Coop Scoop: [Resend] The Corporate Rebellion Edition
Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from profits.
April 8-9, 2021
Issue #69
By Marc Cooper
Just in case you had any doubts about what sort of thinking might lurk behind the building tsunami of voter suppression legislation, just pick up the latest copy of National Review.
Right there, in the pages of what likes to consider itself the most high-minded intellectual journal of the broadly defined American Right, we find editorialist Kevin Williamson arguing “the republic would be better served by having fewer – but better—voters,” Better voters clearly meaning loyal White Republicans. Williamson went on to write that, indeed, democracy itself wasn’t much to get excited about. Elected representatives, he said, are “people who act in other people’s interests,” and therefore don’t really need to consult or represent them.
It’s a gob-smacking statement of insidious honesty, letting us all know that the central program of one of the two major political parties in America today is to inhibit and restrict voting of as many Democrats as possible – especially those with the poorest resources.
I suggest we let that sink in very deeply, lest we become a nation of frogs doing backstrokes in a big pot of ever hotter water.
In her Wednesday night dispatch, historian Heather Cox Richardson calls this Republican attitude out for what it is. “It is the same argument wealthy men made in the 1890s when they illustrated that laws calling for “better” voters meant that white registrars would hand-pick the nation’s voting population. In the South and the North both, legislators wrote new state constitutions to keep Black men, immigrants, and poor workers from the polls. Leading Americans argued that such men “corrupted” the vote by electing lawmakers who provided public infrastructure like schools and hospitals, paid for with the tax dollars of hardworking white men. To keep poor voters and men of color from the ballot, new state laws called for literacy tests, in which white registrars personally judged a man’s ability to read; poll taxes for which one had to keep the receipts; grandfather clauses, in which a man could vote if his grandfather had, and so on.”
All true enough. Yet, I have the distinct impression that this latest push to suppress is going to backfire big time on the Republicans.
While the attitudes of the Trump Republican Party resemble the willed ignorance and hubris of a time a century ago, the United States and its electorate have radically evolved since then.
The drive to suppress voting will certainly create a measure of logistical challenges but those will be outweighed by the intensity of an organized backlash already building steam.
By moving so quickly in the new election cycles to blockade the voting booths, the Republicans have unwittingly given us oodles of time to counter-organize and out-mobilize them in 2022.
This helps to explain the frenetic and awkward tap dance performed by none other than Mitch McConnell over the past few days. As Atlanta-based Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola publicly denounced (a little too late) their opposition to the headline-grabbing suppression laws being passed in Georgia and as the MLB vowed to pull its All-Star game from the state, McConnell blew a fuse.
Mitch’s panic might have been further stoked by news that AT&T and Dell along with eight other Texas-based corporations were about to denounce the same Republican suppression shenanigans in the Lone Star State.
In what must be one of the five greatest moments of Gross Hypocrisy in American political history, Mitch kept a straight face while harrumphing:
“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEO’s getting in the middle of politics,” he said. “My advice to corporate CEO’s of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”
A few hours later Mitch fired his second blast calling corporate opposition to Republican legislation “stupid” and obliquely warned these big brands they might face retribution from Republican consumers.
But wait…there’s more. I don’t know how many corporate CEO’s burned up Mitch’s phone lines after that outburst or what kind of threats they made, or how many times they reminded him he was their top Congressional floozy and it was HIS job to quietly take the money off the nightstand, get back in the Senate bed to serve them and that HE is the one who should shut up.
So it was that Mitch, with his usual charm and charisma, once again in his career staged a dandy pirouette by declaring: “I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday. They’re certainly entitled to be involved in politics. They are. My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill.” Oh, right. That’s why!
This kerfuffle in no way portends some sort of gigantic split between corporate America and the GOP but it does accurately reflect current tensions; primarily the discomfort of major brands being squeezed between their historically more favorable pols who have run off the rails and the more enlightened sectors of their vast consumer base. If there’s anything that large corporations worry about as much as their bottom line is their PR image.
More than anything, this dust up reveals the indisputable reality that politics resides downstream from culture. And that, in fact, the charged polarization we are experiencing nowadays is much more cultural than political. Or, better said, it’s the cultural divide that produces and sustains the political chasm.
This theory is easily understood by recognizing the higher you go inside the political system, the more distant are the people who actually live in the country.
I know this will shock some liberals who have convinced themselves that rednecks, racists and authoritarians are a majoritarian force in American politics, but the American culture, the American people in aggregate, are actually center-left. They are pretty liberal.
Clear majorities support a high minimum wage, expanded and more accessible health care, same sex marriage, anti-discrimination laws, legalization of drugs, increased access to the vote, the right to choose, tighter gun registration, more action against climate change and waning enthusiasm for foreign wars.
The problem, the very serious problem, is not only that the American political system reeks of corruption and the influence of Big Money (that Mitch is a master of conjuring from these same sort of corporations) but it is also obsolete.
I loved the way that political analyst Ron Brownstein put it in a recent interview saying that, unfortunately, we remain governed “by a 200-year-old document written for a small agricultural country.”
Brownstein was not arguing against constitutional rule. On the contrary. He was arguing that our own constitution just doesn’t work properly in this country that has expanded to both coasts and covers 50 states. The structural advantages written into the constitution were to protect the smaller states, but they have turned into nefarious instruments of minority rule, consistently thwarting the needs and desires of a majority. Brownstein’s latest book, Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics, makes a compelling argument that it was precisely in that year that culture caught up with politics and even surpassed it, becoming a predictor of where society was going. Perhaps the most salient aspect of Brownstein’s book comes with his argument that by the mid-1970’s, the American culture began to accept and assimilate many of the core values of the Sixties.
Brownstein’s latest book, Rock Me on the Water: 1974-The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics, makes a compelling argument that it was precisely in that year that culture caught up with politics and even surpassed it, becoming a predictor of where society was going. Perhaps the most salient aspect of Brownstein’s book comes with his argument that by the mid-1970’s, the American culture began to accept and assimilate many of the core values of the Sixties.
That American culture has been on a track of slow but certain liberalization over these last 50 years, a trend destined continue and destined to create ever more friction with an unresponsive political system.
Hence, the corporate rebellion, the limited corporate rebellion, of this week. Limited, because just as engaged as these companies are in denouncing the voter suppression laws, they are even more adamant in opposing Joe Biden’s proposed corporate tax increases to be used to pay for new infrastructure.
Major corporations like Coca-Cola and AT&T, unlike Republican politicians, have zero problems with issues like “diversity.” and immigration or even Black Lives Matter. It costs them nothing to hire more workers and managers of color and those who are non-binary. They don’t mind if police are reformed or if the undocumented are legalized. So long as they are good consumers.
Indeed, “diversity” and to a great degree even “wokeness” offer rich marketing possibilities for American companies. Coke and Delta know very well how to market effectively to increasingly self-aware and even self-identified ethnic, racial and niche populations. Or did you not catch the final episode of Mad Men?
As the country continues to evolve and change and liberalize, we see that sector of mostly poorly educated Whites and small business people along with some of the elderly, are convinced that this New America is a Bolshevik or Black Power nightmare. Though he said it, to borrow a phrase, inartfully, Barack Obama was on to something when he talked about rural frightened people clinging to their guns and God.
Actually, they are clinging to a myth about an America that never existed but that was, nevertheless, one in which they found their place. That’s no longer true for millions of Americans who feel they are being left behind economically and/or watching their relative standing in society being over-run by people who are alien to them and who scare them.
These folks vote Republican regardless of the issues and it explains why people continue supporting Trump. The major and defining issue for them is, excuse the term, the vision they hold of America in common with the Republicans…not the specific policies. Many, and in some areas, most of these voters actually agree with Democratic and even progressive policies – at least if it benefits them. But they are phobic about being even identified with the Democratic Party who they have seen as the primary vehicle for all the changes they fear and loathe.
This is going to be a huge challenge to Democrats starting yesterday. How do you mold your public rhetoric, how do you refine your messaging, your program and your mostly non-existent on the ground organizing to break through these cultural barriers? Maybe by spending a lot more time concentrating on bread and butter economic issues and a lot less on the cultural side. That latter war is already over and we won. Time to win the political battle that is far from finished and could easily go sideways as soon as next year. ++
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