WOKE, INC.

Hobby Lobby good, Patagonia bad: a plaintive denunciation of the movement toward socially responsible corporations.

That Ramaswamy considers Rand Paul to be “one of the greatest advocates for social liberties of Americans” tells you all you need to know about what side of the fence his political shadow falls on, and every word in this book should be read against that knowledge. The author is angry that the Milton Friedman school of predatory corporatism—capitalism in which the only duty of the firm is to maximize shareholder return—has turned into “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations advance causes for the social good. By Ramaswamy’s account, it’s wrong that Delta Airlines, headquartered in Atlanta, should denounce Georgia’s recent attempts at voter suppression while “failing to explain why Americans should care whether a voting law matches the values of an airline company.” The author scores a point or two: He’s right that there’s a disconnect between people’s decrying the corporate personhood enshrined in Citizens United while demanding that corporations take a role in socially progressive causes. He’s also right to note that corporate leaders love to take companies public in order to dilute the power of governing boards, since “the more people you are accountable to, the more powerful you become.” In the face of all this, Ramaswamy wrings his hands about what will happen to, say, the Trump supporters inside Google and demands that conservatives be accorded protected-class status under the terms of civil rights law, since he holds that the “Church of Diversity” is a civil religion whose tenets are to be questioned only at one’s peril. Here he waxes hyperbolic: “According to corporate America it’s anti-semitic to compare liberals to Nazis, but praiseworthy to compare conservatives to them.”

A wounded right-wing yelp against companies that make moral as well as commercial decisions.