By Elliot Kaufman
Thursday, August 24, 2017
‘Amid this turbulence,” the New York Times breathlessly reported, “a surprising group of
Americans is testing its moral voice more forcefully than ever: C.E.O.s.”
Vox upped the
ante, explaining: “After Charlottesville, CEOs have become our public
conscience.” The piece’s original title, “Corporations are replacing churches
as America’s conscience,” was even more arresting.
But the real face of corporate morality was not in the
wind of herd-mentality withdrawals from useless presidential advisory boards,
and it was not in the earthquake of boring condemnations of “hatred.” No, it
was revealed in the dumpster fire that was ESPN’s decision to pull an
Asian-American sportscaster named Robert Lee from the coverage of a University
of Virginia football game, on the sole basis that he shares two names with
Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general.
uncanny pic.twitter.com/xDUfe1GqQp
— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) August
23, 2017
ESPN explained in a statement: “We collectively made the
decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville
were unfolding simply because of the coincidence of his name. In that moment it
felt right to all parties. It’s a shame that this is even a topic of
conversation and we regret that who calls play by play for a football game has
become an issue.”
This is, on its face, absurd. Nobody was making an issue
out of the name of Asian sportscaster Robert Lee (who, just in case
college-football fans might have been confused, is not a general or a
Confederate defender of slavery). ESPN did that itself.
In fact, that’s the crucial point: ESPN was not just
ready to accede to nonsensical, hypersensitive left-wing orthodoxies, but
willing to create new orthodoxies that didn’t even exist yet. It self-censored even when it did not have to, acting to
narrow its own boundaries of acceptable speech. As Vox put it, “It’s not just virtue-signaling, but virtue creating.”
Big corporations are now enforcers, not victims, of political correctness.
The New York Times
was right, in a sense. “The C.E.O.s had found their voice,” concluded their
fawning article. But top-flight executives are not pre-teen girls who have
finally mustered up the confidence to speak; they are savvy representatives of
their shareholders’ interests. ESPN, like all the Fortune 500 companies that leapt to boycott or threaten Indiana and
North Carolina over their religious-liberty and transgender-bathroom laws, knew
that the safest thing they could do was to get out ahead of a left-wing mob.
As National Review’s
Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “they chose the enmity they know how to
handle.” American Airlines, the NCAA, and Bank of America knew they could side
with the Left and withstand whatever opposition right-wingers could muster over
North Carolina. Accordingly, they solidified a new orthodoxy, making clear that
allowing men and women to use bathrooms without the company of confused members
of the opposite sex, and not forcing bakers to participate in gay weddings,
were now beyond the pale. ESPN did the same: It probably figured it could take
in stride any fallout from conservative mockery. Far more dangerous would be to
risk upsetting the delicate mores of the Left. That’s how ESPN out-policed the
PC police.
Corporate appeasement of the Left is necessary because
the Left takes scalps. Mozilla pushed out its CEO and co-founder, Brandon Eich,
because he donated to an anti-gay-marriage referendum campaign. Just a mere
“senior software engineer” at Google, James Damore never had a chance with his
violation of orthodoxy in a memo exploring male-female differences. By
contrast, conservative boycotts, whether against Disney or Ben & Jerry’s,
inevitably seem to fail. However, in response to Chick-fil-A’s COO’s opposition
to gay marriage, the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco — wielding
substantial market power between them — threatened to exclude the restaurant
from their cities.
Corporations want to avoid that at all costs. However,
here they run into a difficulty: The Left’s social-media mobs are
unpredictable. CEOs never know when their corporation will be attacked, even if
it’s just for not condemning the
latest outrage, not opposing Donald
Trump, or not boycotting an entire
state. The only way to not get left behind is to get ahead.
Freddie deBoer, a far-left writer, summarizes the problem
on the Left well:
The woke world is a world of
snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and
what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone
is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed
for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of
Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone
Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary
people for something, anything. That
movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your
indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now — the search for baddies doing
bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to
find out who’s Good and who’s Bad.
Some companies struggle in vain. Walmart, for example,
has invested $100 million in economic-mobility programs. The world’s biggest
oil companies joined together to urge President Trump to stay in the Paris
Agreement on climate change. Corporations tripped over themselves to put out
gay-pride-themed brands and advertisements.
As perhaps they should — contra Vox, “America’s conscience” does not reside in corporate
boardrooms. CEOs have legal responsibilities to put their shareholders first,
even before the common good, in some cases. Our “moral voice” must put the
people first.
As ESPN and many previous examples have shown us, this
often means that corporations will be risk-averse and choose to side with the
Left on contentious social issues. Bandwagoning onto the right side of History
and advancing the frontiers of political correctness and social coercion, these
powerful companies have found that the safest way to avoid the mob is to lead
it.
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