Editorial | Why America goes woke and broke
- ‘Woke’ moralism in US foreign policy will provoke a global backlash while encouraging polarisation and extremism from the ‘unwoke’ at home
Go woke, go broke. You may have heard of this expression. It mocks the profit-destroying projects or products of large corporations in the United States as they try to be politically correct or virtue-signalling, usually on matters concerning social justice such as LGBTQ rights and women’s empowerment.
It’s most frequently, though not exclusively, applied to the film and TV industry. Why do filmmakers and TV producers in North America keep aiming for box-office destruction and viewership collapse? While I am no film critic, this question does pique my curiosity, as I was raised on a heavy diet of Hong Kong and Hollywood movies. And one thing I do know is that when a film sells, they will keep making sequels, prequels and franchises, and stealing the same formula from each other.
However, the current “go woke” commercialism seems to run counter to this simple and long-proven profit-making formula. In fact, it has gone to such extremes that it now threatens to kill off such decades-long, money-spinning franchises as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings and the Marvel superhero series.
Consider the latest fiasco with Bud Light, a signature beer line in North America that has long been associated with hyper-masculinity. When it hired Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer as spokesperson, its diehard drinkers rebelled and called for its boycott. Bud Light’s sales slumped and the stocks of Anheuser-Busch, the beer’s brewer, suffered a mini-crash.
After such a frequent trail of failures, some commentators now argue companies are finally learning to give what their customers want, not try to “educate” them on unrelatable social justice themes. We are, perhaps, starting to witness the end of woke.