This piece has been getting some attention on Twitter and it’s pretty interesting. Alan Cole writes a newsletter about economic policy called Full Stack Economics. Today he’s got a piece about the GOP’s increasingly confrontational response to the kind of woke corporate activism we’ve seen lately.
The obvious example here is Gov. Ron DeSantis reaction to Disney’s outspokenness about his Parental Rights in Education bill which the left and the media (but I repeat myself) labeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But that wasn’t the only example. Sen. Josh Hawley also proposed a new bill on copyrights which would retroactively limit copyrights to 56 years. That would be a blow to Disney because the earliest version of Mickey Mouse would suddenly become public domain:
Hawley, employing DeSantis’ playbook, said in a statement, “Thanks to special copyright protections from Congress, woke corporations like Disney have earned billions while increasingly pandering to woke activists.”
Hawley’s mention of “special copyright protections” refers to Disney’s major role influencing the evolution of copyright law. Mickey Mouse was first introduced with the 1928 release of Steamboat Willie. At the time, Disney was afforded 56 years of protection for the character.
But with the copyright set to expire in 1984, Disney lobbied for reform and secured the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976. This allowed ownership of works by corporations for 75 years. In 1998, Disney was again able to delay the entry of Mickey Mouse into the public domain with the adoption of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. The law extended protection of copyrights by corporations for 95 years from their original publication, pushing the expiration of Disney’s copyright for Steamboat Willie to 2024.
And there’s some indication that the pushback has had an impact. Last month there was a report from a progressive site that a number of big corporations had been advised to remain quiet about the leaked SCOTUS draft:
Large corporations including Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and Netflix have been reportedly advised to stay silent about abortion rights in the wake of a leaked Supreme Court draft decision.
Communications company Zeno Group discreetly advised its clients against commenting on the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, according to an internal memo obtained by independent online newsletter Popular Information from the PR company. The company’s client base also includes Salesforce and Hershey’s.
So with all of that in mind, Alan Cole has written a piece arguing that this didn’t start a few months ago, it arguably started in 2020 during the protests that often turned into riots in many places around the country.
This shift by Republican lawmakers is relatively sudden, and it may be driven by a rapid shift in the views of Republican voters. Gallup shows a 31-point shift among Republicans, over the last two years, on their satisfaction with the “size and influence of major corporations,” with almost all of that shift coming between early 2020 and early 2021.
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The largest cause for this change of heart is likely a sequence of 2020 events: the murder of George Floyd, the protests that followed, and the violence that eventually accompanied or followed those protests, which ultimately took at least twenty lives and cost billions of dollars in property damage. This sequence of events was also tied into the COVID-19 pandemic as well; large gatherings had often been prohibited, or at least discouraged, but were suddenly condoned by public figures when it came to a particular favored cause.
Cole argues that Republicans saw the mayhem, arson, murders that followed in places like Seattle, Atlanta, Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, etc. as a serious problem even as the media was praising BLM and doing its best to help make “defund the police” sound like a good idea. And corporations were essentially seen as siding with the chaos.
The bottom line is that the Floyd protests and their aftermath had a variety of consequences, many of them bad ones. And conservatives were quite attuned to the ill effects.
By contrast, corporations engaged with this moment with unreserved support of the 2020 protests, in some cases to the point of absurdity. The fruit candy Gushers, for example, tweeted “Gushers wouldn’t be Gushers without the Black community and your voices. We’re working with Fruit by the Foot on creating space to amplify that. We see you. We stand with you.”
It’s easy to make fun of Gushers, but the overall subject matter was a serious one. To conservatives, it was like public order was collapsing. Police should not be retreating from their precincts and ceding territory to anarchists. It’s not a thing that’s supposed to happen. And conservatives saw those unambiguous statements of corporate support as if corporations were cheering on the disorder, too, not just the calls for better policework.
Speaking only for myself, there were a lot of protests around the country that weren’t violent. Some of the less extreme proposals being offered by protesters (police body cameras) were ones I supported. But the moment people started burning down police precincts and small businesses and murdering people, including innocent children, and setting up autonomous zones in the midst of major cities, I was ready for a swift return to law and order. The fact that major corporations were ignoring all of that and pledging millions toward whatever their DEI staff was telling them to do seemed crazy. Again, I’m speaking for myself but I think that graph above suggests I wasn’t the only person on the right who felt that way.
There’s a lot more to Cole’s piece including his analysis, partly borrowed from Josh Barro, that the GOP’s argument isn’t with shareholders it’s with management.
…from shareholders’ perspective, excessively left-wing corporate statements may well be what economists call agency costs. You hire someone (an “agent”) to do a job, but they have preferences of their own, and those differ from yours, sometimes to your disadvantage…
It’s debatable where you’d draw the line between respecting freedom for the agent and fidelity to the agent’s task. But Republicans are thinking about doing more to curb politicking adverse to shareholder interests, and laying the legal groundwork to empower relatively right-leaning shareholders to rein in relatively left-wing management.
We’ll see where this goes but I think the basic idea here is that the GOP has turned a corner with regard to woke corporate activism, just as they have with regard to woke public school activism. A laissez-faire approach to these issues doesn’t work when your woke opponents behave like members of a cult whose goal is to seize control of everything in public life one institution at a time.
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