Twenty years ago, the military-industrial complex rushed the United States into a pair of wars that cost billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives — only to end in the abject humiliation of American power in Kabul over the past few days. Meanwhile, defense contractors, who had no financial incentive to properly train an Afghan military to operate independently of them, made out handsomely along the way.

Today, a new alliance of big government and big business seeks to profiteer from the domestic culture war. I call it the woke-industrial complex. The consequences could be even more devastating this time around, for democracy at home and for the moral standing of the United States on the global stage.

As I detail in my new book, “Woke, Inc.,” the woke-industrial complex concentrates into the hands of a small group of investors and CEOs the power to determine our social and moral values on a vast range of issues, from climate change to race.

Companies like Blackrock, Goldman Sachs and Twitter leverage their market power to wield undue influence in the marketplace of ideas: by stopping companies from going public, firing employees and censoring viewpoints on the internet. In so doing, they betray the one-person, one-vote principle that defines American democracy. This rampant abuse of economic power undermines open debate and fuels a growing epidemic of institutional mistrust in America that renders our democracy more fragile.

Fragility at home begets fragility abroad. The geopolitical consequences of woke-ism were painfully on display during our ignominious departure from Afghanistan. Pundits who criticized President Biden’s flawed execution missed the more important point: The only way to have ensured an orderly exit from Afghanistan was to impress the fear of total decimation upon the Taliban in response to malign behavior.

Yet Biden made no such threat, and even if he had, the Taliban would have known that he wouldn’t have followed through on it. When the commander-in-chief of the United States obsessively criticizes our country — including by claiming, as Biden did, that “systemic racism” stains our national “soul” — Washington loses its moral standing to project strength abroad precisely at the moments we need it most. 

The Taliban exploited this grim reality to the fullest extent.

This was no tactical failure. It was a failure of moral leadership. Every minute that our military spent this year teaching our troops about “white privilege” should have been spent cultivating American idealism and projecting it abroad in ways that give us the moral authority to do what needs to be done under extraordinary circumstances like the ones we encountered this week. If America’s president doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism, no one else will, either.

Another factor compounded our compromised geopolitical position: America’s top companies have turned their backs on America.

Just this week, Twitter effectively aided the Taliban in their coup by permitting them to tweet to hundreds of thousands of followers as they seized control of the presidential palace in Kabul. Meanwhile, Twitter has permanently banned the 45th president of the United States from communicating with his own followers here in America (the Taliban made hay of this fact in a recent news conference, referring a question about free speech to US companies like Facebook). Companies like Disney and Nike regularly criticize the United States, even as they obsequiously praise the genocidal Chinese Communist Party.

These corporate actions further contribute to a growing morally relativistic perception of America on the global stage: If the same companies that criticize the United States for injustice say nothing bad about the Taliban or the Beijing regime, that implicitly bolsters the moral standing of the latter at the expense of the former.

So when China invades Taiwan in the years ahead, we can reasonably expect that these same companies will remain silent or even praise Beijing, just as Twitter implicitly aided the Taliban this week at the expense of US interests. China expects it, too. That’s what modern progressives miss: Once corporations become vectors to advance progressive agendas, they become vehicles to advance any agenda.

We are only beginning to understand the dangers of the woke agenda and its marriage to American capitalism. The consequences could be existential for American democracy at home and American exceptionalism abroad. The first step in addressing the problem is to expose it and speak out against it.

Vivek Ramaswamy is the author of the new book “Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social-Justice Scam.”