Peace of Palo Alto

Description

"According to Ross Douthat in the New York Times, the Treaty of Detroit which led the basis of the social welfare compromise, is being replaced by the Treaty of Palo Alto, which enshrines Woke Capitalism:

"Ross Douthat of the New York Times speculates that part of the leftward move for American capitalism mirrors what once was called the Treaty of Detroit, in which US automakers agreed to labor contracts with the United Auto Workers that in the long run proved harmful to those companies.

He writes:

The system defined by the so-called Treaty of Detroit, the labor-management agreements struck between Walter Reuther and the Big Three automakers, was well-intentioned but also self-interested, a necessary-seeming concession to political trends that might have threatened corporate independence and profits even more. Douthat labels the current corporate “wokeness” as being what he calls the Treaty of Palo Alto, writing: But there are other ways to compromise besides on wages, and at an accelerating pace our corporate class is trying to negotiate a different kind of peace, a different deal from the one they struck with New Deal liberalism and Big Labor. Instead of the Treaty of Detroit we have, if you will, the Peace of Palo Alto, in which a certain kind of virtue-signaling on progressive social causes, a certain degree of performative wokeness, is offered to liberalism and the activist left pre-emptively, in the hopes that having corporate America take their side in the culture wars will blunt efforts to tax or regulate our new monopolies too heavily." (https://mises.org/wire/rise-woke-capitalism)