Woke Boardroom Preening a Threat to Democracy?

By: Adam Creighton
In: The Australian

A former FBI deputy director resigned from Airbnb after raising concerns that the popular online holiday booking platform was sharing customer data with the Chinese government.

Joel Kotkin, an insightful Californian academic at Chapman University who has written seven books on social demography, believes woke capital is making the West more like China.

Where former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping shifted China in a more liberal direction in the 1970s, creating what he famously called “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, the West is shifting its economic and social model to more resemble China’s.

“A convergence between the world’s two superpowers is taking place,” he (Kotkin) writes, arguing the diffusion of power so critical to democracy has been replaced by a near unassailable alliance between Silicon Valley tech giants, Wall Street “and the progressive clerisy in government and media”.

Chinese socialism with American characteristics is our destiny, Kotkin writes in his brilliant new essay, The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny. Big American businesses, he argues, increasingly “resemble companies in authoritarian states – such as Mussolini’s Italy, or Hitler’s Germany and today’s China – where private capital accumulation is permitted but dissent from the agreed norms of the media-government-academy, once a privilege of individuals and business, is now largely verboten”.

Joe Biden’s election victory appears to have emboldened the woke capital heartland in Silicon Valley, which has started censoring users who argue against auth­or­itarian responses to the pan­demic. Woke ideology even can provide executives, bored perhaps with the drab and technical tasks of running a big business, a sense of moral purpose and excitement – and seemingly at no cost.

Read the rest of this piece at The Australian.

Related:

The Rise of Corporate-State Tyranny
How the US Turned Into the EU