Kerby Anderson

Why are woke ideas and wokeness more prevalent in some institutions and not in others? One way to answer that, according to Dan McLaughlin, is to understand the phenomenon of bundling.

You have experienced this before in the consumer market. Companies will bundle multiple products into a single package. Cable companies offer cable, phone, and the Internet in one package. Insurance companies bundle home insurance with car insurance.

A problem arises when a company has a virtual monopoly. Consumers don’t like it if they are forced to buy something they don’t want. Bundling also allows the company to dominate the market with a product people don’t like.

This is what is happening with wokeness. “Walt Disney built an empire of movies and theme parks that offered Americans and the world a broadly shared ideal of the childhood imagination. Nike built its brand back when Michael Jordan was quipping that ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too.’” In most of these cases, wokeness didn’t make the product more valuable. Most consumers, if given the choice of with or without, would likely choose the product without the wokeness.

He explains that choosing an alternative isn’t likely. “Don’t like Harvard? Build your own. It will only take 400 years to build up comparable prestige and endowment. Don’t want to watch Star Wars on Disney+? Create your own copyrighted Star Wars universe.”

This is also why you don’t see wokeness with small companies or ones with significant competition. The lesson here is simple: “Go woke, go broke.” A woke plumber who refused to work at a home because there were Bibles on the table and Scriptures verses on the wall won’t stay in business very long. A car mechanic who refused to work on a car with a Trump sticker will go broke.

I think this explains why we only see wokeness in certain places.