“At the retail level, the culture wars have taken a particularly silly turn as conservatives celebrate Anheuser-Busch’s falling stock prices following a widespread boycott of Bud Light after it partnered with a transgender social-media influencer to promote the beer. The Mexican beer Modelo has soared into the top spot in U.S. beer sales as a result.
But who is going to break the news to the culture warriors? Modelo’s parent company, Constellation Brands, boasts that its “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals…are critical components to our future success.” Trying to one-up always-agitated left-wing social-justice warriors, right-wingers also are angry about Target’s LGBQT displays—and have turned on religiously conservative Chik-Fil-A after learning it has a DEI officer.”
…
“As TechTarget explains, ESG is a “framework used to assess an organization’s business practices and performance on various sustainability and ethical issues” and “provides a way to measure business risks and opportunities.” It’s a way for corporations to evaluate their policies. Are they investing in things that help the environment, instituting fair employment policies, and embracing corporate transparency?”
…
“At the political level, however, ESG—and the reaction against it—has become a means for elected officials to use their respective governments’ massive financial clout to achieve desired cultural aims. That’s where this latest cultural battlefront is becoming dangerous. In blue states, such as California, elected officials are pushing pension funds to divest from their holdings in fossil fuels, firearms manufacturers, and tobacco companies.
They’re also directing vast government investments into companies that match their political aims (alternative energy, recycling, etc.) but might not yield the best bang for the buck. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) has a whopping $440-billion in assets, so the temptation is strong to starve capital from “bad” industries and energize “good” ones.
This has triggered a backlash in Red states, which have passed laws that forbid state business with investment firms that divest in the ways that Democratic states prefer. Texas has taken that approach and, according to one study, could cost the state billions of dollars in higher borrowing costs. Both sides are putting cultural preferences above their fiduciary responsibilities.”
…
“The answer is to call a truce. States should enact “clear fiduciary duty laws that define who is responsible for state investment” and allow them to use ESG factors only if they promise to yield better financial results”
…
“The obvious and important goal is “to insulate pension funds, other investments and public contracts…from political concerns.” Of course, trying to convince politicians to limit their political influence in financial decisions is no easy feat, but there’s too much financial risk to let these bitter cultural battles spread from the grocery-store shelves to Wall Street.”
“most of his anti-liberal broadside is at once underbaked and overheated.
The critique is underbaked in the sense that it’s not clear from his account how exactly this rather large “elite” is responsible for the destruction of conservative norms and small-town America. How can we hold a graphic designer in Chicago or a Whole Foods supply chain specialist in Austin responsible for the decline of Christian morals and the hollowing out of small towns?
It’s overheated in the sense that Deneen turns his rivals into cartoon villains, arguing that “the current ruling class is uniquely ill-equipped for reform, having become one of the worst of its kind produced in history.”
Roman nobles were legally permitted to rape their slaves. The military elites of the Mongol Empire were constantly murdering civilians and each other. In France after the Black Plague, the impoverished aristocracy stole from their already-suffering peasants to continue funding their lavish lifestyles. The elite of the early American South centered their entire society around the racist brutality of chattel slavery.
Is the American elite out of touch with the working class in ways that have tangible and negative consequences for the country? Sure. But it’s not remotely comparable to the bad elites of previous centuries.
This loss of perspective tarnishes Deneen’s argument throughout the book — a problem most vividly on display in his treatment of the divide between “the many” and “the few.”
In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.
Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”
Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions.”
“DeSantis argues that this is a pro-transparency change that will ensure Disney cannot do whatever it pleases without some semblance of state oversight. It could also be, as DeSantis critics like Jonathan Chait have argued, a move that will allow DeSantis to exert direct pressure over Disney’s content in the future. The board members won’t be able to write or reject plot arcs in future Disney films, of course, but an unhappy board could cause problems for the company’s development plans in and around its Florida theme parks.”
…
“In the old days, conservatives would have viewed unelected officials being appointed to oversee corporate decisions as a worrying intrusion of state power into private affairs. DeSantis has figured out how to get them to cheer for it.”
“The group aims “to align conservatives on the narrow and limited view of antitrust that Robert Bork popularized in the 1970s, called the ‘consumer welfare standard,'” notes Washington Monthly. This standard says consumer interests—not breaking up companies just for being big or inducing artificial competition just for the sake of competition—should be the primary concern of antitrust law enforcement. It is not a “pro-monopoly” argument but an argument against excessive government intervention in private industry and for a conception of antitrust enforcement that puts protecting consumers—not any particular economic ideology—first.
“Under the consumer welfare standard, which has anchored U.S. antitrust law for over four decades, consumer harm is measured through tangible economic effects and empirical evidence,” notes Tom Herbert, federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform, in a recent opinion piece in The Hill. “Antitrust law under the consumer welfare standard allows business conduct that benefits Americans through lower prices, better quality products and greater access to goods and services.”
Just a few years ago, the fact that Republicans would turn against such a standard in favor of a leftist vision of antitrust enforcement would be weird, to put it mildly. But antitrust law is now seen as another tool in fighting the culture war. “Large businesses [are] increasingly viewed as the enforcement arm of the cultural Left,” notes Klein, and “the cancel culture and anti-PC debates have become more animating for a lot of conservatives than traditional social issues.””
“actually ending someone’s career through the power of public backlash is easier said than done. Few entertainers have truly been canceled — that is, they haven’t had their careers totally shut down by negative criticism on the internet.”