What's Going on Here, Really?

 Rather than make observations, and posit conclusions, this post will ask a question to which I have no clear answer.

The firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News has caused quite a stir and speculation as to the reason behind his termination.  Carlson, as an outspoken critic of the Woke, the Left, and the establishment Republicans certainly had a target on his back.  He was the subject of advertiser boycotts, attacked as a racist and a white supremacist, doxxed and physically threatened in restaurants and at his home.  Yet, he anchored the Fox evening lineup, and had a wide and loyal following.  Fox shares were down 5% in the day following the announcement. The 8 p.m. slot for Fox has tanked by two-thirds, dragging the rest of the evening lineup down with it.  The people at Fox had to know that this would be the result.  

Traditionally, most organizations expend a great deal of energy, planning, and resources to hang on to a loyal core customer base and seek to build around it.  Consulting firms, MBA programs, and executives spend innumerable hours developing strategies to cement loyalty among their customers.  Nonprofits—universities, charities, private schools and the like do the same with their donors.

But in the era of Woke, we have seen the opposite behavior.  Companies and nonprofits have demonstrated a willingness to abandon core customers or donors in their quest to display their Wokeness.

What’s going on here?

Tucker Carlson’s abrupt dismissal and the blow to Fox News comes on the heels of the Bud Light debacle as they appointed transgender Dylan Mulvaney as their mascot.  The Anheuser-Busch Brand suffered a 17% loss in revenue and a 21% loss in volume in the wake of the Mulvaney debacle.  Alyssa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s marketing VP has been placed  on leave.  It’s mind boggling to consider this Harvard/Wharton MBA grad did not model out or anticipate the impact this decision would make on sales, the brand, and the company’s stock price, and no one on her staff  warned her off.  

These are irrational business decisions, and similar decisions are being made in board rooms across the country.  The N.F.L. alienated many of its faithful fans by backing Colin Kaepernick.  Many college alumns have stopped writing checks to their alma maters.    The local Catholic high school here allowed their largest donor to walk away over BLM. 

This seems to be irrational organizational behavior to me.  Or is it?  Is the Woke culture so strong that it overwhelms ordinary marketing and finance considerations?  Does it give a license to managers, trustees and boards of directors to abdicate their fiduciary duties to the organizations they are charged with overseeing?   Do they believe that the drop is temporary and that customers and donors will return (as most of the NFL fans did) once the kerfuffle dies down?   Or is something else going on here?  In the corporate world, it’s clear that ESG (on which I will have more to say on a later post) is giving managers an escape hatch to allow them to duck ordinary duties to put profits first.  Are these people making a conscious decision to subordinate their organizations to the demands of Woke or are they just not very capable?  

I have heard different answers from different people on this issue. That brand suicide is becoming more common leads me to believe that simple incompetent planning and strategy is an inadequate explanation.  Something more is going on here.

The Barbell Party

 It’s hard to discern precisely when it happened or if it was tied to a specific event or even whether it resulted from the implementation of a deliberate strategy, but the Democratic party transformed itself from the party of the “working man” to what I have called the Barbell Party.

The contours of the federal government in the 20^th century were initially shaped by the Republican Roosevelt.  As America industrialized, Teddy Roosevelt established the precedent that the federal government had a role to play in offsetting large corporate power.  Known as the trustbuster, TR used the levers of government to push back against railroads, big steel, big coal and the like to provide a “guardian angel” to the average American worker.

A few decades later, as the Great Depression devastated the U.S., FDR used the federal government to attempt to battle its impact.  Whatever you think of FDR, his programs were aimed at restoring the dignity and income of the average working man.  The TVA, WPA, CCC, CWA were all conceived to provide real work and dignity to ordinary Americans.   And for most of the 20^th century, Democrats counted on working people as the mainstay of their constituency and advanced workers’ rights and unions and union membership.  Again, the main constituency was Everyman.

Both TR and FDR sought to use government to protect American worker’s ability to work and provide for his family.

But something changed, and I mark that shift with the housing collapse in ’08 and the election of Barack Obama.

The light bulb went on for me in about 2012.

I happened to catch an episode of a home improvements show (which my wife loves to watch).  A young black couple- both teachers—absolutely giddy over their new home.  It was clear that the show was taped before the crash. They had borrowed 95% of the purchase price.  And borrowed the down payment.   They were ordinary people and we all know how that story ended.

Their lives were ruined.  They lost the house.  No one backstopped them.  But the boys and girls at Goldman Sachs and places like that had their net worths protected.

Then, hedge fund manager Cliff Asness made an astute observation.  He distributed a Venn Diagram with overlapping circles that showed the Tea Party on one side and Occupy Wall Street on the other.  Although the constituents are almost polar opposites in the nominal political parties they support, he noted that they were mostly complaining about the same things.

That’s when it became clear to me that the Democratic party (and the Republican establishment) primarily backstopped the Professional Managerial Elite. 

The next big thing, of course, was COVID. 

For everyman, there were rules, lockdowns and shutdowns.   The local bagel deli was shut and could only do takeout.  But Walmart stayed open.  The local bookstore was shuttered.  But Amazon was hardly impacted.  Independent restaurants were closed, wrecking the livelihoods of thousands of hardworking entrepreneurs.  The most pernicious aspect of this was that certain of the Professional Managerial Elite were deemed to be “essential workers” and were allowed to return to their offices, while other working men and women were confined to their homes.  Landlords (most of whom are independent property owners)  were barred from enforcing their rights to evict for nonpayment of rent.  In some egregious situations, landlords were living out of their cars while tenants refused to pay rent and thumbed their noses at landlords.

During the Floyd riots, people were allowed to protest, riot, and attend mass funerals for the career criminal George Floyd.  Politicians were allowed to get their hair coiffed,  eat at restaurants unmasked, and go on vacation, all in violation of the rules government officials established.

In responding to the two big adverse events- the housing crash of ’07-’08, the federal government acted to protect the elite and crush average Americans. 

And this theme shows no evidence of reversing itself.  The government responded to the insolvency of Silicon Valley Bank by guaranteeing all deposits, even thought the limit is $250,000 per depositor.  Silicon Valley Bank’s depositors are mostly the wealthy venture capital funds or companies owned by wealthy venture capital funds.  Yet in the same month, when East Palestine, Ohio was turned down for emergency funds and virtually ignored by the feds when a train derailment unleashed an ecological and health catastrophe.

It's very clear that at least since the election of Barack Obama, the Democratic party (and the federal government when it is in power) has morphed into something very different.  It uses its power and influence to guarantee economic outcomes for the elite.  Unlike FDR, it does not try to create conditions for working class employment, but simply to transfer wealth to “marginalized peoples” and empower the criminal class.  Average working people are ignored, held in contempt or affirmatively shut out.

It is now the Barbell Party.  It advocates the interests at both ends but nothing in the middle.