Corporate America has been in uncharted territory for a while now as it tries to navigate today’s increasingly heated culture wars. Nowhere has that fact been driven home more shockingly than with Bud Light’s recent dethroning as America’s No.1-selling beer.
It’s certainly not the first iconic company to get entangled in these political thickets — witness Disney, Target, Starbucks, Chick-fil-A — but Bud Light’s dilemma may be the most instructive example yet of just how thoroughly today’s political polarization has impacted every facet of the culture.
The controversy began in April, when the company provided transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with a can of Bud Light with an image of her face on it, which she displayed on social media as she endorsed the beer.
It’s important to note — because this part of the story has been grossly misrepresented during the entire debate — that this wasn’t part of any formal ad campaign by Anheuser-Busch InBev. Dylan Mulvaney cans weren’t for sale anywhere. It was one face on one can, displayed on one individual’s social media accounts.
Which makes the storm that followed even more bizarre, if that’s possible. Conservative activists and politicians seized on it as an example of a big company “rubbing our faces” in LGBTQ culture, in the ever-tolerant words of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Which is ironic, considering it was actually conservatives who have promoted the Mulvaney endorsement (again: one can) out of its progressive social-media niche and onto the cultural front lines.
Kid Rock famously, or infamously, shot up cases of Bud Light to express the ire of the right. A group of female Republican governors released a wince-inducing video about “real women of politics,” which confirmed that outright bigotry is still considered funny in some circles. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, never one to miss an opportunity to demagogue, declared on Twitter that “woke globalists are ruining a great company.”
The other shoe dropped recently, when monthly sales figures confirmed that Bud Light in May lost the top-in-the-nation sales crown that it has worn for more than two decades. As the Post-Dispatch’s Daniel Neman reported, Bud Light remains the top-selling beer for the year to date on the strength of its pre-controversy sales. But that only matters if the company can pull the nose up on the current sales plunge going forward.
There’s little doubt the beer maker largely brought this storm down on itself by badly misreading its own customer base. One of its own vice presidents tried to explain the Mulvaney endorsement as an attempt to update traditional Bud Light branding that “has been kind of a fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor” — confirming that the company understood how poorly its core customers would receive such an endorsement even as it insulted them again.
In short, you don’t have to buy into the intolerant narrative of the Bud Light boycott to marvel at how supremely the brewer screwed up here. Not by displaying tolerance for a transgender personality, but thinking it could do it under the radar and thus have it both ways — keeping its old customers while wooing new ones from the other side of the cultural fence.
Unfortunately, America today isn’t a country where liberals and conservatives can just agree to disagree on much of anything. Even beer.
Anheuser-Busch’s announcement that it will offer financial assistance to its distributors and others affected by the boycott is the responsible thing to do, and a good example of corporate level-headedness in a crisis. And the company’s quick retreat from the culture-war battlefield — “We hear you,” A-B CEO Brendan Whitworth wrote to customers in vowing to just get back to the business of beer — is about the only move it could have made at this point.
If that retreat has angered the LGBTQ community and its supporters (reportedly it has), that begs the question of just what they thought they were getting from a company that, like virtually every company, is ultimately interested only in the bottom line. As Slate noted recently, “rainbow-washed corporations are fair-weather allies.”
Other examples of that phenomenon include Target’s apparent decision to deemphasize its annual June rainbow-themed merchandise in the wake of a truly despicable harassment campaign by right-wing bigots against its employees. Starbucks has been accused of similarly wavering in its traditional support for the LGBTQ community by removing rainbow decorations from stores (the company denies it).
What does it look like when a big corporation actually stays the course on these turbulent seas? It looks like, of all things, Disney. The company’s epic legal and cultural fight with DeSantis over Florida’s law muzzling classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues isn’t for show. They mean it.
But there are some important differences there. The company is under intense pressure from its own massive workforce not to back down. Also, there’s no discernible public boycott movement afoot to, say, stop visiting Disney World. Unlike getting on the wrong side of half the country, confronting one blustery bully of a politician could actually be good for Disney’s image.
What lesson should the LGBTQ community and its supporters take from all of this? Only that businesses are in business to make money. Yes, their employment practices should reflect the growing acceptance that America celebrates during Pride month every June. But the real (and remaining) work of mainstreaming that acceptance has to come from citizens, not corporations. Love is love, as they say — and ultimately, beer is just beer.
