Corporate America's Anti-Woke Retreat Is Reaching Its Limits

Over the past year and a half, many U.S. corporations have been forced to rethink their social policies. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs have been scaled back or scrapped altogether, sustainability language has rapidly disappeared from corporate messaging, and executives have grown far more guarded about discussing social issues in public. The driver is political, legal and regulatory pressure from the Trump administration and conservative activists, which has pushed numerous companies to walk back social-impact commitments they once touted with pride. According to Scott M. Curran, a lawyer and adviser on social-impact initiatives, questions that would have seemed absurd back in 2020 — which words carry the greatest risk, which pledges should survive in public statements — have become part of the daily agenda for corporate executives and their lawyers.

But Curran argues that corporate America's backlash against the 'woke' era — the retreat from what critics call 'woke' culture — is now nearing its limit. According to Harvard Law School's Corporate Governance Forum, conservative activists had filed 43 anti-DEI shareholder proposals by May, but the 22 that reached a vote drew average support of only about 1 percent. On the broader front of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, anti-ESG proposals averaged 1.7 percent support, while pro-ESG proposals reached 13.3 percent. The numbers suggest there is little genuine shareholder appetite for an anti-DEI or anti-ESG campaign.

Research from UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy found that companies which kept their DEI policies intact, or voted down shareholder proposals against them, performed no worse financially than those that abandoned such programs. In a recent survey by Benevity, a corporate giving and volunteering technology company, 420 corporate-impact professionals were polled: 78 percent said their organization was continuing its social-impact work at the same level as before, a figure that stood at 57 percent among large companies. At the same time, 69 percent admitted they had changed how they present their programs publicly. In other words, while public rhetoric has softened considerably, the internal infrastructure at many companies has remained largely intact.

Companies with conservative customer bases bear out this trend as well. Chick-fil-A, tied to conservative Christian culture, still states on its website that it values 'diversity, equity and inclusion,' while Bass Pro Shops continues to brand itself as 'united for wildlife' and to lead the largest conservation movement in North America even as environmental advocacy draws heavy criticism. It's a reminder that corporate purpose has always sat outside partisan lines — the need to engage employees, customers and communities can't be legislated away by either side of the political divide.

The case of the AI company Anthropic showed just how costly corporate principles can get: the company refused to comply with Pentagon requirements involving mass surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons, prompting President Trump to order federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's technology. The episode illustrates that corporate principles can carry a steep price — yet still hold firm in practice. There's a commercial logic behind that resilience too: Edelman's 2026 Trust Barometer, based on nearly 34,000 respondents across 28 countries, found that 64 percent of consumers factor a brand's values into their purchasing decisions, while 68 percent say it matters that brands evoke positive feelings such as trust and inspiration.

None of this, in Curran's view, signals a return to the public debates of the early 2020s. Instead, a new phase of corporate purpose is taking shape — one that is far more legally cautious, closely tied to business strategy, grounded in measurable outcomes, and resilient to shifts in the political climate. As Robert Profusek of the law firm Jones Day puts it, 'ESG metrics are a means to an end, not the end itself, no matter what the loudest voices on social media say.' A company that rebuilds its values every four years ultimately loses the trust of its employees, customers, investors and communities — which is why corporate leaders are now focused on building strategies built to outlast the next election and last for decades.