The Republican Party may not have much of an agenda to sell to the public right now, but it does have an enemy with which to rally its troops: “woke capital,” or those corporations that have adopted progressive rhetoric on social issues and used their platforms to support voting rights or back movements like Black Lives Matter.

“Parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, told reporters on Monday. “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida wrote the commissioner of Major League Baseball to condemn the organization for moving its All-Star Game from Cobb County, Ga., to Denver in response to Georgia’s new election law. That decision, Rubio said, was “woke corporate virtue signaling.”

To the extent that “woke capital” even exists, it involves real questions of political economy. Simply put, there are few countervailing forces in American life to corporate speech, corporate money and corporate political action. If “woke capital” is a real problem, then the solution is to reanimate those countervailing forces, which is to say, to put life back into organized labor.

Some Republican critics of “woke capital” seem to understand the need to put some distance between their party and corporate America. Rubio, for example, has backed the effort to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., as a punishment of sorts for the company’s occasionally progressive messaging. “It is no fault of Amazon’s workers if they feel the only option available to protect themselves against bad faith is to form a union,” he wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “Today it might be workplace conditions, but tomorrow it might be a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.”

Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, largely quiet since he tried to challenge the Electoral College results in January, has also pledged to take action against the “MLB & the giant woke corporations” that “keep telling Biden’s big lie about Georgia & election integrity.” Hawley said he would soon “introduce a trust busting agenda for 21st century.”

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