IGNORE THE GOSSIP -- THE GOP AND BIG BUSINESS AREN'T BREAKING UP

At his Editorial Board newsletter, John Stoehr interviews Corey Richardson, an advertising executive who says that a GOP/Big Business divorce won't happen in the future -- it's happened already.

A confluence of business interests, evangelical Christian interests and conservative interests created the current Republican coalition.

The evangelicals gave the energy, the [intellectual] conservatives gave the ideas and the business community funded the whole operation.

It was a simple transaction. You give us tax breaks and we’ll make sure your people get elected. That alliance lasted about 40 years.

But now we’ve gone from conservatism to populism.

Culture wars are no longer a secondary or tertiary thing. The right recognizes they control the Supreme Court, they control the state legislatures and they can pass all kinds of restrictive and regressive social policies. They don’t need that corporate money anymore.

They don't need corporate money? So why do they keep trying to raise it? Why does every story on the feud in Florida between Governor Ron DeSantis and Disney begin with "Despite the large amounts of money Disney has given to Florida Republicans..."?

The future of America looks different 40 years later. Forty years from now, it will, too. It’s going to be a browner, more diverse country.

Businesses understand this. The folks I work with, in marketing, are looking at the future and saying, “Well, we got to diversify our offerings, because our consumers are going to be diverse.”

So when we say there’s a breakup coming, we should say the breakup has come. It was a marriage of convenience. It’s no longer working. There’s no couples counselor they can go to to get this one fixed....

Generation Z is 47 percent multicultural. They don’t have the same hang ups or issues of identity. Businesses have to think about not just the consumer base, but a labor force. They also need shareholders....

As the Republicans become entrenched in a heteronormative view of a Eurocentric patriarchal America, businesses are catering to the tastes of their constituents. They don’t have voters. They have a bottom line.

Being publicly progressive and multicultural while shoveling cash to Republicans who are culturally bigoted and regressive but will cut their taxes and regulations ... that would be two-faced! We all know Big Business would never do anything that's two-faced!

Stoehr is somewhat skeptical. He asks Richardson:

What about the idea of corporations like Disney saying “whatever, just make sure I get a tax cut.” They could ride the storm easily.

Richardson replies:

Consumers wouldn’t allow it.

Their labor force will allow it.

DeSantis made the choice binary. Either you’re with “Don’t Say Gay” or you’re a groomer. Consumers and other stakeholders within the Disney universe had to say no – we take a stand against this bill.

... More people watch The Mandalorian than vote. More people watch Iron Man than vote. Spider Man is bigger than the elections. Picking a fight with not just any corporation, but a corporation that essentially owns pop culture? That’s just stupid.

Yes, you can say Disney content is so popular that DeSantis doesn't pose a serious threat to the company -- but Disney is also so popular that LGBT people and their allies don't pose a serious threat if, in a few months, we see the company giving money to the politicians who backed this bill, after all this has receded from the headlines.

Richardson sees a post-GOP future for business:

I think the business community is going to be further and further alienated from their political home in the Republican Party.

Conversely, you have pro-business Democrats who are going to become increasingly alienated from the left wing of their party.

These pro-business forces could align somewhere in the middle....

This is where business in this country can look at the parties and think, “We can make more deals with Democrats than we can with Republicans. They’re more interested in sound bites, tweets and getting on Fox. But Democrats, we might be able to make a deal.”

This won't happen. Republicans will just rail against "woke corporations" while continuing to be reliably pro-plutocrat in tax and regulatory policy, because that's in their DNA. They can't stop. And there's still enough business skepticism in the Democratic Party to keep corporations on the GOP's side. They know that there are Democrats who want workers to unionize and there are no Republicans who feel that way. They know that skepticism about the nature of capitalism is widespread among Democrats, even though Democratic corporatism keeps it in check. Republican business skepticism is a tiny niche product that produces books and opinion columns but no policy changes at all that threaten corporations' bottom lines.

Yet pundits keep telling themselves things are changing. Bloomberg's Adrian Wooldridge notes that

The rising generation of conservative intellectuals, such as Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari, Nate Hochman, Christopher Rufo, Ben Shapiro, Gladden Pappin and Ross Douthat, are all, to varying degrees, skeptical about business and critical of “zombie Reaganites.”

He adds:

Business-skeptical conservatives are solidifying their position in the conservative establishment with a network of think tanks, magazines and training programs.

No! Please! Not the think tanks!

Meanwhile:

It is easy to dismiss all this as so much verbiage. For all his corporation-bashing during the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump ended up cutting taxes on the wealthy and lightening regulations on business, not least by starving the federal government of employees. And for all its populist rhetoric about redistributing opportunity, Britain’s Conservative Party is determined to deliver tax cuts in the run-up to the next election campaign.

Yup. Nothing's changed. Nothing will.