Communism! Heresy! they cried
We know by now that principles among many conservatives are like honor among thieves. Like Martin Blank’s “moral flexibility.” Like small government and states’ rights. Where they stand depends on what day it is. Guns must be protected at the federal level. They are that important. Women, not so much.
Conservatives’ stance on free markets and free association as well. Contingent. They’re all about them so long as they like your choices. Until they don’t.
Investments, for example (Slate):
ESG criteria (for “environmental, social, and governance”) are a set of standards for public companies’ actions that investors use to guide where they put their money. (These criteria could include committing to reduce carbon emissions by a certain percentage by a specific date, allowing employees work-at-home flexibility in light of pandemic safety and child care issues, or requiring that a minimum percentage of the board of directors be female or persons of color.) As more and more investors, large firms, and asset managers have gravitated toward ESG positions in recent years, they have found themselves at odds with a Republican Party that used to count on these institutions as A base of support. Republicans are now striking back, which is why you hear more of them railing against “woke capitalism” and ESG. One group recently formed a new right-wing business lobby, the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, to compete with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a long-standing supporter of mainstream Republican policies that anti-ESG activists now see as corrupted by the left. Another recent anti-ESG initiative has been to push red states to pass legislation to divest state pension fund assets from firms who follow ESG principles. For all the GOP fretting over left-wing “cancel culture,” the party is working very hard to cancel ESG.
A typical example comes from former Vice President Mike Pence, who wrote a May 26 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (“Republicans Can Stop ESG Political Bias”) full of right-wing fervor. He called ESG a “pernicious strategy” from the “woke left” including “an unelected cabal of bureaucrats” and “large and powerful Wall Street financiers” who “almost never refuse to do business with China or Russia.” He compared ESG ratings to something from the Chinese Communist Party. He warned that far-left extremists are using ESG to impose a radical agenda and take away our freedoms. In fact, it is Pence who is trying to override the free market, where millions of investors have decided ESG is what they want.
More choice when it comes to privatizing schools: good. Choice when it comes to women’s health : bad. More choices in an unregulated free market : good. People choosing not to invest with rapacious, un-diverse companies lacking even rudimentary concern for the planet: bad.
Given the growing wave of influential ESG investors, most public companies and asset managers have incorporated ESG into their operations to meet investor demand. Incorporating ESG means implementing policies and procedures to measure and accurately disclose the firm’s application of ESG principles to its business operations, workforce, and governance. For asset managers, incorporating ESG also means creating financial products that follow ESG principles, such as ESG-based investment funds. That is the free market at work. Customer demand shifts and businesses adjust their operations to meet the new demand. ESG is the product of a free market, not a cabal of pernicious financiers with international sympathies.
Don’t get me wrong. I still believe the corporate model for doing capitalism is overdue for a serious overhaul. ESG and B-Corps are just lipstick on pigs. The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. About who has it and who doesn’t. Conservatives are full of empty platitudes about freedom and liberty so long it is theirs and theirs alone. Challenge that control and all the happy horseshit goes out the window.
UPDATE: It’s all nihilist pretense.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Request a copy of For The Win, 4th Edition, my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us.
If in a position to Play to win in 2022 (see post first), contact tpostsully at gmail dot com