Free Speech: Why Corporate America Is Now Ditching Wokeness In Bunches

This is the second in a series of articles from Alliance Defending Freedom on the state of free speech in America today. October 21 to 27 is National Free Speech Week.

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We all know that nature abhors a vacuum.

Thanks to the virtually superhuman efforts of Robby Starbuck, some of the most iconic brands in the country have been systematically exposed for embracing the toxic creeds of DEI and gender ideology.

Starting with an unveiling of Tractor Supply’s discriminatory DEI personnel policies earlier this summer, Starbuck has shone a light on similarly controversial practices at a growing list of household-name brands. As of this writing, Starbuck has wins at John Deere, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, Lowes, Home Depot, Ford, Coors, and Toyota. Starbuck has brought these companies to their knees—or better put, back to their senses. In doing so, he’s come away with major concessions that are helping these companies regain the trust of a growing movement of customers and shareholders who are fed up with Left-wing activists browbeating beloved American companies into pushing their narrow political agenda.

Despite the painful public relations moments his crusade has inflicted on these corporations, Starbuck is on a mission of mercy. Along with ridding these companies of increasingly unpopular DEI practices and propaganda, Starbuck is also convincing leaders to end their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s social credit score system known as the “Corporate Equality Index.”

For years, the HRC’s index has functioned as both a carrot and a stick to cajole and threaten companies into adopting an increasingly radical set of LGBTQ+ policy positions, many of which are deeply unpopular with the general public.

For example, companies that score 100%on the CEI this year must cover harmful and irreversible cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for children in employees’ healthcare plans. In addition to exposing companies to legal risk in 25 states, caving to HRC’s radical “puberty blockers for kids” agenda is opposed by nearly 70% of Americans.

Blasting Ford as the “Not-so-tough” company for ending its involvement in the CEI, the HRC is facing the first real cultural pushback since its ascendence two decades ago. If nothing else, HRC’s reaction will make good theater.

But for those who care about the free market’s success, this abrupt upending of the entrenched political-corporate order also raises a new set of questions. At its core, the HRC owes much of its success to its opportunistic seizure of a crucial gap in conventional thinking about the free market.

For decades, the consensus view of the free market was best summarized by Milton Friedman’s shareholder theory — that the business of every business is to return value to its owners. Sound as that understanding is, a distorted image of the market dominates the popular imagination, typified by fictional character Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” speech in the iconic movie Wall Street.

The Gekko-style misconception generated the perception of a moral vacuum in the market. Groups like HRC were eager to fill that space, coming into the corporate boardroom with a moral and ethical alternative to greed. That’s also at the heart of the 2019 Business Roundtable’s popularization of so-called “stakeholder capitalism,” which presents itself as a full-orbed approach to making the world a better place through business.

Here’s the lesson for freedom and free market loving Americans – we will never win the battle for the soul of American business until we win the moral argument about virtue in business.

What does a virtuous business program look like? It starts by urging businesses to stay focused on their core purpose – generating economic value and profit by providing excellent products and services that improve people’s lives. By staying focused on their mission, corporate leaders make a unique contribution to the lives of their neighbors — starting with their employees, shareholders, and customers, but also extending to the broader society.

But virtue in business cannot be defined solely by the profit or shareholder value motive. As we have seen over the last decade, this principle does not forestall some of the best-performing companies in the world from adopting policies and practices that harm freedoms, values, and institutions that are essential to American democracy and society.

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Any vision for virtue in business must therefore also include a commitment to at least “do no harm” to the basic societal structures – core civil liberties such as freedom of expression and religion, family, and mediating institutions like churches, schools, and nonprofits – that sustain markets and a free society. Even better, businesses should embrace policies and practices that respect these essential building blocks.

This means, at the very least, that companies should:

• Embrace equality of opportunity by abandoning DEI policies and practices that discriminate against employees, customers, or vendors based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sex, or religion.
• Embrace a culture of freedom of speech, association, and religion for employees, customers, and vendors and refuse to punish them for expressing their views.
• Refuse to take official positions on political, social, or public-policy issues unrelated to the business’s purpose.

The only thing that abhors a vacuum more than nature is the American political Left. We can be sure that they will attempt to fill the void being created by Starbuck’s and many others’ excellent work pushing back on DEI with another counterfeit vision for virtue in business.

As conservatives, we love the free market, the free exchange of ideas, and competition. We have an opportunity to vie for the hearts and minds of corporate leaders when it comes to the question of virtue in business. Let’s win the argument this time. Yes, we should lead with the proposition that providing excellent goods, services, job opportunities, and financial blessings to shareholders, employees, and customers is inherently virtuous. But we must also advocate that a defining characteristic of a virtuous business culture is policies and practices that respect the fundamental freedoms and institutions that undergird our very way of life.

If we fail, ten years (or sooner) from now we will be cleaning up the societal wreckage from the next installment of rebranded DEI that captures the imagination of corporate leaders.

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Jeremy Tedesco (@Jeremy_Tedesco) is senior counsel and senior vice president of corporate engagement for Alliance Defending Freedom (@ADFLegal).

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.

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