Comment on this story: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Or so conservative consumers have decided. After decades of complaining about political correctness in corporate America, they now hope to correct corporations’ politics. Tired of critiquing cancel culture, they’re canceling various forms of culture themselves. And after frequent yet extremely niche attacks on what’s become known as environmental, social and governance investing, they seem to have invented their own bizarro GOP ESG, too.
Witness the recent celebrations over the dethronement of Bud Light, that onetime princeling of beers.
For over two decades, Bud Light reigned as the best-selling beer in the United States. It lost that status last month after conservatives lost their minds over an influencer’s Instagram post. Bud Light had sent personalized beer cans to a number of social media influencers in honor of March Madness, not too dissimilar from previous promotional campaigns. One such influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, happened to be trans. Her enthusiastic beer post left some right wingers, ahem, triggered.
Some quite literally: Kid Rock (among others) began using Bud Light cans for target practice. Country music star Travis Tritt excised the beer and other Anheuser-Busch products from his tour hospitality riders. Other celebrities and their followers began treating Bud Light as a lager non grata, too.
The brand’s sales plummeted, down nearly a quarter in the week that ended June 3 compared with the same week in 2022, according to an analysis from the consulting firm Bump Williams. Conservative pundits rejoiced, just as they had also recently gloated over stock declines or other financial damage exacted on Target, Kohl’s, Cracker Barrel and other major corporations condemned for “wokeness.” These companies’ alleged sins included everything from having an HR person oversee diversity initiatives to selling rainbow-themed onesies during Pride Month.
It’s reasonable to condemn the hypocrisy of these actions, given the onslaught of outrage whenever progressives push companies to take more liberal stances on social issues such as same-sex marriage or abortion. But in general, I have few qualms about such consumer activism when practiced by either side.
Let right wingers throw their already-purchased expensive coffee-makers out the window or light their own trendy sneakers on fire or flush breakfast cereals down the toilet. They’re perfectly within their rights to destroy their own appliances, apparel, and plumbing.
Likewise, let liberals shun crispy chicken sandwiches (and maybe conservatives too? Chick-fil-A has upset everyone, lately). I applaud progressives who pressure companies to, you know, stop donating to politicians who attempted to undermine free and fair elections.
We’re all free to shop where we want and to ditch brands whose decisions offend our sensibilities — whether those sensibilities are aesthetic or ethical.
Needless to say, companies hate this form of capitalist punishment.
Historically, big consumer-facing firms have tried to avoid wading into divisive culture-war issues because doing so risks alienating some portion of their audience. With limited exceptions, companies want to be seen as neither woke nor anti-woke; they just want to be sufficiently inoffensive to maximize their customer base. To the extent that they’ve taken political stances lately, that’s usually happened because some important stakeholder or partner — perhaps customers, perhaps employees — has demanded they do so.
And so they have to choose and hope they choose the profit-maximizing stance.
Last year, for instance, some corporations became the last firewall for abortion rights not because C-suite executives felt some particular pangs of conscience but because they feared they might otherwise have difficulty recruiting workers to, say, Texas in the wake of Dobbs. Likewise, Target is selling pro-LGBTQ gear not because its managers necessarily care about the cause but because it’s a way to make money (or, at least, so the company had thought).
These companies are also within their rights to implement whatever marketing and HR policies they wish, so long as they don’t break the law. If conservatives respond to such corporate strategy by attempting to cancel the cancelers, let them try. Again, that’s capitalism for you.
At least it is when consumers and companies practice such freedom of choice. But politicians or other officers of the state must be held to a different standard. That is my larger concern about the discourse over wokeness in corporate America: the conflation of consumer boycotts (whatever their politics) with government action.
At least two Republican candidates running for president have grounded their campaigns in punishing companies for political speech. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has tried to exterminate Mickey Mouse because Disney deigned to criticize his anti-gay legislation (reluctantly, after pressure from the company’s LGBTQ employees). Investor Vivek Ramaswamy’s entire campaign appears to be a crusade against wokeness — in both government and the private sector.
Consumers choosing where and when they shop? That’s the American way. Politicians threatening to deploy the power of the state to reward friends and punish enemies? That way authoritarianism lies.
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