Firing the People

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, September 28, 2023

 

The controversial partnership between Bud Light and transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, which sparked an organic, sustained, crippling boycott of the Anheuser-Busch beer brand, didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was the outgrowth of a concept articulated by the brand’s then–vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, who claimed that her primary objective was to replace her product’s unsavory customer base with a better one.

 

“We need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand,” Heinerscheid said with utmost confidence. “Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor,” she added. Indeed, Bud Light drinkers had become an obstacle to “bringing in new consumers.” Ultimately, the company’s marketing strategy didn’t just fail to attract new customers, it repulsed those formerly loyal to the brand.

 

That Bud Light still hasn’t recovered the market share it lost over this debacle should serve as a cautionary tale. But the outlook that led this executive to scorn her company’s customers remains common across the commercial, nonprofit, and political realms.

 

As social scientists have long observed, Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into homogenized camps that flatten distinctions across income and education levels, lifestyle choices, and political affinities. But for those who superintend the country’s institutions, it seems Americans aren’t sorting themselves fast enough. Stewards of brands and organizations who see their patrons as a problem are motivated as much by their understanding of market dynamics as by their apparent belief that they deserve to be in better company. No longer are those in a position of authority content merely to satisfy a particular audience, advance a cause, or represent the interests of one demographic as opposed to others. Too many institutional custodians have become so convinced of their own importance as to believe that their objectives must be as grandiose as their egos.

 

The people who run Marvel Comics are one example. “Marvel has relied on an ever-dwindling population to market its books to,” said one analyst of the graphic-novel industry in 2016. “Overwhelmingly, that’s white men now in their 30s and 40s.” As that stodgy demographic profile suggests, Marvel’s fan base had become somewhat embarrassing to its boosters and affiliates. So, to diversify its audience, Marvel committed to diversifying its characters. The frankly prejudicial assumption to which its executives committed themselves was that, by tweaking their protagonists’ accidents of birth and their sexual orientation, they could do the hard work of character development on the cheap. But Marvel’s gauche white male readership was unimpressed. “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” Marvel vice president David Gabriel admitted the following year. “I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales.”

 

The purportedly sports-oriented network ESPN committed itself to a similar project. Even before 2020, a year in which so many American commercial enterprises became convinced that their foremost objective was to extirpate the vestiges of institutional racism from the public landscape, the network politicized itself. Viewers were treated to sanctimonious lectures about how they had “internalized the insidious workings of white privilege,” while hosts lamented the extent to which they could discuss political affairs only if “a weak, cowardly sports angle” justified it. But as ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro reminded his employees, that was their job. Admonishing them, he said, “We are not a political organization. We are a sports-media company. And our focus is on serving the sports fans.”

 

Pitaro’s disgruntled underlings convinced themselves that they had a historic and moral obligation to contribute to the making of a better world in whatever small ways they could. Mere entertainment just wasn’t important enough. And if that was all their audience wanted, then the audience had become an obstacle to the self-fulfillment of the network’s employees.

 

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This is not a commercial phenomenon alone. Countless advocacy organizations are abandoning their specific domains and transforming themselves into undifferentiated platforms promoting the whole range of their partisan interests. In the process, however, they’re betraying their mission statements.

 

The Anti-Defamation League, once the foremost American organization devoted to combating antisemitism, is a prime example. In response to the progressive activists to whom the ADL caters, the organization amended its definition of “racism” to read: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” That voguish anti-racist construction replaced the more comprehensible definition of racism as “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another.” 

 

The ADL’s evolution wasn’t without cost. “The Holocaust couldn’t have been about race,” Seth Mandel wrote for Commentary, “under the ADL’s definition of the word ‘racism,’” because the perpetrators and the victims were both white; by the same logic, “American Jews cannot be victims of racism.” But the ADL’s new mission as indicated by its definition was bigger than the Holocaust, bigger than antisemitism, bigger than the Jews the organization was founded to defend. Thus did its stewards provide themselves with a stage large enough for their ambitions. But the firestorm the new definition produced ensured that it was short-lived.

 

The National Rifle Association succumbed to a similar temptation. Over the last decade, an institution ostensibly devoted to protecting and preserving the rights of gun owners gradually transformed itself into an organization dedicated to the promotion of a right-wing lifestyle brand of which firearms ownership was merely a feature. The group’s short-lived media outlet, NRATV, filled its hours of programming with such cultural content as objections to the awarding of a Grammy to Childish Gambino, critiques of Pepsi’s 2019 Super Bowl ad featuring Cardi B, and condemnation of the kneeling campaign of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

 

“Vaccination mandates are wrong and the border is not secure enough, according to the National Rifle Association,” Stephen Gutowski of The Reload observed of the group’s new priorities in 2021. Indeed, as law professor Adam Winkler noted, the organization’s representatives were at least as focused on “immigration, race, [and] health care” as they were on gun rights. The universe of firearms owners is large, but the audience for interchangeable cultural commentary was tantalizingly larger. If appealing to it alienates gun-rights enthusiasts who don’t necessarily vote the Republican ticket, so be it.

 

Organized labor unions haven’t represented the interests of labor, organized or otherwise, for quite some time. Old workhorses including the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, and the AFL-CIO have become indistinguishable from Democratic front groups that have long posed as labor representatives, such as the Service Employees International Union and the teachers’ unions. These institutions have been captured by postgraduates who presume to speak for the blue-collar set and role-play as seditious Wobblies from a time when labor activism shook the country to its foundations. But their priorities are far broader than the day-to-day working conditions for their members.

 

Labor leaders are as likely to focus on faddish left-wing causes like “gender-affirming care,” climate change and “environmental injustice,” and the plague of “institutionalized and systemic racism” as on workers’ wage disparities. All of this may be outside the purview of a conventional union local. But organized labor’s boosters will not be constrained by dispensable things like a constrictively narrow mission statement.

 

 

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The American Civil Liberties Union is perhaps the perfect example of a storied American institution that lost its way amid the nation’s mad dash toward cultural assimilationism. As the organization acquired more staff and clients who identified as progressives and subscribed to the constellation of progressive causes, it turned from advocacy of free speech for its own sake to advocacy of speech its members liked. “First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege,” said the Trump-era director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. As the inevitable corollary to this conceit, the group felt compelled to advance the cause of social justice by endorsing a set of new guidelines for its conduct. The ACLU’s new mandate precluded the defense of speech by interests perceived to be powerful enough already, speech by right-wing organizations whose “values are contrary to our values,” or any speech that might cause “offense to marginalized groups.”

 

The ACLU’s devolution into a left-wing activist group led it to broadcast ads endorsing the unsupported allegation that Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a sexual predator. On its social-media accounts, the group declared its opposition to Trump-era reforms of on-campus sexual-harassment guidelines — reforms aimed at restoring due process for those implicated in alleged misconduct — because they promoted “an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused.” It went to bat for organized labor’s power to garnish wages from nonmembers in unionized sectors of the economy because curtailing that power would “severely undermine such unions” — an argument that failed to persuade the Supreme Court. All this followed the logic articulated by K-Sue Park, an ACLU volunteer and UCLA critical-race-studies fellow, in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. In it, she argued that the organization’s “narrow reading of the First Amendment” led it to endorse “hate-based causes” and “colorblind logic,” which fails to secure “real freedom or even safety for all.”

 

But the ACLU’s transformation was also designed to accelerate an ongoing purge of undesirably heterodox elements from its ranks. As seven former ACLU of Florida board members alleged in a recent lawsuit, their objections to the group’s “partisan political activity” and its sudden promotion of left-wing “socio-economic issues” led to their improper ouster. The episode illustrates the organization’s internal turmoil in microcosm. As onetime ACLU director Ira Glasser mourned, “there’s only one ACLU that is a content-neutral defender of free speech,” adding, “I fear we’re in danger of losing that.”

 

True enough. Each of these organizations is responding to incentives presented by their politically and, increasingly, intellectually homogeneous staff. But they’re also adapting to external pressures. Upstart activist organizations on these groups’ flanks present themselves as more zealous in pursuit of their cause than the sclerotic establishment, more eager for the fight, and less amenable to compromise. For older institutions, the risks to their authority and finances are real. But that dynamic also reveals the social forces that have sorted these groups into camps barely distinguishable from the political parties they serve. Indeed, even those two parties have become enamored of the idea that they could reinvent themselves if they could be free of their more embarrassing associates.

 

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Democrats know they “need at least a certain percentage of white voters to win,” wrote political activist Steve Phillips for The Nation. But, he argued, the party should be only minimally solicitous of the interests of America’s white population. After all, any electoral deficit that Democrats potentially invite by muting their appeals to the broadest group of American voters can be more than made up for by maximizing turnout among minorities and the more enlightened, degree-holding whites.

 

The Democratic Party’s identity crisis has troubled the party’s supporters who retain a living memory of the New Deal coalition, the backbone of which was formed by working-class white voters. But among a caste of partisan activists who enjoy disproportionate influence over the party’s evolution relative to their numbers, some of those once integral parts of the coalition are more trouble than they’re worth.

 

“They don’t like immigrants, and they believe minorities are receiving too much governmental assistance and cultural power, at the expense of whites,” David Masciotra wrote for Salon in 2016. “Those who oppose that expansion” of minority voters — “anti-gay, anti-black and anti-women weirdoes [sic] — are increasingly unwelcome in civil society, and it is the weight of shame that silences the bigots who are obstinate.” Not only is the demographic to which Democrats were once beholden repulsively hidebound, it’s shrinking. And “as their population shrinks, they’ve also become more faithfully Republican,” NPR observed that same year.

 

While conventional Democrats fretted over the coalition Donald Trump assembled in 2016 — revealing how the party’s prioritization of boutique cultural progressivism had sacrificed the support of voters on whom it had relied to make its national majorities — the Times profiled a “vocal contingent of Democratic strategists” who welcomed the jettisoning of vestigial elements redolent of the party’s southern roots. “We’re spending all of our resources on broadcast television chasing this mythical unicorn white swing voter,” Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher lamented. “Why would we go back to running campaigns as though it’s the 1980s?” The assumption articulated by Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, according to the New York Times, was that “new arrivals in Florida and North Carolina would make those states tilt Democratic,” rendering the party’s ascension a historical inevitability.

 

But while Pfeiffer was wrong about North Carolina and Florida, his observations about the trajectory along which Arizona and Georgia were headed proved accurate. The Democratic Party has benefited from a similar existential crisis overtaking the Republican Party, to which educated, affluent, white suburbanites once gravitated. Those voters have become increasingly comfortable within the Democratic camp, in part because they know where they’re not wanted. As the GOP grows increasingly infatuated with the notion that it can restyle itself as a vehicle for the ambitions of America’s proletarian masses, it has actively and deliberately repulsed much of its erstwhile base of support.

 

The future of the GOP as a “party of working families” is “both morally right and politically necessary,” The Federalist’s Nathanael Blake wrote on the eve of the 2020 election. Not only did the GOP have the chance to capitalize on Democrats’ coalitional mistakes, in his view, but America’s overeducated elites deserved to be shunned. They were moral reprobates who promoted “sexual self-expression over family stability,” “mock[ed]” religious expression, and “constrain[ed]” the GOP by yoking it to dead-ender “free-market fundamentalists.”

 

Blake’s hostility toward the GOP’s onetime backers is shared by some of the Republican Party’s leading lights. “Our electoral success in the 2022 midterm election will be determined by our willingness to embrace our new coalition,” read the memo that Representative Jim Banks directed to the House GOP minority’s leadership in 2021. “There is an embittered and loud minority in the GOP that finds our new coalition distasteful, but President Trump’s gift didn’t come with a receipt.” As this language suggests, the most active participants in this internecine squabble sound more “embittered” than their colleagues in their denunciation of the GOP as it existed before Trump’s 2016 campaign.

 

By and large, the Republican Party’s primary voters took Banks’s advice, but it was counsel that paid few dividends in the 2022 elections. Nevertheless, the populists in the party were undaunted by the voters’ verdict in that year’s midterms. “Right now, the Republican Party stands at a crossroads,” Senator Josh Hawley averred following those elections. “A reborn Republican Party must look very different.” In emphasizing the aesthetics of the party he hopes to build, Hawley exposed the extent to which his policy preferences take a back seat to what he believes is the most desirable demography.

 

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Securing influence is a numbers game. Those in the corporate, nonprofit, and political worlds who have declared war against the loyal supporters they spent years cultivating claim to understand this. Yet, while they insist that they’re engaged in addition, they appear far more enthused by the prospect of subtraction. These establishments have elevated to positions of authority leaders who find the membership they’ve inherited mortifying. They are enlivened by the idea that they can dissolve their existing constituency and replace it with something else.

 

So far, the results of these campaigns have disappointed those who’ve been prosecuting them. The abstractions they envision rarely materialize, but reversing course is not an option because their investments are emotional. They’re on this course because they wanted to disassociate themselves from a sordid lot with whom they are allied only out of convenience. They want nothing more than to avoid fraternizing with onetime colleagues and compatriots who they believe reflect poorly on them and their organizations. It’s as much about the pursuit of their preferred outcomes as it is about them, their self-conception, and their quest to fulfill, through the alteration of external factors, a grand vision of the future made possible only by their leadership. If psychological satisfaction is their aim, as it so often seems to be, it’s no surprise that their goal has proven so elusive.