Maybe we’re better off if Elon Musk’s attempt to take over Twitter fails. No, wait, hear me out.

I’ve been rooting for the Tesla CEO in his battle with Twitter’s sad board of directors, whose members seem eager to protect their power and position. And it’s been fun to watch all the establishment pundits, academics and regulators circle the wagons against a man whose unpardonable sin is a desire to let people speak freely. He might even stop them from abusing their power to affect elections (always on behalf of Democrats, of course), which is intolerable.

But now I’m having second thoughts.

You see, Elon Musk would be good for Twitter, making it a better, more wholesome place. But set against that is the obvious reality that Twitter has been terrible for the left and its institutions.

Twitter isn’t reality. The vast majority of Americans don’t care about what happens on Twitter. The views expressed there — in favor of “wokeness,” critical race theory and trans issues — don’t reflect the views of most Americans. But the people running America’s institutions, and the left, act as if Twitter is reality.

Through Twitter they interact with one another, one-up each other in performative politics and generally form a highly distorted view of the world and how it works. Twitter makes them feel powerful because they can band together and gang up on people they want to cancel, and often the folks running the institutions where those people work are foolish enough to think that Twitter sentiment means something.

But there’s a reason the world isn’t actually run by Mean Girls. The power of gossip, ostracism and backstabbing only gets you so far, and the price of that power is a narrow, distorted world.

So Democrats have been courting blacks and importing Hispanics for decades in the hope of building a demographic majority, as Ruy Teixeira once proposed. But, as Teixeira now warns, blacks and Hispanics are moving away from the Democratic Party because it’s getting its guidance from woke white people on Twitter.

Struggling members of the black and Hispanic (and for that matter white) working class aren’t excited about drag-queen story hours or sermons on systemic racism. They want good jobs at good wages and a chance to get ahead, not political theater and economic stagnation.

Virtually any sensible politician of the past century would have seen the Democrats’ approach as suicidal. But the activists who run the party take cues from each other and brook no departures from the cult of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

The corporate world is, if anything, worse. As Elon Musk himself just noted, “The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable.” His statement came after the streaming service reported it had lost more than 200,000 subscribers, its first drop in over a decade, when it had expected to add 2.73 million. That’s rather a big gap, and Netflix shares tumbled.

Why the heavy bleeding? Because, as Musk remarked, Netflix’s executives care more about striking the right political notes than they do about pleasing subscribers. Its series include “He’s Expecting” and “Dear White People.” That’s not a sustainable approach, and Netflix is hitting its limits.

And it’s not just Netflix. On Apple TV+, Jon Stewart’s new show is flopping, with only 180,000 viewers, despite his efforts to go woke with show themes like “The Problem With White People.” Twentysomethings spouting woke nonsense are tedious enough; guys Jon Stewart’s age doing it are deadly dull.

CNN+, meanwhile, can only envy Jon Stewart’s numbers. With only 150,000 subscribers against a target of 2 million, it’s shuttering not even a month after it launched. CNN, which once was a hard news channel, got woke. And as the saying goes, “Get woke, go broke.”

Woke Disney is also floundering, having picked an unnecessary fight with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over a bill banning the teaching of sex and gender theory to young children. Though Disney’s employees and executives are strongly opposed to the bill, a majority of Florida voters support it. Now lawmakers are taking a second look at the company’s special legal benefits in Florida — negotiated when Disney’s public face was the all-American and avuncular Walt.

Musk is exactly right. Wokeness is a “mind virus,” a toxic idea that spreads from one person to another like a zombie plague. It makes you stupid and removes concern for your well-being.

And as I wrote in “The Social Media Upheaval,” Twitter is the main vector by which this virus is spread. But as long as it’s destroying the left, is it really a good idea to stop it?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.