Left demands woke words from corporations

This is part of a weird larger trend in corporate America in which it is no longer enough for companies to sell us soap and smartphones; they also must be saving the world, leading the way for cultural change or standing up to this, that or the other thing. Why? Why can t they just sell us a widget and shut up? 

The answer, until recently, has been that progressive public-relations stunts bought companies cred with the hyper-left at little cost. You could throw love is love into a commercial, throw on a colorful ribbon at the Oscars, and feel smug as you collected a paycheck. 

Now that s not enough. Activists and the Twitter mobs won t accept it when businesses and cultural heroes don t take a stand. You denounced that law in Kentucky, why won t you do the same in Texas? 

via nypost.com

Yes, it’s “jarring,” at least to aging boomers like us, to see these mega-corporations pushing for their weird version of public virtue. Why can’t they just sell us soap, or entertainment, or phones and leave the morality to us? The thing is that corporations are stepping into the void left by our other public institutions (such as the family) to provide people some sort of direction and meaning for their lives. Disney is a perfect example. I believe its C-level did not particularly want to publicly oppose the Florida parents’ rights/don’t say gay bill. They didn’t want the Mouse to become a political football. They were pushed into it by their woke employees and their allies, and they did not have the vocabulary to resist that push. “But what about shareholder value?!” just doesn’t have the same moral oomph as “Equality (or maybe equity) for all!” To explain why being neutral on the Florida law is most in line with what’s best for the shareholders, and why what’s best for the shareholders is really in the end best for everyone, takes some explaining, and some listening, and those are scarce commodities these days.