“Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Those were the words manager Casey Stengel addressed to the bumbling 1962 New York Mets.
But nowadays, it might just as reasonably be addressed to the people who run our biggest and most important institutions.
“Get woke, go broke” has been a catchphrase for several years.
Yet the people at the top of major corporations and government agencies keep, well, getting woke and going broke.
Which makes me wonder why.
Harvard, roiled by antisemitism scandals in which woke politics kept administrators from protecting Jewish students, has lost enough in donations that it’s shutting down a library and looking to borrow money to meet expenses.
(It won’t actually go broke with its gigantic endowment, but most of that money is tied up, and it relies on donors to cover year-to-year costs.)
Early-admissions applications took a hit after the fall’s scandals.
Disney, marked by subsidiary Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy’s “Put a chick in it, and make her gay” — as “South Park” famously formulated — is losing money hand over fist, as one beloved franchise after another is turned into politicized dreck that alienates fans.
Sports Illustrated, which had a surefire moneymaker in its venerable swimsuit issue, went out of its way to alienate its once-loyal audience by featuring trans, obese and old models on the cover and is laying off its entire staff.
Planet Fitness has decided to embrace men who identify as women shaving in the women’s locker room, and its stock is plummeting. (It’s even terminated the memberships of women who complained.)
Target, with a similar restroom policy, has also taken a hit.
The debacle Budweiser’s faced since trans personality Dylan Mulvaney became a Bud Light spokesperson remains, despite claims that any damage to sales would be transitory.
PayPal’s blacklisting of politically incorrect businesses has cost it business and led to layoffs.
Higher education’s focus on wokeness and “equity” has seriously damaged its brand.
Enrollment is falling, and Americans don’t view it with the respect they showed just a couple decades ago.
The military’s focus on woke politics and attacks on “white rage” have led to dramatic enlistment declines, especially among young white males.
Why go where you’re not wanted?
You’d think that after just a couple of these flops, American leaders would have learned the lesson.
But the problem isn’t that they didn’t know this stuff is bad for business.
The problem is they knew and didn’t care.
In fact, ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing was created to provide metrics that companies could claim to be excelling at, even as their actions drove profits down.
Happily, investors are beginning to see through this, and some states are acting against ESG metrics.
And give the US military a little credit: Its recruiting ads have started to feature white men jumping out of airplanes instead of diversity nostrums, leading some wags to conclude (probably correctly) there’s a war coming.
But this stands out as an exception.
The State Department is still delivering gay-rights lectures to African nations, which point out that China, on the other hand, is delivering airports.
So why? If obvious wokeness is bad for business, why is so much of our leadership class peddling it at every opportunity?
Well, when a group of people, especially powerful people, does something that seems counterproductive, there are two possibilities.
One is they’re just crazy.
The other is they’re getting something out of a policy that seems, on the surface, destructive.
Sometimes it’s both.
I believe our ruling class is kind of crazy.
Where it used to be socially, ideologically and culturally diverse, now it’s a monoculture.
Oh, there’s more variation in skin color and expressed sexual preference.
But it’s overwhelmingly made up of people who went to the same schools, were indoctrinated with the same values and believe the same things.
Worse yet, they care more about their standing with peers than they do about their actual jobs.
Thus, policies that get leaders plaudits for DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), “climate awareness” or “antiracism” score them social points that improve their position, even as they damage the institutions they’re responsible for.
It’s a conflict of interest, an abuse of power, but it’s very common and generally goes unpunished.
When the United States was an up-and-coming young nation, we made fun of bumbling, hidebound empires whose ruling classes wasted more effort on social climbing among the aristocracy than on helping their countries get ahead.
Now we’re looking pretty bumbling and hidebound ourselves.
And we’ll keep looking that way until there are more consequences for failure at the top.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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Glenn H. Reynolds
