In his relentless war on all things “woke,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — a likely candidate for president in 2024 — wants America to believe he is merely standing tall against the forces of leftist extremism.
He began with schools by restricting curricular materials concerning LGBTQ folks or suggesting racism in America has been a systemic problem woven into the social and political fabric of the nation.
Then, when companies like Disney balked at the “Don’t Say Gay” bill (while remaining disturbingly silent about the attacks on racial equity), he went after them too.
DeSantis railed against companies for holding diversity, equity, or inclusion trainings and accused “woke CEOs” of besmirching the values of Florida families — though presumably not the gay or lesbian ones.
Then, in the case of Disney, DeSantis and the GOP-dominated legislature repealed favorable tax and regulatory structures that had benefitted the company since its Orlando park opened in 1971.
And now, he has set his sights on “Environmental, Social, and Governance,” also known as ESG.
It’s a framework that corporations and investment strategists utilize to better understand and evaluate how societal concerns can impact a company’s long-term sustainability.
But to Ron DeSantis, it’s evidence of radicalism sneaking into those progressive bastions known as the corporate C-suites.
He says the state of Florida should stop investing pension funds with managers who employ ESG in their decision-making because their only concern should be making maximum returns for those whose money is parked with them.
Most of all, he insists, investment firms and the companies they recommend should get out of the politics business altogether.
The implication is clear: before ESG, before wokeness, corporate America was not political.
I’d like you to read that sentence again.
I suspect you see the problem here, right?
It’s like DeSantis’s attack on critical race theory or discussions about sexuality or gender identity in schools.
To the Governor, these things introduced politics into a space that had been free of it before.
Because neither education nor business had ever been political.
This will come as news to anyone who has ever gone to school, been a parent of someone in a school, worked for a company anywhere in America, or simply spent any substantial portion of their lives awake.
Schools and businesses have always been political
The truth is, all of these institutions are political and always have been.
The fact that schools have to fight for funding means that they’re political entities.
The curriculum, too, is always political.
For years, the decision to downplay the role of racism in history and present America as a shining city on a hill, where injustice had been an aberration — a glitch rather than a feature — was a political decision.
Reflexive patriotism is no less political than critical theory.
For generations, southern schools have deliberately downplayed the centrality of enslavement to secession and the Civil War — an entirely political decision.
And when Ron DeSantis pushed through legislation this year requiring Florida schools to teach about the evils of communism, he was making a political statement.
It may be a move you applaud. But only a fool or a liar would deny it was a political decision.
Likewise, corporate America has always been political.
Ron DeSantis’s campaign coffers — and those of his fellow Republican lawmakers — will attest to that.
But you won’t hear him complain about companies or entire industries making considerable donations to politicians like himself through their PACs.
While the Governor seems mightily concerned that “woke companies” may be embracing politics that go against the beliefs of many of their employees, there are surely Democrats who work for companies that have contributed to DeSantis’s campaigns.
But he didn’t seem to mind the political implications of that.
And is Ron DeSantis going to call for the Supreme Court to overturn Citizen’s United?
Of course not.
Even though that decision made it much easier for companies to funnel money to candidates for office to influence election outcomes, DeSantis, like virtually all conservatives, loves Citizen’s United and the freedom it gave corporate entities to make such contributions.
Because he knows that, despite some firms’ flirtations with progressive ideas, most still favor the tax-cutting, de-regulatory agenda of right-wingers like himself.
But you can’t have it both ways.
You can’t bash companies for being political and then turn around, as a politician, and take their money.
Companies aren’t doing ESG for ideological reasons — they do it for economic ones
What’s also fascinating about the attack on so-called woke companies is the assumption that these corporate execs are willing to sacrifice profitability to make some political statement.
Does Ron DeSantis believe this?
Surely not.
If companies seek to be LGBTQ-inclusive, ensure that their health care plans cover birth control, and provide DEI training to facilitate a racially-equitable work environment, it isn’t because they’re trying to suck up to MSNBC hosts.
It’s because they know it’s good business.
Women are half or more of the workforce.
LGBTQ folks buy things and spend money.
So do Black and brown people.
And in a nation becoming less white each year, to not make your workforce more inclusive is to ensure you won’t have a business, woke or otherwise, for long.
As for ESG, far from supplanting concerns over profits, it is a framework explicitly intended to ensure them over time by insulating companies from some of the social and environmental crises that can harm long-term profitability.
ESG is essentially a framework to help institutional stakeholders (and shareholders, when relevant) understand how that organization manages risks and takes advantage of opportunities posed by various environmental, social, and governance concerns.
So, when it comes to the E part of ESG, companies or investors would pay close attention to their fossil fuel emissions and carbon footprint, natural resource usage, and long-term resilience in the face of risks posed by climate change, like fires, drought, hurricanes or flooding.
And they would do this not to be woke but to guard against supply chain disruptions and other issues with sustainability, all of which would impact their bottom lines.
The S part of ESG refers to a company’s relationship with employees, contractors, and other supply chain partners, like fair wages and working conditions.
And again, companies or investors who measure such metrics in making business decisions are not doing it to make some left-wing political statement but because such metrics are related to long-term sustainability and profits.
And the G part of ESG is what really drives this point home.
Far from being a diversion from more traditional business-minded concerns, governance issues refer to how a company is managed. It means evaluating things like the transparency and accountability of executive decision-making or how shareholder’s rights are balanced with those decisions.
These are entirely reasonable concerns rooted in entirely economic rationales.
There is nothing radical about any of it.
And Ron DeSantis — a man educated at Yale despite his man-of-the-people shtick — knows it.
Aside from the hypocrisy and duplicity, DeSantis’s attempts to bring down the power of the state against companies for being too progressive is a sad and dispiriting sign of the times.
It says a lot about how far backward we’ve come as a nation.
In the 1960s, people looked to the state and demanded political action against those companies that refused to be inclusive and equitable. That’s what the civil rights movement was doing with sit-ins and boycotts, and demonstrations, in an attempt to force companies to treat everyone equitably.
Now, conservatives have inverted the script entirely.
Today, they’re looking to the state to take action against companies precisely because they’re equitable and inclusive — or at least trying to be.
They want the state to punish firms for not being exclusive or biased enough.
And Ron DeSantis — a man who badly wants to be president — is at the forefront of this effort.
To roll back the clock.
Because that’s all MAGA ever meant — to any of them.
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This post was previously published MEDIUM.COM.
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