Richard Hanania is a Research Fellow at the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. The Saltzman Institute of War and Peace was founded in 1951 under the sponsorship and tenure of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President of Columbia University.
Hanania opens his essay Why is Everything Liberal? with the following presupposition: “In a democracy, every vote is supposed to be equal. If about half the country supports one side and half the country supports another, you may expect major institutions [read: corporate America] to either be equally divided, or to try to stay politically neutral.”
Yet, due to the marginal Evangelical and Pro-life Catholic Christian input and impact on the culture, this is not what we find. “If it [corporate America] takes a position on the hot button social issues around which our politics revolve, almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left. In a country where Republicans get around half the votes or something close to that in every election, why should this be the case?”1
For an answer to the question why corporations are woke, we must look at what has changed in the last decade. According to Hanania, the answer is found in the marshaling, organizing, and making ready for action. He writes: “My theory that institutions are captured by whatever segments of the population are most mobilized would predict that the mobilization gap between liberals and conservatives has increased over the last several years.”2
The answer to that question is indeed not that difficult. Newsrooms, education, sports, arts and entertainment, government, Fortune 500, Big Tech, and medicine lean left because American Christendom abandoned public education and the public square over the last 100 years. This in direct disobedience to Jesus’ Kingdom assignment to His disciples at Caesarea Philippi [Matthew 16:18] in explaining that His ekklesia was to be positioned in the rough and tumble of the public arena.
America’s Founders established a Biblically based culture to emphasize that the glory of a nation lies in its righteousness, not in its GDP or military prowess [Proverbs 14:34]. Solomon aptly put it thus: “Righteousness [moral and spiritual integrity and virtuous character] exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people.”
Odious and deplorable might be the epitaph writ large all over mid-20th century and early 21st century America as profane secularism debased and distorted the culture. A common view among America’s Founders was that Christianity was necessary for happiness and political prosperity, as well as to promote virtue and keep vice at bay.3
What happened to America in this period amounts to one of history’s most profound deceptions, as expressed in Genesis 3:1: “Did God really say...?”
A nation “founded for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith” [Mayflower Compact, November 11, 1620] has now sanctioned, and even empowered, the demolition of the Biblically based culture established by America’s Founders, with secular Justices removing prayer in 1962 [Engel v. Vitale], the Bible in 1963 [Abington School District v. Schempp], the Ten Commandments in 1980 [Stone v. Graham], discovering the right to kill unborn babies in 1973 [Roe v. Wade], exalting and codifying into law homosexual sin and same-sex marriage in 2015 [Obergefell v. Hodges], and expanding homosexual and transgender rights in 2020 [Bostock v. Clayton County].
As a result, cultural Marxism is gaining momentum in contemporary America, along with its ideological compulsive obsession with “diversity” and “tolerance,” amidst its banning of opposing viewpoints that conflict with leftist orthodoxy and validating the violation of First Amendment rights by its allies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and YouTube.
These niggling, insidious “deities” have become the sole arbiters of truth in America, of right and wrong - judge, jury, and executioner - whom through deceit and conceit have forged a false sense of order and justice.
They censored and silenced Dr. Vladimir Zelenko through their multiple media platforms, including an all-out ban on Twitter, for recommending hydroxychloroquine and other effective treatments for Covid-19.