For decades, the American right wing succeeded in winning over big business and religious conservatives. But as the fault lines of American politics continue to shift, that alliance may be fraying at the seams. The left may be hesitant to take advantage of this change – but there are good reasons for it to put aside its qualms.
When North Carolina passed the so-called “bathroom bill” – which overruled all local ordinances protecting LGBT people and took away private citizens’ right to sue over discrimination – there was an immediate and fierce backlash, not just from blue states, but from corporations.
The CEOs of more than 100 prominent companies – Apple, Google, Facebook, Kellogg, Citibank, Pfizer, Microsoft, Starbucks and more – signed an open letter opposing the law and calling for its repeal. Deutsche Bank and PayPal canceled plans to invest and add jobs in the state. A similar corporate outcry greeted an equally mean-spirited anti-LGBT law in Mississippi, with executives from Dow, General Electric, Pepsi and other blue-chip companies saying it was bad for business.
North Carolina’s and Mississippi’s laws are still in effect for now, but recent history suggests that corporate opposition could be decisive in rolling them back. It sank a similar anti-LGBT bill that looked set for easy passage in Georgia. The bill had already cleared the legislature, but when major employers like Coca-Cola and Home Depot voiced opposition, Governor Nathan Deal bowed to their will and vetoed it, infuriating lawmakers on the religious right.
Corporate opposition was also instrumental in rolling back Indiana’s notorious right-to-discriminate law – which Governor Mike Pence signed with great ceremony and then was left scrambling to fix after a firestorm of criticism engulfed the state – and it blocked a similar bill on the verge of passage in Arizona.
Now that it has lost the battle over same-sex marriage, the American religious right has increasingly focused on discrimination as its raison d’être. Its members claim to be concerned above all else about protecting the “religious liberty” of business owners to refuse to serve gay people. But what they’re finding, to their dismay, is that the business owners often aren’t on their side.
Part of this is simple human decency: business owners and CEOs are people like everyone else, and many of them share in the growing consensus that anti-LGBT prejudice is fundamentally wrong. But I suspect a bigger part is pure rational calculation. Whatever political views they personally hold, they know full well that sanctioning discrimination is just plain bad for their bottom line. It stains their public image and makes it harder for them to attract talent, not just in one southern state, but everywhere they do business.
But even if the corporations are acting out of self-interest rather than idealism, their help has the same impact. Corporate lobbying has been a powerful counterbalance against these harmful and prejudiced laws, especially in states where progressives would have no chance of stopping them on their own. In the long term, this could become a wedge splitting the conservative coalition, as each faction realizes how its interests diverge from the other.
This is even true for some strictly economic issues. Surveys find that strong majorities of US business owners are in favor of raising the minimum wage, and in this way they’re very much out of step with conservative lobbying groups such as the Chamber of Commerce that purport to represent them. Many large corporations that support action on climate change, like Apple and Nike, have dropped their Chamber memberships over its policy of preferentially funding climate change deniers. Again, there may be more potential for fruitful cooperation here than the left has recognized.
Obviously, this isn’t to say that liberals always will or should work with corporations, or that they’ll be our allies in everything. Almost inevitably, they follow social progress rather than lead it. They’ve gotten on the bandwagon of LGBT rights because that cause has won broad public support, but they’ve mostly absented themselves from other equally important causes, such as reproductive choice and racial justice, that are still more controversial than they should be. And there will always be businesses run by religious conservatives, including Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, that openly support regressive policy whatever the cost.
Even if we don’t see eye to eye on everything, there’s no reason to turn down corporate help where we do agree. The goal of politics should be harm reduction, not preserving ideological purity. When it comes to fighting religious-right lawmakers who want to undo all the social progress of the last hundred years, making common cause with powerful and influential allies is an offer we should welcome.
