The End of Cheap Progressive Signalling

And Why That Might Be a Good Thing For Progressive Causes

Catch-up service:
The Bud Light Debacle
Banishing the Inner Critic
Stop Making Sense
How.I Use ChatGPT
How To Love Classical Music
Notes On the Great Vibe Shift

“It’s not a principle until it costs you money.”
Bill Bernbach

In corporate America, the words diversity, equity and inclusion have become flashing red danger signs.¹ President Trump has issued an executive order targeting ‘illegal’ DEI, the scope of which is ominously vague. The Justice Department has bared its teeth on the issue. The remit of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been transformed. Anti-DEI activists and politicians are on the march.

Organisations with DEI commitments are in a panic about being sued by staff, strafed on social media, or tasered by the government’s anti-woke police. Across corporate America, the same executives who marched their organisations up the hill of DEI are now marching them back down again. I listed some of the renouncers in a recent post, but more have joined their ranks since, including the mass retailer, Target.

This last one is particularly notable, since Target was so heavily invested in DEI. In 2020, its CEO, Brian Cornell, remarked that George Floyd “could have been one of my Target team members”. The company pledged to increase its black workforce by 20%, and established a Racial Equity Action and Change committee. In 2021, it pledged to spend over $2 billion with black-owned businesses by the end of 2025. Cornell, after accepting an award for Target’s commitment to DEI, said, “[the] focus on diversity and inclusion and equity has fuelled much of our growth.”

Target has now abolished all of these initiatives and changed its language; instead of promising to advance equality, it talks in more anodyne terms about the importance of “belonging”. Its retreat from progressivism was accelerated by Trump’s return but was already underway. Campaigns from right-wing activists had succeeded in hurting the business. Target’s quarterly sales fell for the first time in six years following Pride Month in 2023, a fall which the company’s head of sales attributed to adverse consumer reaction to its Pride-related merchandise.²

A common reaction to America’s ongoing corporate reformation is that the executives performing these about-turns are cynical liars who never believed what they were saying or doing in the first place. This isn’t wholly unfair. Critics of DEI have always argued that in many or most cases, its true purpose is not the same as its stated goals. But I don’t think these executives sat around coldly gaming this out. Most of them sincerely want to be good people, or at least to be seen as such by their social peers and teenage children.

My guess is that Cornell, for instance, was genuine in his intentions. The murder of George Floyd took place 10 minutes from Target headquarters. Cornell himself grew up poor in a single-parent household, his mother on welfare. I can well imagine he has empathy for the disadvantaged. It’s more likely that he allowed his sentiment to substitute for a rigorous assessment of whether and how his company should be backing progressive causes. So he just went along with whatever progressive lobbyists proposed. A certain dishonesty, or at least wishful thinking, then became inevitable. It’s hard to believe that DEI “fuelled Target’s growth”.

Perhaps a better and less moralistic way to think about the corporate vibe shift is this: the price of progressive signals has sharply increased. DEI used to be a virtually cost-free way to show where you were on these issues; it’s not anymore. Companies are therefore having to reassess whether they want to pay the new price. Some are deciding that they do. JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, has doubled down on DEI in public statements. Others are deciding that the price, in terms of reputational, legal and business risk is no longer justified.

In truth, most are making this calculation for the first time. It’s only in the last few years that DEI has come under sustained and heavy fire from politicians and activists. For a long time, it was easy for executives to align themselves with what they took to be the zeitgeist. They could do so unthinkingly, and many of them did. The result was a profusion of poorly thought through initiatives, pointless and expensive training, and endless boiler plate, not to mention linguistic policing, divisiveness, and discrimination.

In the era of zero interest rates, many firms blithely ran up huge debts and made unwise investments. Warren Buffett coined a phrase to describe what happens after a period of easy money comes to an end: “Only when the tide goes out do you learn who’s been swimming naked.” When financial conditions change for the worse it becomes harder to conceal inefficiency, waste, and sloppy management, which means investors get a more accurate picture of what’s going on. Similarly, now that the period of easy progressive signals has come to an end, we learn which companies are genuinely committed to social justice and which are not. The rise in price in progressive signalling is forcing companies to be more honest. It’s possible that Trump has forced the price too high. But I do think it was too low before.

The new price ought to make those organisations who want stick with DEI in some form design better programs. At a conference in the U.S. recently, a group of academics and social entrepreneurs discussed how universities should react to the new hostility to DEI. Some suggested the same programs just be rebranded with different language to evade the attention of the government. I think this would be a missed opportunity. Universities and companies should accept that there is at least some truth to the Republican critique of DEI. It did need serious rethinking, if only to better serve the people it claims to help. The end of cheap signalling gives organisations a chance to design activity from the ground up, rather than blindly adopting other people’s language and practices, or taking programs off-the-shelf from consultants and pressure groups.

More generally, one of the questions for the left now is whether it should concede that much of the progressive agenda was based on cheap signalling, and can therefore be left behind without compromising on principle - or whether they want to go tooth and nail for “LatinX” and so on. At the moment, they’re trying to have it both ways. Here is Pete Buttigieg (whom I generally like and admire):

C’mon Mayor Pete. If it is absurdly trivial of the Trump administration to reverse changes to terminology made under Biden, that implies it was absurdly trivial to make those changes in the first place. This reminds me of ultra-progressives who roll their eyes at feminists who complain about shared bathrooms. Why are you so fixated on toilets, you weirdoes? To which you want to say, hang on, nobody questioned gendered toilets until you made a fuss about it. So, is this stuff important, or isn’t it? Pick one.

The left as a whole has become over-invested in its own symbols and language games, partly because of its success at converting knowledge economy professionals. Activists and boardrooms became locked into an insular private conversation to which most staff and voters were outsiders. The end of cheap signalling might just force progressives and their converts to engage with those for whom the signals never made sense.

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After the jump: my thoughts on the films I’ve watched in the last few weeks: A Complete Unknown, Nosferatu, A Real Pain, Conclave. Plus a Rattle Bag of juicy links.