Progressives’ alphabet soup ingredients are DEI hiring and ESG investing. Both often are illegal, and the latter is medieval.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion” became fashionable in corporate America, and enforced in academia. There, refusing to take DEI loyalty oaths provokes exclusion as punishment for deviations from this orthodoxy: Equity is group entitlements — inevitably, a racial spoils system. As Kamala Harris joyfully explains, “Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”

Courts have dampened enthusiasm for DEI by reminding colleges of laws against racial discrimination, and by affirming that corporate officials and even directors can be held personally liable for illegalities. Recently, some star-spangled American companies — responsible for Jack Daniel’s whiskey, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, John Deere tractors and Ford F-150 trucks — have curbed their DEI enthusiasms.

Regarding ESG, last year, $13 billion was withdrawn from asset managers making investment decisions based on “environmental, social and governance” considerations. Unpacked, those categories mean the woke agenda: decarbonizing the economy, social engineering based on identity politics, gender equality, union power and more. Even the solemnly woke Securities and Exchange Commission has deleted ESG from its list (why does it have one?) of investing priorities.

ESG’s defects begin with illegality. The 1940 Investment Advisers Act required advisers to have one overriding concern: their clients’ financial interests. This fiduciary principle was reaffirmed in the 1974 Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which stipulates that those entrusted with investors’ money have the duty to deploy it “solely in the interest of” and “for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to” the investors.

ESG attempts to vitiate this duty, and disguise ESG’s illegality, by asserting that a corporation’s shareholders are just one set of “stakeholders.” And shareholders are inferior to stakeholders whose supposed superiority derives from having no financial stake in the corporation’s performance. Stakeholders include employees, suppliers, customers and (per the Oxford Reference Dictionary) “members of the wider community.” So, a stakeholder is anyone who claims to be affected, at whatever remove, by any corporate activity.

Investors are supposedly enabled by ESG to do good while doing well. Leave aside the Everest of unsurprising evidence that ESG investments do substantially less well than investments made for the purpose of maximizing returns for investors. Now, about doing good:

The greatest good, in terms of alleviating suffering, in all of humanity’s history has been done in recent decades by market-oriented, profit-seeking capitalists: by private wealth serving private interests. In 1975, half the human race lived in what the World Bank calls extreme poverty ($2.15 a day, adjusted for inflation). Today, fewer than 1 in 10 persons are so afflicted.

Former senator Phil Gramm and his colleagues in refuting ESG note: Between 1990 and 2020, the globalized market dynamism ignited in the previous decade by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher pulled up from abject poverty an average of 128,000 people … every day.

In “Ending ESG and Restoring Economic Enlightenment,” Gramm and co-editor Terrence Keeley, the CEO of 1PointSix, a financial advisory firm, discern a paradox concerning progressives who advocate ESG. For them, progress consists of returning to the Middle Ages.

Then, life for most people was (as Thomas Hobbes depicted life in the state of nature) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hitherto in human history, there was stagnation — negligible economic growth — because workers, and the very few who had a surplus beyond subsistence to save, were surrounded by grasping “stakeholders”: kings, nobles, communities, tribes, guilds, churches and others who enforced nonconsensual communal sharing, leeching away much of what little that workers received for their dawn-to-dusk toils.

Mass flourishing has been enabled by economic growth. It began with the Enlightenment principle that individuals own what their labor and investments produce.

ESG is the stealthy socialization of wealth, the surreptitious semi-confiscation of others’ wealth. But progressives’ ESG aspiration is worse than a strange nostalgia for the 1300s. It also is a repellent yearning for the 1930s.

In 1933, Italy’s government formed the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction that, using the nationalized banking system, controlled about 75 percent of the nation’s economy. Benito Mussolini said: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” In 1937, a German law implementing “Gleichschaltung” meant government’s total regimentation of economy and society. The Third Reich’s animating principle was “public welfare before individual gain.”

ESG aspires to achieve comprehensive social control by making the private sector no longer private. With semantic sleight of hand, ESG advocates created their obfuscating category “stakeholders.” This camouflages awkward echoes of the statism of 20th-century totalitarians. Still, the echoes are undeniable.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post. His email address is georgewill@washpost.com.