24 Apr ESG Opponents Pounce!
One of the most absurd and frustrating aspects of the debate over ESG is the charge made by ESG’s supporters and their allies in the financial media that Republicans are the ones who “politicized” investments by pushing back against the movement. We have written about this phenomenon (the “pushback against the pushback”) a dozen or more times, carefully and thoroughly debunking the patently nonsensical idea that ESG is a legitimate shareholder-based strategy and was perfectly apolitical before Republicans became involved. And we’re hardly alone. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone who writes in opposition to ESG has felt compelled to refute this silly idea and has, as a result, written accordingly.
Nevertheless, the pushback against the pushback continues to insist that ESG’s opponents are politicizing investments and doing so at the behest of dark and powerful forces:
More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general have blasted ESG financial practices, while Republicans in Congress plan to increase their scrutiny of what they call “woke capitalism.” One of their main complaints is that environmental, social and governance investing is part of a broader Democratic effort to prioritize climate change and other societal issues to the detriment of the fossil-fuel industry.
The political assault by the right is backed by some of the party’s biggest names, including former Vice President Mike Pence and the governors of Florida and Texas, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott. Pence and DeSantis are widely seen as potential 2024 presidential candidates. Wealthy GOP supporters such as Peter Thiel, as well as billionaire Elon Musk, also have criticized ESG. And there’s a long list of right-wing activists such as Leonard Leo who have spoken out against BlackRock Inc. and other Wall Street giants they claim are catering to a Democratic agenda.
Such a coordinated political attack on the finance industry may be without precedent, said Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at University of Pennsylvania, who’s tracked corporate-governance issues for more than three decades. Fisch notes that there’s “big money behind the scenes,” what with Big Oil among the more generous backers of GOP candidates. “I don’t see it going away,” she said.
We’ve always known that this counterargument is both disingenuous and coordinated. It wasn’t until recently, however, that it occurred to us just how disingenuous and coordinated it is, as well as the reason why it sounds so familiar.
In conservative commentary and media circles, there’s a long-running “joke” that’s not especially funny. It’s called “Republicans Pounce,” because that’s the punchline. Whatever terrible, horrible, no good, very bad thing Democratic politicians might do, the mainstream media will ALWAYS frame it as a Republican shortcoming, a perfectly normal occurrence that is only made dangerous and “political” by Republicans, who have the unmitigated gall to notice it. Joe Biden leaves Afghanistan in chaos? Republicans Pounce! Hunter Biden smokes crack and sells access to his father? Republicans Pounce! Inflation comes in at a 40-year high? Republicans Pounce! As Jim Treacher put it: “When Republicans screw up, that’s the story. When Democrats screw up, the Republicans’ reaction is the story.”
A couple of weeks ago, Zach Faria penned a column for the Washington Examiner in which he explained how this “joke” plays out in the culture wars, which are always and everywhere, Republicans’ fault:
The establishment media guidelines when it comes to “the culture war” are quite simple: Democrats are allowed to do anything they like, and the second Republicans object, they are starting a culture war.
The most recent example of this involves gas-powered cars. In 2022, less than 1% of cars, SUVs, and light-duty trucks were electric vehicles. There are many reasons people might want to keep it that way. Electric vehicles are inefficient and expensive, and even liberal California cannot support its small share of electric vehicles with its current energy grid. And yet President Joe Biden is mandating that two-thirds of all new cars sold in 2032 must be electric vehicles.
Is it a culture war to force people to buy cars that are more expensive, less efficient, and that they typically do not want? No, because Democrats are the ones doing it. And if Republicans object to this absurd order, daring to say that people should be allowed the option to buy cars they like, that is how the media say the “culture war” starts.
Politico claimed Biden simply wants to “coax” people into buying electric vehicles — as if declaring that they cannot buy other cars were simply “coaxing.” Meanwhile, “Republicans in Congress are already stoking the fires of what could be the next big culture war” by saying that people should have more options to choose from and not less.
We have seen this before, and Politico, in fact, gives away the same strategy. According to that newspaper, Republicans used a “false accusation that Biden was proposing to ban gas stoves.” But the Biden administration was proposing to ban gas stoves — a high-ranking Biden administration official said it on the record. Biden only had to walk it back because Republicans made a big deal of it. And even then, after the furor died down, Biden went ahead with it anyway through a different federal agency, proposing a new rule that would ban the sale of 96% of existing gas stoves.
But that was not a Democratic culture war, according to our unbiased media. NPR accused Republicans of “using outrage to score clicks and sell books.” Time said that “gas stoves became the latest right-wing cause in the culture wars.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes called GOP opposition to Democrats dictating life choices to people a “bit” while laying the “gas stove culture war” at the feet of the GOP….
We’re certain that most of you can come up with other examples. Faria himself noted, in a subsequent column, that the same script is currently being used regarding transgender issues. “The liberal obsession with transgenderism (and with foisting it on children) has led leftists to go back to a familiar playbook. They are attempting to change the culture radically, even as they claim that conservatives are the ones who started a ‘culture war’ by noticing what they were up to.”
If it’s not clear already, this is EXACTLY the same script as is being used in the “pushback against the pushback” on ESG. The problem isn’t that the activists and massive asset managers decided to impose their political beliefs on an unwilling public using other people’s money and employing a top-down-one-size-fits-all coercive strategy. The problem is that Republicans (specifically State Treasurers of Republican states) noticed. As You Sow and BlackRock were just peacefully going about their business, promoting “sustainability” as a primary investment criterion and aiding Engine No. 1 in flooding the board of Exxon Mobil with a bunch of damn dirty hippies, and then Republicans went and politicized everything by noticing.
All of this is damning on two fronts. First, it demonstrates (as if any further proof were needed) that the pushback against the pushback is thoroughly unserious. The cries and whines from the ESG folks about “real science” and “risk mitigation strategies” are worse than nonsensical. They’re also just trite variations on the “just minding our own business” shtick. Additionally – and maybe more to the point – ESG supporters KNEW that this would be the plan all along. They KNEW going in that ESG was not an investment strategy, that it was, in truth, one more front in the broader culture war. I wrote a whole book confirming this, of course. But I could have saved myself the trouble, if I had known how the ESG supporters would respond to any criticism, if I had known that that they were so intellectually bankrupt that they wouldn’t be able to formulate any response that wasn’t directly from the culture-war playbook.
This is all your fault, you see, and ours. How dare we notice!
