In June 2022, FIFA celebrated Pride Month by flying the rainbow flag at its Zurich headquarters.
An accompanying press release gushed about how the World Cup in Qatar would be a celebration of unity and diversity. At the same time, FIFA launched its LGBTQIA+ Staff Network, which would work to ensure that football’s governing body is a safe and inclusive workspace, and send a global message of equality, inclusivity and acceptance.
One wonders what morale was like amongst members of the network when, just a few months later, it became apparent that FIFA would punish any players wearing a OneLove armband during the World Cup. Surely the OneLove armband, with its anti-discrimination messaging, stood for the same ideals FIFA celebrated in its press release back in June?
FIFA chief Gianni Infantino managed to pour oil on the flames in a bizarre rant where, amongst other things, he likened the discrimination gay people experience in Qatar to him being bullied as a child because he had red hair and freckles. There were various stories of fans turning up to World Cup games with rainbow t-shirts or hats being given a hard time by security. It’s all very difficult to reconcile FIFA’s fine words about opposing bigotry with the way they behaved when those principles are put to the test.
Not that FIFA is alone in this. Every June, for Pride Month, companies make sure they change their social media profiles to incorporate the rainbow, to demonstrate their impeccable anti-discrimination credentials to the world.
Well, to some of the world, anyway. BMW’s avatar in June 2022 featured a rainbow around its logo, but the BMW Middle East corporate account did not. Cisco added rainbow colours to its logo, but Cisco Middle East did not. Ditto BP, Visa, Mercedes-Benz, and so on.
Presumably the marketing calculation here is that displaying the rainbow in Europe provides a low-cost way of generating good PR, whereas doing the same in the Middle East could be an unpopular move for the brand. This Janus-faced approach merely emphasizes that these companies don’t care about Pride; the reason for the disconnect is because the consistent motivation here is money, not principles. Any principles which are only held when it’s convenient to do so aren’t worthy of the name. The drivers are economic, not social.
You’d think conservatives would understand this; the party of business ought to know that firms are amoral, and exist to make money for their shareholders. Yet the right find themselves frustrated with this new “woke capitalism”. Kemi Badenoch’s tilt for the Conservative leadership back in July saw her rail against corporate activism:
“The right has lost its confidence and courage and ability to defend the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper. It's been undermined by retreating in the face of the Ben & Jerry’s tendency, those who say a business's main priority is social justice, not productivity and profits.”
I suppose one problem with this is that Ben & Jerry’s do operate in the free market, and are currently doing so very successfully. Further, it’s difficult to think of exactly what the political right can do in defence of the free market besides fulminate; if companies want to talk big about social justice, conservatives can’t really stop them.
The point which I think Badenoch misses is that the problem for the right is further upstream. Conservatives shouldn’t be worried by corporate activism per se, they should be worried that corporations see activism as a route to good PR and profits. Because what that suggests is that cultural conservatism is unpopular; firms aren’t turning to social crusades out of the blue, they are responding to consumer demands and expectations. It’s not companies which are letting conservatives down here, it’s society.
I have a great deal of sympathy with conservatives who say they don’t want a moral lecture every time they buy some mayonnaise, but there is no solution which lies in targeting the companies; they understand their marketing well enough (if they don’t, they’ll fail). For conservatives, the challenge is to make their cultural beliefs more popular in society at large.
The left-liberal position on corporate activism is confused in different ways. This Substack has in the past discussed the bizarre sight of supposed leftists getting private companies to demonstrate their commitment to social justice by firing employees who hold the “wrong” opinions.
Already this year we’ve seen Limited Run Games (LRG) sack a community manager for some tweets from 2016 and for following the “wrong” people (broadly, high-profile conservatives). This came to light because an anonymous internet crank decided to trawl the employee’s tweets and publicly confront the company about it. Desperate to display their social justice credentials, LRG terminated the employee’s contract, saying that they were “committed to supporting an inclusive culture”. That inclusivity clearly doesn’t work in every direction.
As I’ve warned before, it is a fundamental mistake for left-liberals to look to big corporations for moral guidance, or to cheer when companies supposedly commit themselves to social justice activism. In 1930s and 1940s America, firms such as General Motors and Hilton Hotels bankrolled conservative clergymen in their fight against the New Deal, and of course, plenty of business owners fund the Conservative Party today. The tide of corporate activism is not guaranteed to keep washing up in the same direction, and establishing principles such as firing employees for wrongthink could yet come to be seen as a strategically stupid move as well as a morally bankrupt one.
Both left and right would do well to remember that companies aren’t sincere or genuine when they indulge in activism, they’re doing it to benefit the brand and nothing more. If a business thought it would prosper by dropping the social justice rhetoric, its corporate activism would be thrown overboard in a heartbeat. Look how easily FIFA’s belief in anti-discrimination folded when Qatar objected. Judge organisations not by their platitudes, but by the way they behave when there is a real-world cost attached.
So when some firm indulges in a bit of cheap PR to show how committed it is to minority rights or climate change, surely the correct response isn’t to get enraged, or to celebrate, but instead to meet this insincere propaganda with cynicism, and remember: They Don’t Mean It.