Does Social Justice Over-Involvement Render Enterprises All But Insolvent?
Go Woke, Go Broke and other questionable couplets.
Pesca’s Rule of Aphoristic Couplets states: A saying that rhymes is 50% less likely to be true than a saying that doesn’t rhyme.
This was perhaps more eloquently put in Poor Pesca’s Almanack (1793 edition):
He who follows a rhyming dictum
Tis nary the victor, but oft the victim
Which brings us to the newfangled adage: “Go woke, go broke”. Lately I’ve been writing about NPR’s travails, my theory being that the network is no longer connecting with audiences as it once did, because the programming is off-putting to core listeners. James Carville gets it, telling an Aspen Ideas Festival audience:
“When you start speaking in a language that people don’t speak, they resent that. And if you start speaking like NPR, you’re going to lose votes. So I tell people there’s one term that I just don’t like, the term communities of color. I don’t know what the hell it means. So I live in New Orleans. So I saw three guys on the street corner. I said, ‘Hey, fellas, how are things in the community of color today?’ They said, ‘What’s this son of a bitch talking about?'”
Carville there was using NPR as the stand-in for out-of touch, lefty buzzword-inflected way of seeing the world that regular people can’t relate too. MY point was that even NPR audiences can no long relate to NPR.
Of course, my subtle, carefully crafted, bordering-on-genius arguments were reduced to “So what you’re saying is…go woke, go broke”, and then a meme of Kid Rock shooting beer cans.
Actually, even though it is true that NPR is ailing financially, I don’t believe their ailments are best diagnosed by: “go woke, go broke”.
First of all, the idea of “woke” is so disputed and derided as to be useless. Second of all, there is plenty of socially justice-oriented content that NPR, or any news outlets, can and should pursue that is accurate, relevant, and moves our understanding of society along. I’m sure Ron DeSantis or certainly Vivek Ramaswamy would deride most of NPR’s content as “woke”, even, or especially, the good stuff.
My critique of NPR is about the misapplication of jargon and ideology where grounded news judgement should prevail. NPR got that calculation wrong too many times to retain its audience. But that’s not to say media has NEVER gone “broke” because it went “woke”.
Go Woke, Go Broke: Confirmed Cases
The examples pointed to by “go woke, go broke” theorists are usually in the realm of marketing, retail, or pop culture, but there are some cases in journalism. The LA Times is experiencing a severe downturn thanks in no small part to the social justice activism championed by its billionaire owner’s daughter. The Philadelphia Inquirer, even as they rebranded as an explicitly “anti-racist” newspaper, didn’t go broke, but that’s largely because they got taken over by a non-profit. Michael Moynihan recently wrote an excellent accounting of the end of Vice Magazine that makes the case for runaway social activism conspiring to steer that once august filthily transgressive magazine into the dirt. My take on the end of Vice is that it was always a magazine of youthful rebellion, but leadership began to mistake the particular flavor of youth they were writing for. What was once a bible for aspiring and actual gutter punks began to be written for and by sociology minors.
You find more examples of franchises going woke, then going broke, in pop culture. The most frequently cited examples are often not necessarily woke, just rebooted with a twist, like a full-scale gender swap out. The 2016 version of Ghostbusters wasn’t a box-office success but not necessarily for “woke” reasons, the all-female Ocean’s film Ocean’s 8 was profitable. The 2023 version of The Little Mermaid with live actors didn’t emphasize a social justice agenda, it was about singing crustaceans, but it did cast as its lead a Black actress, the criticism of which strikes me as blatantly racist rather than engaged in legitimate social critique. But if those are poor examples of “go woke go broke” these are better ones:
Victoria’s Secret (the televised fashion show)
And Just Like That (The Sex in the City Reboot)
There are caveats to all of these. Later seasons of long-running franchises often flounder, for reasons having nothing to do with a social justice agenda. The creative process relies more on alchemy than science; producing reliably compelling cultural content isn’t analogous to Coke sticking with a tried and true formula for syrup. Also, the crankiest viewers who are specifically hunting for evidence to support the “go woke, go broke” thesis are the ones most likely to publicly grouse, thus cementing a narrative. And in the case of the NBA and the Sex in the City reboot, there was an internal recognition that poorly executed social justice content was failing to connect to the audience thus prompting a pull-back.
This list is far from definitive, but it’s also not cherry picked. These are prominent examples in pop culture, which I think truly do represent instances of the phenomenon. If you can think of other great ones let me know.
Weirdly, I can’t come up with a “go woke, go broke” agreed-upon archetype in pop culture. The all-female Ghostbusters reboot is the most notorious example, but I don’t think it’s a good one. They tried something different, it didn’t work, but it didn’t work just as badly as Ghostbusters II with the original cast didn’t work. Sequels and reboots of iconic movies are hard, just ask the not-woke Caddyshack II, Coming 2 America or Steve Martin’s The Pink Panther.
There is a “go woke, go broke” archetype in marketing, which is Bud Light’s partnering with Dylan Mulvaney. But an organized right-wing boycott of a consumer brand is fundamentally different from an artistic product that fails to connect because of its content. I think it’s telling that there isn’t one clarion cultural example to exemplify the trend. If we argue “Politicians are corrupt”, we can site Richard Nixon, Albert Fall, Bob Menendez, or hundreds others to flesh out our example. They might be outliers, they might be rare exception, but only defense attorneys on retainer would argue that they don’t at least embody a valid example of the critique. But with pop culture the examples are much more nebulous.
Go Woke, Go Broke: Clear Refutations
If we’re being fair, we can’t just cite failed examples of going woke, while ignoring the successes. M*A*S*H, Maude, and even The Smothers Brothers were “woke”, back when the term held its original meaning. More recently, there have been examples of film and television that have greatly benefitted from their creator’s socially-justice oriented instincts. A few are:
Watchmen (HBO Series)
Pose
Insecure
Euphoria
Orange is the New Black
What did I leave off?
I have quibbles with all of these, except Watchmen which was all but perfect. As an anthology, Small Axe had triumphs and duds. You could argue that Euphoria isn’t “woke”, so much as meeting its audience where they live. Disclosure didn’t prove its assertion that film portrayals inspired real-life violence, Pose and Orange is the New Black fell apart in later seasons (but not because they were any more socially oriented than earlier seasons). But all would not exist were they not heavily animated by the social justice orientations of their creators, and the culture would be poorer for it. I’m sure the creators of these projects would argue that the inspirations for these products were to connect through shared stories and characters, as is the motivation for all art, or in the case of Disclosure effecting documentary film. But an undeniable part of the effectiveness of the connection was the desire to use art to communicate a world view and values. I wouldn’t insult any of them by using the term “woke”, but the kind of people who argue “go woke, go broke” would, or in the face of really impressive art probably wouldn’t.
Go Woke Go Broke: 83% Untrue
I suspect that if one were able to quantify the social justice elements of cultural products, and put those scores on one axis, and then chart on the opposite axis the ratings, box office, or audience engagement the result would be random. The scatter plot would not show a correlation, inverse or regular. It would be, like so much of the debate, just noise. Admittedly, I don’t have the data at hand to generate such a graph, but in its place I can offer yet another couplet from Poor Pesca’s Almanack,
The supposed correlation ‘tween wokery and brokery
Is half foofaraw and a third jiggery-pokery.
As a decidedly non-woke (but liberal) person, there's a lot of good, fairly self-consciously "woke" media out there. In particular, my favorite genre of visual media is probably "woke" cartoons, e.g. Stephen Universe, Nimona, Luca, She-Ra.
I also tend to like music where the singer is several shades to the left of me. I'm a big fan of Phil Ochs and Kimya Dawson, even if I'm pretty sure with would object to me and my politics.
I'd argue that Orange is the New Black became much more socially oriented in the later seasons as it diverged from the source material. This NYT article previewing season 7 describes the transition from season 4 to 5 as a "fulcrum" where "the series tilted more toward the somber". Not coincidentally, season 5 has a 71% on Rotten Tomatoes while seasons 1-4 are all mid 90s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/arts/television/orange-is-the-new-black-final-season.html
This isn't to say that the first few seasons weren't "political", but they were more grounded and character-focused. A typical S1 plotline would be something like how the protagonist - a bougie woman sent to prison - is feeling isolated and out of place among the prison population. One scene has her complain that she's falling behind on Mad Men and the episode ends with her boyfriend watching it without her. Meanwhile, another prisoner is bitter that she missed a chance to reconnect with her father on his deathbed. The contrast highlights how petty many middle-class concerns are. A typical post-S5 plotline will act as a proxy for the killing of Freddy Gray or a private prison corporation opening an ICE detention facility. The later plots were much less focused on how social institutions affect the characters and more focused on using the characters to show the institutions. Probably the most heavy handed example was a Jewish and Muslim inmate having a conflict over access to "the west bunk" in their cell.