffer is dismissive of absolute moral norms. He writes that the faithful person is “not fettered by principles,” for “principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.” His conception of faithfulness is radically open to divine commands. Principles, he might say, are the refuge of empty religion, a legalistic Pharisaism that vaunts ethical ideals over the real, living God. So, we must be free of them—and to be free of them means to be able to make exceptions, Bonhoeffer thinks. Hence a pacifist abetting the plot to kill Hitler. Despite his pacifism, Bonhoeffer smuggles back in a Niebuhrian disregard for absolute norms by turning to an exception ethic.
This example does not rub most the wrong way because we—unlike Bonhoeffer—may think conspiring against Hitler is a completely justifiable action in itself. We might only think Bonhoeffer was wrong to heap guilt on himself for his involvement, not wrong for being involved. Yet, if this is the case, we ought not to speak of what Bonhoeffer did as a justifiable exception to our moral norms.
As Ramsey makes clear, there is no such thing as a justifiable exception. The very idea is incoherent, for something is either justifiable or it is an exception, that is, unjustifiable. In the case of killing Hitler, one finds justification not in throwing out the rule, but in looking for a deeper, more encompassing moral logic. For example, within the commandment against murder is an injunction to preserve life. It may be possible to uphold the commandment by plotting against a tyrannous ruler, though no measure of life against lives can justify an action that is in itself a moral atrocity.
Rather than looking to exceptions to exempt Christians from following moral norms in some emergency situation, Hollowell argues that Ramseyan love is demonstrated through “deeper and deeper commitments to the covenant bond”: “creativity and flexibility in practical reasoning must stem from a deepening commitment to foundational theological considerations.” Moral creativity and resourcefulness, which faithful actions require, come not from abandoning the rules but from learning to work gracefully within them.
In a time when our national politics leaps from exigency to exigency, taking every situation to be uniquely urgent, we need the cool and careful analysis of a Paul Ramsey. We need a theology that can lay out the boundaries of acceptable Christian action and take political responsibility seriously, but also one that understands the difference Christ makes for all of our moral reasoning.
For the Christian earnestly desiring, as Bonhoeffer puts it in Ethics, to know how to let “the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality” and navigate faithfully amidst the policies and politics of the day, he will find few better guides than Paul Ramsey. Indeed, as we continue to hear prominent Christians advocate for the lesser of two evils, Hollowell’s Power and Purpose offers up a Ramsey who is more needed than ever.
The post Navigating the Scylla and Charybdis: Paul Ramsey and Contemporary Political Theology appeared first on Providence.
Epidemic of 15-19 Year Olds Dropping Dead in Schools and Dorms Across USA and Canada in April 2023
By , April 24, 2023
Found dead in dorm or residence. Cardiac arrest and died while at school. Died …
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An Oklahoma man and woman have been arrested and are facing charges over their alleged involvement in the death of a newborn baby. Sarah N. Helton and Kevin R. Helton were arrested for second-degree murder or alternatively one count of child neglect.
The case surrounding the Heltons emerged after a man loaned the couple’s phone and saw a photo of a baby that appeared to be deceased, in addition to messages that discussed the child’s death and the whereabouts of the remains.
According to the probable cause affidavit, authorities suspect Sarah and Kevin Helton caused the baby’s death through neglect between December 26, 2022, and January 10, 2023. Investigators believe that the baby was born in late 2022 in the bedroom of the Heltons’ home. After the baby’s birth, Sarah Helton departed without notice, and Kevin Helton allegedly discovered the baby in the trash days later.
The man who loaned the Heltons’ phone reportedly stated to police that the photo of the baby looked as though it was sleeping or deceased, and Kevin’s message to Sarah read, “Do you want me to tell your daughter what really happened to her sister? I buried her this morning because you left her in the trash.” Upon obtaining a search warrant for the device, investigators found five photographs and a video depicting a dead infant.
In a statement to investigators, Sarah Helton claimed she gave birth at a midwife’s residence. Kevin Helton took the newborn to an adoption agency in Oklahoma City the day after the birth. Nonetheless, Sarah Helton was unable to provide the details of either the midwife or the adoption agency when questioned by police.
Kevin Helton told deputies that Sarah Helton immediately left home upon the child’s birth, preventing him from calling an ambulance as she believed there was an active warrant for her arrest.
Sarah Helton was previously convicted in Tulsa County for accessory to murder in 2017 and was released from prison in May 2022, less than five years following her incarceration.
The location of the newborn baby is still unknown. Although the baby “is presumed to possibly be deceased and disposed of,” the Garfield County and Noble County Sheriff’s office continue investigating the case. The Heltons are scheduled to appear before District Judge Blake A. Gibson on April 24 for a bond hearing.
The story of Sarah and Kevin Helton underscores the necessity of providing adequate assistance to expectant mothers in complex circumstances. Why Sarah Helton felt compelled not to seek medical attention, why Kevin Helton didn’t pursue assistance, and what factors they considered when making such decisions remain unanswered.
Regardless, the situation is a tragic reminder of the importance of embedding assistance and resources for pregnant women in difficult predicaments.
The Walt Disney Company faces an uneasy transition as they lay off thousands of employees this week while dealing with a tense dispute with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The Burbank-based entertainment giant has announced a targeted $5.5 billion cost savings plan, marking “the biggest shake-up since” former CEO Bob Iger returned in November, who announced the plan for 7,000 job eliminations at the start of the year.
After completing this round, they will have eliminated 4,000 jobs of their 7,000 job elimination target.
Evidently, the job has been cut across various business segments, including Mike Soltys, ESPN VP/Corporate Communications and the network’s second-longest tenured employee. Though the job cuts represent around three percent of Disney’s global workforce, the scope of the layoffs is unclear, as the entertainment corporation employs about 100,000 workers in the US.
Notably, Disney relies on special legal privileges it held for decades at the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which covers 40 square miles of land owned by the company, to “speak out against the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill” passed by DeSantis in March. This bill which bans classroom teaching on gender identity caused a deep and bitter argument between the two parties.
The job cuts are part of Iger’s plan to trim $3 billion from content and “the remaining $2.5 billion from non-content”. This new leadership in Disney has seen him appoint several creative executives – including Dana Walden and Alan Bergman – to bring authority back to the troubled corporation.
Disney is pushing to reach the target of job eliminations by the beginning of summer, and their efforts are clear. While difficult for those impacted, the company looks to turn around its problem for the better.
“If there is a way Israel could assist in ending the fighting, we would be very happy to do so.”
By World Israel News Staff
Israel has offered to host ceasefire talks between warring factions in Sudan as the death toll reached several hundreds on Monday.
“Since the start of hostilities in the country, Israel has been working different channels to bring about a cease-fire and the advancement in recent days is very encouraging,” Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said on Monday.
“If there is a way Israel could assist in ending the fighting, we would be very happy to do so,” he added.
Cohen shares close ties with the embattled country, as does his ministry’s director-general, Ronen Levy.
Cohen was in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum in February with the aim of inking Israel’s normalization deal with Sudan.
“Since my visit to Khartoum three months ago, a visit whose purpose was to bring about the signing of a historic peace agreement between Israel and Sudan, we have been in contact with various parties in Sudan in order to promote relations between the countries,” Cohen said on Monday.
According to a statement from Cohen’s office, the foreign ministry was “encouraged” by the “progress made in recent days during talks” with the rival Sudanese factions.
A power struggle between Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s de facto military leader, and his deputy, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo has spiraled into open violence between loyalist forces on both sides.
US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Monday that Washington was also trying to reach a ceasefire.
“We have not given up on the notion that there could be a ceasefire that would come into effect,” Kirby said.
“We will keep working with close partners in pushing the two sides to try to…get a permanent cease-fire in place,” Kirby added. “We see the risk of protracted conflict but we see a possibility…that we could get to a cease-fire.”
The post Israel offers to mediate ceasefire summit in Sudan appeared first on World Israel News.
The court conceded that Waters use of Nazi imagery in his stage show was “tasteless,” but would not go further than that.
By Ben Cohen, Algemeiner
A previously-canceled concert in the German city of Frankfurt by the former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters may now go ahead, after a court ruled on Monday that the decision by local authorities to ban his performance on the grounds of his alleged antisemitism violated his artistic freedom.
The May 28 concert at the city’s Festhalle — where more than 3,000 Jews were assembled and abused by the Nazi regime in Nov. 1938 prior to their deportation to concentration camps — was canceled two months ago, after the city government, which jointly owns the venue with the state of Hesse, accused Waters of being “one of the world’s best-known antisemites,” citing his backing for the campaign to subject the State of Israel to a regime of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions” (BDS). It also highlighted the use of antisemitic imagery in Waters’ past concerts, including a balloon shaped like a pig and embossed with a Star of David and various corporate logos.
At the end of March, Waters announced that he was taking legal action to reverse the decision, claiming: “I fight for all of our human rights, including the right to free speech. We are on the road to Frankfurt. Frankfurt, here we come!”
The Frankfurt Administrative Court ruled in favor of Waters on Monday, arguing that the memory of the Jewish deportees who were forcibly gathered at the Festhalle would not be tainted by the singer exercising his “artistic freedom.” While the court conceded that Waters use of Nazi imagery in his stage show was “tasteless,” it was also the case that the singer “does not glorify or relativize the National Socialist atrocities or identify with National Socialist racial ideology,” a spokeswoman for the court told local media outlets. Post–war Germany instituted a series of laws that outlaw pro-Nazi organizations and their associated symbols as well as the denial of the Holocaust.
The decision can still be appealed at the Administrative Court for the state of Hesse.
As well as Frankfurt, Waters is scheduled to perform in Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Munich as part of his “This is Not A Drill 2023” tour. An attempt to ban his Munich appearance at the Olympiahalle venue failed over concerns that Waters could sue for breach of contract. The city council has urged the Olympiahalle to prepare signs, flags and other symbols on the day of the concert that would send a “clear signal for international understanding and international solidarity, against antisemitism and for the right to exist of the State of Israel and the sovereignty of Ukraine.”
Waters has established himself as one of the most visible supporters of the campaign to subject the State of Israel to a regime of “boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS)” as a prelude to its elimination as a sovereign state. As well as including antisemitic motifs in his concerns, Waters has made incendiary comments in a number of media interviews about the alleged power of the “Jewish lobby” in the US and Israel’s supposed program of “genocide” targeting the Palestinians.
The singer’s recent activities have included a Feb. 8 appearance at the UN Security Council. Invited to address the body by the Russian mission to the UN, Waters delivered a rambling speech in which he claimed to be speaking on behalf of the world’s “voiceless majority” while denouncing Ukraine’s democratic government as “provocateurs.”
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Vendors sell products in a busy street in Accra, Ghana, on March 21, 2022. (Seth / Xinhua via Getty Images)
At the end of last year, Ghana defaulted on its debt as the government suspended payments on most debts owed to foreign creditors. Earlier in 2022, Sri Lanka also entered default as inflation sent the country’s currency tumbling, exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis as imports of essential goods like food and medicine became more expensive.
This year, Pakistan finds itself on the brink of default as the combination of high inflation and climate breakdown fueled environmental disasters devastated its economy. Pakistan’s situation is particularly worrying given the fact that the country is the world’s fifth largest by population. Other countries like Zambia and Lebanon have been in default for much longer.
High inflation and slow global growth have wracked many poor economies at the same time as rising interest rates have made debt servicing more expensive. Fifteen percent of poor countries are already in debt distress — when a country is unable to fullfil its financial obligations and debt restructuring is required — while half are in danger of entering it.
In short, the world economy is already in the midst of a sovereign debt crisis. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned that the developing world faces a “lost decade” as a result of the debt crisis, estimating that debt servicing alone will cost these states at least $800 billion.
There are, of course, notable differences in the economic and political situations of the countries currently in, or on the brink of, default. Ghana’s situation is unique in that much of its debt is owed to domestic rather than international creditors. Its default, therefore, risks creating a deep shock to the domestic financial sector, which would likely reverberate throughout the rest of its economy.
Sri Lanka, previously a golden child of international financial markets owing to its strong record of debt repayments, mismanaged its negotiations with creditors when the economic crisis became particularly acute. And countries like Pakistan and Lebanon, which is also on the verge of default, have suffered from decades of corruption and political mismanagement.
But while it is important not to insulate domestic elites from responsibility for the role they have played in exacerbating their countries’ debt crisis, it is also critical to recognize the global factors that are driving debt distress across the developing world — one of the most important being the way in which the rich word is dealing with its own economic crisis.
The inflationary crisis that began to tear through the world economy from last year is being driven by three main factors: the uneven recovery from the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and — often forgotten — climate breakdown. These are not issues that can be solved by fiddling around with the cost of borrowing. And yet this has been policymakers’ central response.
By raising interest rates, central bankers hope to slow growth and investment, increasing unemployment and disciplining workers into accepting less pay. The idea is that, even though workers did not cause the crisis, they can be made to pay for it.
Yet across most of the rich world, real wages are failing to keep pace with inflation, meaning that most workers are facing pay cuts. If policymakers really wanted to curb inflation, they would focus on profits, which in many sectors have soared even as input costs have risen. As the political economist Isabella Weber has forcefully argued, many large companies have taken advantage of inflation to raise prices higher than their costs, pocketing the difference.
So, interest rate hikes won’t solve the inflationary crisis in the rich world. They will, however, make it much more expensive for poor countries to finance their debts. The monetary policy currently being pursued in the rich world has been designed to impoverish workers domestically, with the added bonus of impoverishing poor countries globally.
We have been here before. In the 1980s, when the then chair of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, sent US interest rates through the roof to discipline US workers, it led to dozens of defaults in the Global South. The so-called Volcker shock laid the foundations for neoliberalism in the United States and, conveniently, it also provided the perfect pretext for imposing neoliberal policies on the Global South.
When poor countries were forced to appeal to international financial institutions for emergency lending, they received this assistance in exchange for introducing policies like privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts. The terms of these loans — referred to as structural adjustment programs — decimated many economies and permanently increased inequality in others.
Yet no lessons appear to have been learned from the debt crisis of the 1980s. As countries like Ghana and Sri Lanka have appealed to international financial institutions for assistance, they have been forced to introduce austerity policies that are likely to constrain growth for years to come.
If austerity hasn’t worked in the rich world, it’s certainly not going to work in the poor world, where significant investment in infrastructure and public services is necessary for sustainable development. In fact, forcing poor countries to cut spending at a time when vast sums of money are needed for decarbonization and climate change mitigation is likely to exacerbate both the climate crisis and global inequality.
Debt cancellation is urgently needed to deal with both the global debt crisis and the climate crisis. Rather than forcing countries to implement regressive and self-defeating austerity measures in exchange for emergency lending, new lending could be directed into investment in green infrastructure and climate mitigation — as well as protecting important carbon sinks like rainforests and tundra.
But over the long run, even debt cancellation will not be enough to close the gap between the rich and poor worlds. The reason that poor countries have been forced to take on so much new debt is that they have been kept in a position of dependence in a global economy structured to enrich the wealthy and impoverish the poor.
An extractive international financial system, regressive intellectual property rules, and enforced neoliberal policies have denied many poor countries the resources required for sustainable development.
China is, of course, the major exception to this rule. It has achieved development by ignoring the rules laid down by the Global North, protecting industry and prioritizing investment. In fact, China is now the single largest lender to many poor countries, and its attitude toward debt restructuring — influenced more by geopolitical than economic considerations — will significantly impact how this crisis is resolved.
In an optimistic scenario, poor countries would be able to take advantage of the cooling of relations between China and the West to access lending on more favorable terms. As they once did through the Non-Aligned Movement, poor states could work together to resist imperialism and achieve real debt cancellation.
In a pessimistic scenario, these countries will be caught in the middle of the new Cold War. Western lenders may refuse to negotiate with Chinese ones over how to write down the debts of poor countries, leaving these states stuck in limbo. This is exactly the situation currently faced by countries like Zambia, whose creditors have failed to come to an agreement about its debt for several years now.
One thing is for certain: the world economy can’t fully recover until the Global South debt crisis is resolved. But when it comes to debt, politics always trumps economics. What happens next will be determined by what politicians and policymakers in China and the West consider to be in their interests, rather than what is most likely to promote sustainable development.
A sign disparaging Bud Light beer is seen along a country road on April 21, 2023 in Arco, Idaho. Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of Bud Light, has faced backlash after the company sponsored two Instagram posts from a transgender woman. (Natalie Behring / Getty Images)
Last November, conservative commentator Ross Douthat penned a provocative column titled “How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right.” “One of the master keys to understanding our era,” Douthat wrote in the opening paragraph, “is seeing all the ways in which conservatives and progressives have traded attitudes and impulses.”
The populist right’s attitude toward American institutions has the flavor of the 1970s — skeptical, pessimistic, paranoid — while the mainstream, MSNBC-watching left has a strange new respect for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The online right likes transgression for its own sake, while cultural progressivism dabbles in censorship and worries that the First Amendment goes too far. Trumpian conservatism flirts with postmodernism and channels Michel Foucault; its progressive rivals are institutionalist, moralistic, confident in official narratives and establishment credentials.
Despite some terminological imprecision — Douthat often writes of “the Left” when he really means “liberals” — the argument speaks to something real.
While liberals of the Bush era worried about mass surveillance and government overreach, today’s liberal mainstream champions the sanctity of institutions and views the likes of courts, security agencies, and misinformation regulators as a bulwark against the Right. As Donald Trump insulted his way into the executive branch, liberals bludgeoned Bernie Sanders and his supporters with bad-faith social-justice critiques and made prudish appeals to consensus and decency. The Republican affect, by contrast, has increasingly drawn on themes of dissent and rebellion, with a politics of trolling and an aesthetic of 4chan-esque vulgarity supplanting the comparatively upright style once associated with figures like Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush.
There’s a certain elegance in seeing contemporary politics like this: censorious and oversensitive Brahmins sermonizing about institutional authority in one corner and a newly irreverent right pursuing a frenzied and paranoid style in the other. It isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s not exactly right either. In its tidiness, such a narrative elides the important ways that the Right now engages in its own version of the very politics it claims to deplore. Conservatism, in this sense, has not so much traded places with liberalism as converged with some of its shallowest and most illiberal instincts.
Recently, conservatives launched a crusade against brewing company Anheuser-Busch in response to an innocuous advertising collaboration with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Breweries have reportedly been targeted with bomb threats, and one right-leaning company has seized upon the situation to launch a service called “Woke Alerts” that will warn consumers “when companies cave to the woke mob.” The episode is instructive for several reasons, among them that the campaign so obviously mirrors the very sensibility it purports to be resisting. In effect, the Right’s go-to reaction to what it imagines are woke mobs is to create woke mobs of its own.
The incident is merely one example of a wider zeitgeist currently reflected in mass campaigns to get books with black or LGBTQ themes pulled from library shelves, draconian legislation to discipline academics who teach particular subjects, heavy-handed regulation of free expression in public-school classrooms, and sinister directives to state agencies targeting transgender children and their parents. “Woke capitalism” has, meanwhile, become conservatism’s favorite bête noire, inspiring absurd freakouts about everything from Disney’s ostensible promotion of socialism to Pride-themed Oreo packaging. The related concept of “ESG” (Environmental and Social Governance) is set to be the subject of congressional hearings that will, like Woke Alerts, target investors thought to be undermining profits in pursuit of a “woke” agenda.
Conservatives, in effect, have recognized the socially liberal bent of modern America — and they absolutely hate it. The result is a politics increasingly indistinguishable from the most exaggerated right-wing caricature of censorious social-justice warrior liberalism.
Another irony of this posture is that it has seen conservatives embrace a key premise of the shallow social-justice ethos that now pervades the upper echelons of some large corporations. True, they may hate it when leviathans like Amazon and Nike issue statements in support of Black Lives Matter or partner with transgender TikTok stars. But, in lockstep with the marketing teams at these very companies, conservatives accept the corporate alignment with various social-justice causes as something genuine rather than a branding exercise. On this, they agree with an influential section of American liberals: “woke capitalism” exists.
Yet the whole idea of so-called woke capitalism is absurd on its face. Large profitable corporations are, by definition, driven by cold-market calculus, not the pursuit of social justice in anything but the hollowest sense. Insofar as some corporations bend toward social liberalism, it’s mostly because there’s a greater market share to be found there — on major issues like trans rights and abortion, conservatism is very much a minority proposition in today’s America — and because it can be an effective inoculant when their owners and bosses are caught union busting, running exploitative workplaces, or contributing to climate change. It’s a cynical and often nakedly hypocritical branding exercise undertaken by people thinking about their bottom lines and little more. If the Right is wrong to attack woke capital, liberals are wrong to celebrate it.
It’s one thing to find fault with the moralism that pervades some liberal milieus, or to roll one’s eyes in the direction of Wall Street banks or entertainment conglomerates trying to cash in on social-justice branding. The fact remains, however, that it is not oversensitive liberals who are crusading against Bud Light, trying to get books banned en masse, or enforcing parochial ideas about gender and sexuality through state legislation. In the narcotic haze of the culture war, it is all too easy to overlook the extent to which America’s conservative minority has become a mirror image of the very thing it purports to deplore: a shrill and inflexible mass that not only mistakes consumption for politics but demands protection, at all times, from facts, people, and ideas that make it uncomfortable.