https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_tyranny_of_woke_capital.html
Traditional American values have long been under attack by social justice warriors, cultural Marxists advancing the insidious tenets of critical theory. Their “long march through the institutions” has infiltrated schools, universities, entertainment, the mass media, the courts, politics, and beyond. One might assume that business, adhering to the Milton Friedman doctrine of maximizing returns for shareholders, would be insulated from their malign agenda. But that assumption is no longer valid, according to Stephen Soukup’s recent book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. He illuminates how ‘progressive’ forces have insinuated themselves into regulatory agencies, the finance industry, and corporate America, jeopardizing capital markets and the free-market system itself.
The book traces the genesis of American progressivism to Richard Ely (1854-1943) of Johns Hopkins University. Believing in a confused amalgam of religion, socialism, white superiority, and a paternalistic state, Ely advocated that the state should be harnessed to fix social problems like poverty, alcoholism, racial tension, and child labor in G-d’s name. He never presented himself as a socialist, but believed G-d works through the state, which should heal the ills of capitalism through labor reform and compulsory education. With little faith in the canaille to vote in society’s and their own best interests, he favored a “third way”: employing professional administrators to manage society rationally, guard against laissez-faire economics, and make socialism unnecessary. This new progressivism looked at the American state as the natural, necessary “administrator” of civic life.
Political scientist Dwight Waldo, the defining figure of modern public administration, refined Ely’s ideas and propounded that public servants should be “value advocates,” “agent of change,” and stewards of “social equity, democratic administration, and proactive, non-neutral public administration.” Voters and their elected representatives were to be superseded by unelected, unaccountable experts — with ostensibly better values than the people. Though it was seen as being in violation of the Constitution, Waldo wanted a central bank with an administrative elite controlling monetary policy to maintain stability.
