Which is better? Woke progressivism or hard-nosed capitalism?
Would you rather have six eggs or half a dozen?
To me, the whole debate between these two sides is laughable, absurd, perplexing. It reads like a satire.
I think there might be a bit of a growing self-awareness on the side of the so-called woke that they are (qua woke) less opponents of capitalism than products of it and contributors to it. But such awareness still seems quite nascent, at best.
The people who think they can be proponents of capitalism and also at the same time, by the same token, of tradition and traditional institutions, seem to have far less self awareness to me, which is saying something.
Capitalism is the furthest thing from conservative or traditional. In itself it sows the destruction of everything traditional, and as such it is the antithesis of conservatism. A Schumpeterian glorification of entrepreneurial creative destruction is many things, but the one thing it is not and can never be is conservative.
I’m not saying it’s bad thereby; it is neutral, good insofar as the things it destroys are bad and the things it gives rise to are good, and bad insofar as it destroys what is good and gives rise to bad. Whether on balance the coming future is better than the receding past is another question, and not an easy one, and entirely dependent on the standards by which we’re judging good and bad.
All I’m saying, here, is that the shockingly numerous voices who have never questioned whether conservatism and capitalism are compatible (or indeed, often even whether the two are identical!) are delusional. Capitalism may be a good thing, but if so it will not be because it is conservative or opposed to progressivism.
Any good arguments against progressivism are, just are, good arguments against capitalism.