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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
***
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.
