Corporate America’s anti-woke retreat is reaching its limits
· Fortune
Much of corporate America has spent the past 18 months second-guessing and editing itself.
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Many diversity programs were renamed or eliminated entirely. Sustainability language quickly disappeared from corporate communications. Executives became considerably more careful about advancing or even discussing different social impact issues. Under intense political, legal, and regulatory pressure from the Trump administration and conservative activists, companies reconsidered once-celebrated social impact policies and practices.
I have watched this upheaval from inside corporate conference rooms as an attorney and adviser who works in social impact. My clients—many of whom count on me to keep our work private—range from global corporations, founders, and CEOs to their charitable and social impact initiatives, often including partnerships with their peers and other industry stakeholders.
The specifics of my conversations with clients are likewise bound by confidentiality. But I can tell you that I’ve fielded questions—from executives, attorneys, and impact leaders everywhere from Fortune 500 companies to America’s largest law firms—that would have sounded ridiculous back in 2020: Which words create the most risk? Which commitments still belong in public communications? Which programs remain central to the business? How can we build social impact strategies that withstand a rapidly changing political environment? What will our talent, customers, and other stakeholders think?
Several of the organizations I work with are in genuinely precarious positions at the moment. One of them came close to being legislated out of existence by Congress. Others have been bracing for years about growing scrutiny over inclusion initiatives. (Naming them in a national business publication could put a target on their backs, so I won’t.)
At the same time, even as good corporate citizens navigate these turbulent waters, it feels like the tide is beginning to turn. By that I mean, corporate America’s anti-woke retreat appears to be approaching its limits. And a new model of corporate purpose is emerging in its wake: more legally disciplined, more closely connected to business strategy, and more measurable and designed to survive political change. At its core, it is still deeply rooted in two realities: that caring about all people is inherently part of doing good; and that doing good is good for business.
Consider what shareholders are actually saying, as assessed by Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance. Through May, conservative activists had filed 43 anti-DEI shareholder proposals, dwarfing the number of proposals supporting DEI. Yet the 22 anti-DEI proposals that reached a vote received an average of roughly 1 percent support. Looking across environmental, social and governance issues more broadly, anti-ESG proposals averaged about 1.7 percent support, compared with about 13.3 percent for proposals supporting ESG-related actions or disclosures.
The same data show declining enthusiasm for many prescriptive pro-DEI proposals. Investors appear increasingly selective about how companies address these issues. They also appear to have remarkably little appetite for the anti-DEI agenda being offered in their name. Additionally, new research out of University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy shows that firms that either kept their DEI policies or voted down anti-DEI shareholder resolutions have performed just as well financially as those that didn’t.
An even stronger signal arrived this summer. Benevity, which provides corporate giving and volunteering technology, surveyed 420 corporate impact professionals for its latest State of Corporate Purpose report. Seventy-eight percent reported that their organizations had continued their purpose work as before. Among respondents from large companies, the figure was 57 percent. Meanwhile, 69 percent said their organizations had changed how they described their programs publicly.
That distinction matters. While the public language of corporate purpose changed dramatically, much of the underlying infrastructure survived. Put another way, you can argue, as Jones Day’s Robert Profusek did in Fortune earlier this year, that “social purpose stakeholder capitalism” may have gone too far too fast; and at the same time, you can acknowledge that there is important business value in corporate impact initiatives. “Most companies support key ESG objectives already, recognizing that they are essential to the operation of any company positioned to succeed in the 21st century,” Profusek wrote. “ESG considerations are important means to an end, not an end of themselves no matter what the loudest voices on electronic and social media might say.”
Corporate leaders (and their lawyers) are scrutinizing language, eligibility rules, legal exposure and public communications far more carefully. They are also asking harder questions about which initiatives serve employees, customers, communities, and the business itself. These conversations increasingly sound like strategy discussions. That evolution will likely make corporate purpose more durable for the years, headlines, and headwinds ahead.
Some of the companies illustrating this point hardly fit the stereotype of progressive corporate activism. Chick-fil-A, long associated with conservative Christian culture, still maintains a webpage explaining how it “values diversity, equity and inclusion,” using that exact phrase, which it either admirably or mistakenly never scrubbed from its website. And at a time when talking about environment or conservation invites increased scrutiny, Bass Pro Shops still proudly describes itself as “United for Nature” and continues to declare that it is leading North America’s largest conservation movement.
This makes sense. Corporate purpose has always belonged—and still belongs—across the political divide. Humans care about their fellow humans, as well as our shared planet. Companies have employees to attract, communities to operate in, customers to earn, stakeholders to serve, reputations to protect. Human goodness is a constant, and humans show up more fully in workplaces and marketplaces that serve the innate demand for good, even if we reasonably disagree on the edges of what constitutes appropriate corporate citizenship.
At the other end of the corporate spectrum, Anthropic recently demonstrated just how consequential a company’s impact commitments can become. The artificial-intelligence titan resisted Pentagon demands concerning uses of its technology that included mass surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons. The dispute eventually led President Trump to order federal agencies to stop using Anthropic technology and produced an extraordinary confrontation between one of America’s fastest-growing AI and technology companies and the federal government.
Whatever one thinks of Anthropic’s particular limits, the episode illustrates a larger point: Corporate principles can remain operational even when adhering to them becomes expensive.
The commercial incentives remain powerful, too. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer, based on nearly 34,000 respondents across 28 countries, confirms that employers are particularly well positioned to build trust among people with differing values and perspectives. Its 2025 consumer research found that 64 percent of respondents choose brands based in part on their beliefs and 68 percent consider it highly important for brands to make them feel positive emotions such as confidence, inspiration or safety.
None of this requires a return to the controversies of corporate activism of the early 2020s. There is ample opportunity for refining and growing a more settled, durable approach to impact for the rest of the decade to come.
The next generation of corporate purpose can be more disciplined. Companies can choose issues connected to their businesses and stakeholders. They can comply rigorously with civil-rights laws. They can measure results. They can explain why a particular investment belongs in their strategy. They can approach employees and customers as politically diverse human beings whose trust has to be earned, who may disagree on matters of style and degree, but not on the substance of caring for our fellow human, fellow colleagues, and fellow consumers.
This is also where the anti-woke backlash may ultimately prove surprisingly useful. It subjected corporate purpose to a stress test. Some initiatives proved legally vulnerable. Others lacked a clear connection to business strategy. Some corporate pronouncements outran the work behind them. Stronger programs survived because leaders could clearly explain why they existed and what they accomplished.
America’s political winds will keep changing. A company that rebuilds its values every four years will eventually exhaust the trust of employees, consumers, investors and communities alike.
Corporate leaders now have an opportunity to design their social impact strategies for durability: grounded in law, connected to business, supported by evidence and broad enough to serve stakeholders who see the world differently.
The next era of corporate purpose will be built to survive the next election and thrive for decades.
Scott M. Curran is a social impact attorney, professor, strategic adviser, and the author of Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact, published this month by Simon & Schuster.
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