By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
Conservatives are annoyed with State Farm because,
per a leaked email that was sent to the insurance giant’s agents in Florida,
the company intended to help “increase representation of LGBTQ+ books
and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering
conversations with children Age 5+.” Progressives are annoyed with State Farm
because, having been criticized by conservatives for intending to help
“increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having
challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+,” the
company reversed course.
What in the ever-loving hell was State Farm doing
starting this fire in the first place?
State Farm is an insurance company, not a bordello. It is
engaged in one of the most necessary — and one of the most boring —
pursuits in the country: playing with the actuarial tables until it can offer
customers a cost-effective way of managing their financial risk. State Farm has
a natural interest in public policy as it relates to the insurance industry,
but, outside of that, nothing the company does requires it to get involved in
politics in any particular way. Until roughly five minutes ago, nobody in
America had ever wondered what his insurance agent’s parent company thought
about any of the hot-button issues that animate our politics. The very idea is
preposterous. Deductibles, medical exemptions, loyalty discounts, bundling
deals — those are State Farm’s bread and butter. Making more LGBTQ+ books
available to pre-K kids? Not so much.
It will never cease to be bizarre to me that so many of
America’s companies seem so determined to make this mistake. Right now,
somewhere in America, the CEO of some no-name aircraft-maintenance company is
considering destroying his business’s well-cultivated reputation for quiet
excellence by acquiescing to the demands of his loudest, wokest employees and
agreeing to fund abortions on the runway at LaGuardia or send mankinis to the
local day care or sponsor an AR-15–buyback program outside the local Bass Pro.
Historically, he would have laughed such a suggestion out of the room with a
gentle, “Bobby, this isn’t Firing Line — we service
small- to medium-size passenger jets.” But now? Now he’s not so sure, and he
won’t be until the bad decision he’s about to make explodes in his face, annoys
all of the most politically active people in the United States, and causes his
stock price to drop 30 percent.
State Farm operates on the franchise model — like McDonald’s or UPS or
7-Eleven. How utterly bewildered the company’s many Floridian franchisees must
have been yesterday afternoon when, instead of fielding inquiries about the
likelihood of their beating GEICO’s initial offer, they were asked by their
customers to explain why they’d been trying to “bring clarity and understanding
to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary.”
A few months ago, I changed my car insurance. The guy I spoke to at AAA was a
kindly semi-retiree from Naples, Fla. He was a chatty fellow, but I am pleased
to say that he seemed about as interested in my views on culture-war issues as
I was interested in his: not at all. Instead, we talked about my
property-damage-liability threshold, and whether or not I wanted to be
protected against uninsured motorists. It was a pleasant — and appropriate
— conversation, and I am happy to report that at no point in its 35-minute
course did I have any reason to ask him whether he was GenderCool.
In modern parlance, “totalitarian” is often used as a
stand-in for “dictatorship” or “tyranny.” But, properly understood, the term
means more than that. A “totalitarian” system is one in which nothing
whatsoever can exist outside of politics, and in which all aspects of life —
however small — are subordinated to political concerns. Under our
constitutional system, private companies may engage in whatever political
speech they like. But political activism is simply not most private
companies’ raison d’être. As a cigar is often just a cigar, so an
insurance company should often just be an insurance company. Inexplicably,
State Farm forgot this, and it is now in crisis mode as a result. Other businesses
that are tempted to throw themselves into the fray would do well to take note
of its misfortune.
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