The Prospects of Anti-Woke Capital

On Jennifer C. Pan’s ‘Selling Social Justice’

Various of the Trump administration’s initiatives of the past three months seem to have been informed by a class theory of politics derived from the work of James Burnham and his intellectual progeny. The theory is roughly the following: “Woke” is the ideology of the managerial class; therefore, the way to defeat woke is to go after the institutions that sustain that class. In practice, as we have seen, this means disbanding these institutions wherever possible (hence the attempted liquidation of large sections of the administrative state) and otherwise bringing them to heel using the power of the state and in some cases the courts (as has been tried with media outlets, law firms, and perhaps most notably elite universities).

This war on the managerial class was proposed at various points by MAGA-affiliated intellectual luminaries before Trump’s return to power—think of Steve Bannon’s promise to “deconstruct the administrative state” all the way back in the first Trump term, reactionary tech intellectual Curtis Yarvin’s slogan “Retire All Government Employees” (RAGE), or JD Vance’s remarks about “de-Baathification.” To be sure, Republicans have been promising to shrink the federal government forever, and they’ve also had an animus toward liberal-dominated institutions. What is novel is the effort doesn’t entail simply waging war on the battlefield of ideas, as generations of conservatives have, but treating this struggle as inseparable from class warfare.

If we look past the shock and awe of the past few months, there are reasons to question the long-term success of the efforts currently underway. As Michael Cuenco noted a few years ago in Compact, Vance’s “de-Baathification” reference was revealingly short-sighted given what happened after a previous Republican administration did that in postwar Iraq:

This abrupt liquidation of state capacity led not only to anarchy, but to jobless administrators and officers joining the insurgency (which may well have contributed to the superior organizational abilities of ISIS).

Similarly, forcibly retired government employees don’t simply cease to exist once they’re off the payroll, and the administration has no clear sense of what to do about the continued existence of this growing class of malcontents other than hope they won’t add up to any serious node of resistance. Yarvin told Cuenco a better historical example of RAGE was the de-Nazification carried out by the US occupation forces in postwar Germany, which involved rehabilitating former Nazi functionaries for productive work in the new regime. But so far, the Trump administration seems to be taking more of the blasé “Mission Accomplished” attitude of the Bush White House before it.

A deeper problem with the war on the managerial class, however, might be that the theory informing it is wrong or incomplete. If woke isn’t, or isn’t simply, the ideology of the managerial class, it might well survive even the most successful vanquishing of the latter and find new ways to reassert itself.

This would seem to be an unstated implication of Jennifer C. Pan’s new book Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Anti-Racism, which I heartily recommend. In late 2023, I reviewed the bumper crop of anti-woke books (a few of which are clearly influencing the current administration’s approach) and found them severely deficient. To my mind Pan’s book is, along with Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke, one of the few things that will still be worth reading on the 2010s “awokening” a decade or more hence.

Al-Gharbi isn’t a conservative, much less a MAGA activist, but his theory of wokeness has some overlap with the right-wing one outlined above, in which it is best understood as the legitimating ideology of the managerial class (the broader term al-Gharbi uses is “symbolic capitalists”). Pan’s account is somewhat at odds with al-Gharbi’s, although I think the two can ultimately be reconciled. Her book, as she explains at the beginning, “tells the story of how contemporary antiracism … became a means for the rich to re-legitimize a floundering capitalist order in the twenty-first century.” She doesn’t let professionals off the hook; for instance, she notes at one point that one key effect of the 2010s “reckoning” was to “[secure] for professionals their historic role as enlightened brokers of the social order,” echoing one of the main arguments of We Have Never Been Woke. But proceeding along Marxist lines, she lays far greater emphasis on the capitalist class’s agency.

Pan’s history of the racial reckoning goes something like this. The 2008 financial crisis not only exposed a deep structural crisis in the global and national economic order, it created a crisis of legitimacy for a ruling class that not only got out of the crash largely unscathed but went on to claim the lion’s share of the wealth produced during the subsequent years of recovery. The surging discontent that resulted led to a series of inchoate populist challenges from both the right and the left, culminating in Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party and shock victory in 2016.

Amid all of this, Pan says, the capitalist class needed a new story to legitimate its continued rule, and it found that story in the progressive narrative about race, according to which this “original sin” was pervasive and needed to be extirpated through a comprehensive commitment to “antiracism.”

The 21st-century iteration of antiracism was convenient to the capitalist class for a few reasons. First, as has long been emphasized by Marxist critics of racial progressivism like Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels (both cited by Pan) it emphasized disparity rather than inequality or exploitation. What this meant was the implicit political horizon of progressive politics was diversifying the ranks of the ruling class rather than curtailing its massive wealth and power. Second, all talk of “systemic” or “structural” racism aside, the progressive narrative almost inevitably ended up blaming average people for racial inequality. Finally, that way of laying blame also offered employers new means of exerting control over employees through endless bias monitoring and training, as Pan details in a chapter called “How Antiracism Became a Gift to Bosses.” As she writes: “DEI … increases employer and private sector discretion and, in its most uncompromising forms, preempts labor unrest by fracturing workforces behind a PR-friendly veil.”

We all remember the Fortune 500’s immense enthusiasm for and largesse towards Black Lives Matter in 2020, but the oligarchic love affair with racial progressivism began long before that. Pan traces the “business case for diversity” back to the Chicago School economist Gary Becker, and shows that corporate leaders have enthusiastically embraced diversity and affirmative action for many decades not just because of its p.r. value but because of the new mechanisms of control over the workforce they facilitated. Moreover, Pan notes, the version of civil rights legislation that prevailed in the 1960s was more business-friendly alternative to the approach favored by activists like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, which called for full employment by way of a federal jobs guarantee. She also recalls that in 1969, the Nixon administration’s “Philadelphia Plan,” which introduced a requirement for federal contractors to hire black workers, was implemented with the overt aim of “expanding the labor pool and pushing down high construction wages while simultaneously undermining the powerful building trades unions.”

The argument that the impetus for racial politics has often come from the top echelons of the capitalist class works against two other, far more common narratives about why it was that the circa 2020 racial reckoning enjoyed such vociferous support from the pinnacles of corporate power. The first, which Pan confronts directly, is the idea that the latter was “merely a cynical ‘co-optation’ of the protests” a case of “elite capture,” as influentially argued by the philosopher Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò. The second is the right-wing idea that the Fortune 500’s woke turn reflected both the coercive force of state bureaucracy operating through civil rights law and the increasing numbers and clout of the corporate managerial stratum, which forced companies to kowtow to its ideological preferences. These theories turn out to be versions of the same theory, since both assign progressive activists primary agency.

For Pan, in contrast, the real story is that progressive activists supplied the narrative, but they played a supporting role. As she sees it, they became the willing tool of continued domination by a capitalist class that is “completely at ease with a vision of justice that overlaps with the one held by progressives”—one that not only doesn’t challenge the bosses’ power, but often abets it. In this account, the “woke capital” of the 2010s arose out of a strategic alliance between the capitalist class and the PMC that emerged out of the 2008 crisis. Both classes got something out of this arrangement, as reading Pan’s book side by side with al-Gharbi’s will make clear. However, in the long term, it proved incapable of outlasting the latest stage of the deeper crisis it helped prolong and worsen, and eventually began to fall apart amid a number of high-profile defections from both sides over the past several years.

“If you tolerate racism, delete Uber,” read a memorable billboard put up in 2020. But in 2025, the same company co-hosted a party celebrating Donald Trump’s second inauguration, along with Elon Musk’s X and The Free Press, high-profile defectors from the woke alliance of the 2010s; Uber, it seems, has now joined the ranks of a nascent “anti-woke capital.” Around the same time, a who’s who of CEOs made pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago and then Washington DC to ingratiate themselves to the new regime, and corporate titans like Mark Zuckerberg tossed out the woke raiments of last decade and auditioned their new “based” aesthetic. Uber’s journey from antiracism to anti-wokeness reveals the flexibility of capital and the power it still enjoys over the professions it employs to do its bidding. (Zuckerberg has more leeway to change course than, say, the fact checkers he recently sacked.)

The question indirectly raised by Selling Social Justice is: If wokeness functioned, for roughly a decade, as the legitimation mechanism for the capitalist class and it has now run its course, what will replace it? Can anti-wokeness serve an equivalent function? On a related note, Pan argues, as have Reed and Michaels, that anti-racism has come to serve the same role as racism in earlier eras: “[I]n practice, anti-racism in the twenty-first century increasingly serves to stabilize the economic status quo and obfuscate class inequality, which is, ironically, not unlike the work that racism performed a century earlier.” Both, after all, offer effective ways to “undercut or preempt working-class alliances” by emphasizing difference and stoking resentment and conflict between sub-groups of the underclass. Anti-wokeness, in its many varieties, has sold itself as a return to universalism and colorblindness, hence its capacity to bring together an array of otherwise ideologically varied perspectives in opposition to identitarian particularism. This would seem to make it less useful for justifying and sustaining class domination than its antagonist—but that may undersell the adaptability of the ruling class.

A unifying post-woke dispensation might simply be non-woke; it might emphasize a revival of American civic unity anchored in the older patriotic values seemingly still shared by much of the population. Instead, what the Trump administration has been offering, as I’ve argued before, seems to be a “forever war on woke.” And while that doesn’t seem likely to offer much in the way of a shared positive ethos that will consolidate a new era of durable conservative hegemony, it may be useful enough to capitalists for now, insofar as it keeps the public bitterly divided over matters of identity. It may well also lead to a revival of woke in a few years, propelled by a galvanized resistance with many highly competent unemployed managers in its ranks. That, too, would suit the Ubers and Zuckerbergs of the world just fine.

This week in Compact

• John B. Judis, now a monthly columnist, on why the polls look bad for Trump and for Democrats

• Darel Paul on the why politics will trump the “rule of law”

• Stephen Adubato on Ross Barkan’s Glass Century

• Emmett Penney on the fragile state of the power grid

• Ashley Frawley on the trans-ing of the political subject

• Thomas Fazi on how Romania got a more establishment-friendly populism

• G.D. Dess on Matt Gasda’s The Sleepers

• Jon Toomey on the limits of reciprocal trade deals

• Dan Hitchens on the new pope