Economics and the Social Justice Activist

What if the supply exceeds demand?

The author at Tracing Woodgrains argues that Republicans are doomed to be unable to govern the country.

because their voters are increasingly old, rural, and less educated, they lack all but the slightest foothold in the great majority of institutions run by and filled with young, educated professionals: that is to say, the great bulk of institutions involved in the day to day of governance.

Yes, we know that mainstream media, government employees, and educational institutions are all dominated by the Left. We talk about it all the time.

But the Left is not doing a very good job of maintaining those institutions. Public school enrollment has stagnated, while private school enrollment has increased rapidly (from a much smaller base). Most major newspapers have folded. The NYT and WaPo got rich off of Trump-hatred for a while, but more recently their finances have deteriorated.

Harvard students stereotypically have been recruited by McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. But Harvard’s reputation has sustained some hits recently. One can doubt whether their students are the sharpest tools in the shed . Higher education as a whole has lost prestige in recent years, and enrollment figures reflect this.

Woodgrains attends a law school where he is one of the few students who is centrist rather than far left.

My law school is not overwhelmingly progressive because the Powers That Be want it to be progressive. It's overwhelmingly progressive because progressives showed up.

Of course, he is right that young educated people are far to the left of the rest of the country. My question is how this will play out in the job market. In short:

There is a big supply of social justice activists already in the market, with more coming soon. Will demand increase to accommodate them?

Suppose Donald Trump wins a new term. He and his allies have promised to pay a lot more attention to personnel and to agencies with agendas that run counter to conservative values. That does not bode well for government being the employer of last resort for social justice activists.

Republican governors are putting DEI offices at state universities under scrutiny. There has been some voter backlash against progressive school boards and district attorneys and homeless advocates who seem to make the problem worse. Those developments also should worry social justice activists.

The non-profit sector has been a gravy train for many young social justice activists. But the funding for these agencies comes from older, wealthy people. Some of these donors are starting to scrutinize what the agencies are doing. For example, in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, many Jews are concerned about making donations that indirectly fund anti-Israel activism.

Many non-profits receive a lot of their funding from the government. Republicans have become increasingly aware of this and are warming to the idea of shutting off the spigot.

The expansion of “woke capital” that took place following the death of George Floyd has probably peaked. Corporations now see political engagement as having two-sided risk.

My point is that while recently it might have been easy to make a career out being a social activist in government, the non-profit sector, and business, that could be about to change. Leaders at these institutions may start to think that they have all of the activists they need, and maybe more than that. I will be interested to see what happens to Woodgrains’ law school cohort when it hits the job market.

Woodgrains writes,

What's the conservative coalition? Truckers, farmers, business owners, construction workers.

What they have in common is that they work in the profit-seeking sector, providing goods and services that consumers want. While businesses come and go, and industries wax and wane, on the whole the sector is self-supporting and sustainable.

In contrast, the social justice activists mostly work for organizations that in economic terms are parasitical. Governments and non-profits live off of what the private sector can provide them in terms of tax revenues and donations. If federal, state, and local governments find themselves in a financial bind, they will have less capacity to maintain their own employment and to support the non-profit sector.

The popularity of social justice activism in the young college crowd may indeed pose a threat to conservatives. But if the laws of supply and demand hold, it may also pose a threat to those who are counting on activism as a career.

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The Republican Party is Doomed