Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
A staffer is seen with an anti-Bud Light can koozie during a House Appropriations Committee markup in Rayburn Building, June 14, 2023, on Capitol Hill.
Back in 2012, the entire Republican presidential campaign was about slavish worship of entrepreneurs, CEOs, and Wall Street investors. Former Bain Capital executive Mitt Romney was the GOP nominee, and his central argument for becoming president was his business experience. When President Obama made the (entirely obvious) point that business owners depend on the government for political stability and infrastructure that they did not build, Republicans made “you didn’t build that” the slogan for the presidential convention that year.
How times have changed. Now, the GOP is furiously attacking business and entrepreneurs over their investment choices. Today’s Republicans aren’t against capitalism per se, but they are against businesses and investors making decisions they disagree with—specifically, if they are not bigoted enough for their taste, or take into account the risk climate change poses to profits.
Most recently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Fox News that he was urging his state’s pension fund manager to sue the beer company InBev over its decision to do a tiny Bud Light sponsorship deal with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
DeSantis’s argument here is ridiculous on several levels. The supposed justification for the lawsuit, per a letter he sent, is that InBev “breached legal duties owed to its shareholders” when it got involved with “radical social ideologies.” In reality, the entire point of the sponsorship deal was to boost sales of Bud Light, which were large but had been on a flagging trajectory for years. This brand of cheap swill has long been associated with frat parties and older white men, and InBev wanted to freshen up its reputation among younger, more diverse demographics. The whole influencer deal—just one among the thousands done by every big brand—was a cynical marketing gimmick.
Second, insofar as InBev’s share price is down somewhat, it is entirely because of the conservative boycott campaign against Bud Light, which has indeed tanked sales. If anyone is to blame for the Florida pension fund being down slightly, it is conservatives like Ron DeSantis for organizing a blatantly bigoted meltdown when InBev attempted to market one of its brands to people they hate. The chutzpah is incredible. It’s as if conservatives decided to boycott Nike because its association with Michael Jordan promoted race-mixing, and then sued the company because declining shoe sales were tanking their retirement accounts.
Conservatives aren’t just furious about trans people existing, either. Republicans like Reps. Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Andy Barr (R-KY), Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), and DeSantis have attacked “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) standards as supposedly being inappropriate “woke capitalism” that threatens profits. Numerous Republican states have proposed or passed laws attacking the practice.
Again, this is profoundly stupid. ESG is to a large extent a cynical greenwashing enterprise—as Matt Levine notes at Bloomberg, it is trivially easy to get oil investments, including the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, labeled as ESG-friendly. And insofar as it isn’t fraudulent, ESG does consider very serious risks to profits. Climate change in particular is a massive threat to all kinds of businesses; witness the steady stream of insurance companies exiting the Florida home insurance market due to accelerating extreme weather damages. You’d think the government of a state that is more vulnerable than any other to sea level rise and hurricanes would take that problem more seriously.
More broadly, all this is wildly at odds with decades of Republican rhetoric about the private sector. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan famously said. Conservatives thought as a matter of quasi-religious dogma that the state is always wrong by definition, and that unrestrained private enterprise would produce the best of all possible worlds. Now, instead of companies making their own investment decisions free of meddling bureaucratic interference, Republican politicians demand veto power over the tiniest aspects of their marketing decisions.
We also see how the entirety of the Republican policy agenda has come to consist of bigotry, culture-war madness, and authoritarian repression. Back in 2012, conservatives assumed that their agenda of deregulation and tax cuts for the rich would automatically put business on their side, in both political and cultural matters. The moment that partly stopped being true (thanks in part to millennials aging into their prime earning years), they demanded the power to micromanage every business move—specifically to make them more prejudiced and insane.
Considered together with Donald Trump’s plans, should he win the presidency again, to conduct a ruthless political purge of the federal government so he can turn it into his personal plaything, we see what a future Republican regime would look like. Trans people will be subject to relentless state repression, along with anyone who tries to support them. Abortion will be banned nationally under penalty of prison time. And trying to hedge against climate risk will be illegal, even as angry conservative grandpas in Miami Beach are watching Fox News from an armchair half-submerged in 100-degree ocean water.
