Kerby Anderson

Political correctness has been around for decades. But Victor Davis Hanson wonders if it is often used to mask failures in business and government. We certainly have seen major institutions over the last two years go woke. The leaders spend a great deal of time sermonizing and virtue signaling, perhaps to distract from their failures. He calls that the “Bloomberg effect.” The city of New York has difficulty clearing snow from the streets. Perhaps that is why the mayor spent time lecturing us about global warming and the dangers of super-sized soft drinks. The CEO of Delta Airlines lectures the state of Georgia about supposedly racist voting laws that require a valid ID to vote. This is the same type of ID necessary to board one of his planes. Hanson suggests the public try to call Delta’s consumer helplines to fix all the problems travelers have with his airline. We’ve seen an epidemic of well-compensated professional (and Olympic) athletics lecture the country on its various sins of racism, sexism, and the usually affiliated “-isms and -ologies.” But is there any connection between their wokeness and the public’s lack of interest in sports? Universities are the bastion of woke ideology. But Hanson wonders, “Is the general knowledge of the college students superior to their counterparts of five, 10, or 20 years ago?” Did all those experimental courses and majors produce better writers, speakers, thinkers, and scientists? These are just three of a half dozen examples he uses to illustrate his point. His point “is not to berate our institutions, but to warn them.” Either this focus on woke-ism is diminishing their product, or else they are using political correctness to mask their failures and incompetence.