Netflix Gives Progressive Culture Warriors a Wake-Up Call

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, May 13, 2022

 

Netflix has discovered the magical healing power of “No.” In a “culture memo” that was distributed to its staff this week, the company said what every company of its type ought to have said a long, long time ago: “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

 

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

 

It is remarkable that this ever needed saying. If you don’t like soft drinks, it should be perfectly obvious that a job at Coca-Cola is not ideal. If you don’t like cattle, it should be clear that ranch life isn’t for you. And if you don’t like people saying things with which you disagree, then you shouldn’t work at one of the world’s largest streaming services. Those who insist plaintively that they are “offended” have always deserved a heartfelt “so what?” And when the company for which they work is in the entertainment business, that “so what?” ought to be issued daily. “We support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with,” Netflix said in its memo. “We let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices.” Translation: For the love of God, stop asking us to tailor our multibillion-dollar corporation to your pathetic, narcissistic, unfathomably irrelevant tastes, you fools.

 

Small though it may be, Netflix’s move portends a broader shift in corporate America and beyond — a shift that, once completed, is likely to alter our politics for the better. For nearly a decade now, American progressivism has been engaged in an all-hands-on-deck attempt to brute-force its way to the political change that its most vocal adherents desire. Convinced that they represent the future, progressive intellectuals have come to regard their ultimate victory as a well-deserved fait accompli, and their remaining rivals as a flailing revanchist rump to be steamrolled from on high. Neatly summing up this view, the legal scholar Mark Tushnet wrote in May 2016 that “the culture wars are over; they lost, we won,” and that “for liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers.” “My own judgment,” Tushnet continued, “is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers.” How hard a line? “Trying to be nice to the losers,” he concluded, “didn’t work well after the Civil War. . . . And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”

 

Tushnet was writing primarily within a legal context, and yet the strategy he offered is representative. Spurred on first by the reelection of Barack Obama, and then by the decision in Obergefell, American progressives came sincerely to believe that if they could persuade important American institutions to acquiesce to their demands, the rest of the country would eventually follow suit. On Twitter this morning, the elections analyst Sean Trende noted pithily that far too many people “read [John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s] Emerging Democratic Majority and decided it was eschatology, rather than a fairly specific argument for modestly more aggressive Clintonism.” Trende is right, and the mistake he describes helps explain an enormous amount of the peculiar behavior that we have seen from the American Left since it decided not only that the coalition that reelected Barack Obama was set to be a permanent fixture on the landscape, but that that coalition’s core preferences could be programmed centrally from the faculty lounge at Brown.

 

Clearly, that didn’t happen, and indeed, isn’t going to happen. Yet for whatever reason, the majority of American progressives are still clinging stupidly to their original conceits. Nothing can knock them off track. Republicans make dramatic inroads with Hispanic and Asian voters; progressives ignore the change and start describing the party as a “dying, white rump.” Americans make it clear that they are annoyed by speech codes, bored by linguistic sophistry, and deaf to the charge that they are one of those dreaded “-ists”; progressives double down on all of those things. Voters signal furiously that they care about inflation, jobs, and security, and that they don’t believe that America is rotten to its very core; progressives put men in women’s sports, call for the abolition of the police, and mainstream the execrable 1619 Project. If it weren’t so consequential, it would be comical.

 

What has happened at Netflix — and at Substack, and the Zeno Group, and Basecamp, among many other businesses — represents a welcome set of cracks in this delusion. In politics, it can take a while for consumer pressure to be felt. In business, things move much more quickly. Given the right levers of power, progressives can force Americans to do all sorts of things. Netflix cannot — which means that if Dave Chappelle is popular and Meghan Markle is not, and if shareholders start sending warning signals about the company’s creative direction, the company must adapt. Eventually, even America’s stubborn progressives will be forced to adapt, too.