This is an adapted excerpt from “Go Woke, Go Broke: The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America,” set for publication Tuesday.

Corporate wokeness is infuriating, sometimes exhausting to try to comprehend, but it was also inevitable if you study the zeitgeist of corporate America over the last 50 years. Like all revolutions, the woke one at the workplace started small: Woke academics writing papers on the economic benefits, seminars airing those beliefs at places such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Companies increasingly began holding in-house symposiums that discussed soft subjects, including “social responsibility,” or the need for businesses to put aside shareholder concerns to address things such as the environment and to make sure their workforce reflected society. Environmental, social, and governance increasingly became ingrained in the corporate balance sheet.

Further propelling corporate wokeism, a new generation of corporate leaders found its way into the executive class. These were men, and a few women, many of whom were schooled at elite colleges that inculcated them with progressivism even as they sought jobs paying tens of millions of dollars a year thanks to the economic boom created by Ronald Reagan.

This new generation began to flex its might at something called Business Roundtable, setting the stage for the great corporate wokening to come. The Roundtable is the nation’s biggest lobbying group for corporate America. It’s like an exclusive country club, only to gain entry you must be a CEO. Leaders include 181 of the most powerful executives in the world, people such as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of mega-bank JP Morgan and part of that newer, more progressive generation.

On August 19, 2019, Dimon, as head of Business Roundtable, did something that just a few years earlier would have seemed improbable, even sacrilegious. He declared that “shareholder capitalism” was dead and canceled the great economist Milton Friedman, the man who created what history shows to be the most efficient form of corporate governance.

“Since 1978, Business Roundtable has periodically issued Principles of Corporate Governance,” the Roundtable advised its members. “Each version of the document issued since 1997 has endorsed principles of shareholder primacy—that corporations exist principally to serve shareholders. With today’s announcement, the new Statement supersedes previous statements and outlines a modern standard for corporate responsibility.”

Dimon’s statement continued, “While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders. We commit to … deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

In Dimon’s telling, shareholder capitalism and Friedman were being replaced by something noble and modern. Also, thoroughly wokeish. If you really want to know why every company today seems like an extension of the Democratic National Committee — committed to far-left green edicts, ESG that destroys oil production and creates inflation, DEI that devolves into quotas — you can trace much of it to stakeholder capitalism as a defining principle of corporate governance.

Stakeholder capitalism means that companies don’t just make money, they need to take a political stand that is always left of center for reasons that will become apparent. Its embrace of progressivism is all-encompassing: hiring, firing, investing, even advertising. In stakeholder capitalism, the corporation doesn’t place ads to sell products, it advertises to sell woke politics. That same year Dimon did away with Friedman, and during the height of the #MeToo era, which carried its own bit of hysteria, a razor company named Gillette spent millions of dollars in ads to alert the world that every man alive has the Harvey Weinstein gene of toxic masculinity. Men can do better, the company wanted people to know — its ad buy featured actors portraying various forms of gross and faux manhood, because, they said, “boys will be boys.”

Stakeholder capitalism at its finest! Dimon and company want us to virtue-signal while we shave because a male oppressor is born every minute. They wouldn’t put it exactly that way, of course. To them, stakeholder capitalism is refreshing and righteous. Bold and benevolent. Yet when I ask CEOs or business academics to define it, I get a different answer every time, which is why the woke forces found it so easy to hijack it as a tool of progressive, postmodern corporate groupthink as you will soon find out. Shareholder capitalism, meanwhile, might seem antiquated because its power is in its simplicity — and because it is hard for any activist to f*** with. CEOs had one boss: the shareholder. Do good for the shareholder, put people to work, make money for America, pay your taxes, and the rest will take care of itself. Laws will mandate that everyone gets an equal shot. It worked for years until Dimon and company began messing with what Uncle Milton created.

A little background on the man who started the shareholder capitalism movement: Milton Friedman specialized in the field of econometrics, or the use of complex mathematical formulas to study inflation, consumption, and how to grow GDP. He was one of the leaders of the Chicago school of economics that rejected the tax-and-spend consensus of Keynesianism and advocated free-market principles, including cutting taxes and controlling the money supply to achieve economic goals such as full employment.

He also promulgated the theory that CEOs were trained to be good at certain narrow things, such as growing a business and serving shareholders, so they should stick to it. Leave the touchy-feely stuff to the political class. Unlike politicians, CEOs weren’t elected to make the world a better place. If they tried, they would f*** it up.

During his many decades in the public eye, Uncle Milton achieved something rare in the field of economics: He was a Renaissance man, a writer, and a public intellectual speaking on cultural issues, advising presidents and prime ministers on public policy. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 for his analysis of price stability. He helped give us the economic revival of the Reagan years.

The politicization of the boardroom, grandstanding CEOs taking on political causes that he saw beginning in the 1970s, particularly irked him because Friedman also thought it was morally wrong for CEOs to be taking their eyes off the shareholder ball. In his words, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Friedman, one of history’s great economists, died in 2006, but not without leaving his mark — that is until Business Roundtable came along and tried to make him an economic asterisk. In the 1980s through the 1990s and well into the new millennium, when Friedman’s influence reigned supreme, the United States witnessed an economic revival from the malaise of the 1970s. The tech revolutions created wealth like never before. Doing good meant making money, rewarding shareholders for their capital investments, and deploying that capital to expand and hire people, providing them with decent wages and benefits.

What did stakeholder capitalism give us? ESG everywhere. Hiring quotas, uber-powerful DEI advocates inside corporations, and if you haven’t already heard, transgender influencers in beer advertising, and tuck-friendly bathing suits for men transitioning to be women at the retailer Target, the Goldman Sachs pronoun guide, and former Disney CEO Bob Chapek using corporate money to change a Florida law that banned the teaching of sex education to toddlers.

It always struck me as odd that Dimon, someone I know well and admire, put the stake through the heart of Friedman’s shareholder capitalism. The Jamie Dimon I know is a political centrist. He is also a longtime C-suite executive who worked his way from Harvard Business School to assist Sandy Weill, a legendary banking deal-maker, in creating another mega-bank, Citigroup. He is operationally one of the greatest CEOs ever, having steered JP Morgan through the 2008 financial crisis when other big banks needed federal aid, or it would have gone insolvent.

He did this through a lot of creative destruction as opposed to figuring out every conceivable way of maintaining a diverse workforce. He spent his time buying smaller banks and brokerages, scaling them down, and making sure all the parts worked collectively for shareholders. Dimon conducted quite a few mass firings in his time, not very stakeholder-friendly.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

At least before he went woke, Dimon recognized that businesses that struggle to cut costs to survive perish when their products are obsolete, and that puts everyone out of work. Henry Ford, in the mass production of the car, put the buggy whip makers out of work, but those displaced workers got good-paying factory jobs at Ford, and also at GM and Chrysler. The middle and working classes got an efficient form of transportation.

Now that Dimon has gone woke, he and the other stakeholder capitalists appear oblivious to the thing that sets us apart from the rest of the world — the great and once hypercompetitive U.S. economy. Productivity, the mother’s milk of US prosperity, has stalled since 2005. Is it a coincidence that that’s about the time corporate America started going woke? What is undeniable is that what Friedman railed against was mild compared to what’s going down in woke corporate boardrooms today — propelled at least in part by Jamie Dimon. And it pains me to say that.