Woke Business: Putting the Nike-Kaepernick Ad Controversy into Context: The Problem of Social Justice Warrior CEOs

Nike has decided to make out of work quarterback Colin Kaepernick a central piece of its 30th anniversary advertising campaign:

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoItpic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

Predictably, this has caused anger and consternation in some right of center quarters.

Colin Kaepernick will be featured in Nike's 30th anniversary "Just Do It" campaign, announced just days before the NFL season is set to begin

People are destroying their @Nike products in response pic.twitter.com/wcpnibBbUv

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 4, 2018

As a lapsed football fan who has never owned a Nike product (not on purpose, it just worked out that way), I probably would not have paid much attention to this kerfuffle but for the fact that it implicates my two most recent scholarly projects.

In Book Review Essay: Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization by Peter Kolozi, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3206963, I point out that:

Although American conservatism in recent decades has been characterized by its rhetorical embrace of free market capitalism, Kolozi reminds us that it was not always so. To the contrary, there is a long tradition of skepticism about—and sometimes outright hostility to—capitalism among important strains of American conservative thought. ...

Kolozi’s concise and eminently readable text raises the intriguing possibility that the seemingly immutable conflation of conservatism and capitalism may have been a temporary aberration. Post-war conservatism in the United States was a somewhat rocky marriage of traditionalists, libertarians, and, somewhat later, neoconservatives. These conservative tribes were united mainly by a shared opposition to Communism. Given a seemingly binary and existential choice between what passed for capitalism in the post-war West and Soviet communism, American conservatives opted for the former. Yet, despite Frank S. Meyer’s famous fusionism project, which sought to create a new syncretic conservatism merging the various tribal traditions, the pre-existing fault lines persisted. With communism having been taken off the table as an existential threat, it may have been inevitable that those fault lines would rupture.

If it is possible that conservatives are going to abandon their long love affair with big business, it seems almost certain that big business is going to abandon conservatives (especially the brand of conservatives Hillary Clinton famously dismissed as deplorables).

I explore the reasons for that development in my article Corporate Purpose in a Populist Era, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3237107.  In it, I observe that both left- and right-wing populists historically have viewed corporate directors and managers as elites opposed to the best interests of the people. Today, however, right of center populists find themselves increasingly at odds with an emergent class of social justice warrior CEOs, whose views on a variety of critical issues are increasingly closer to those of blue state elites than those of red state populists.

To be sure, as Josh Barro perceptively argues, brands like Nike have profit maximizing reasons for aligning themselves with woke coastal millennials, who are at the core of the supposedly most desirable marketing demographic. But there is also something else going on here, which I explore at length in my article:

The values of the elites (the Oligarchs and Clerisy, as Kotkin calls them), on the one hand, and those of non-elites, on the other, have been diverging for several decades. In his 1995 classic The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch identified the emergent split between what he called the New Elites and the rest of society.[1]Lasch identified several trends that have accelerated in subsequent years. First, he argued, American elites had become increasingly global, rejecting nationalism and patriotism, and refusing to be tied to places or people.[2]Today we refer to those elites, as well as their global counterparts and those who aspire to join them,[3]as Davos Man:

January is when the World Economic Forum (WEF) holds its annual conference at a Swiss mountain resort to “improve the state of the world.” More than a business meeting for 2,500-plus globetrotting academics, executives, politicians, and lobbyists, it is a tribal celebration for leaders who worship a holy trinity of ideas: capitalism, globalization, and innovation. In a 2004 essay, Samuel Huntington, who popularized the term “Davos Man,” described this breed of humans as “view[ing] national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing.” (And, yes, more than 80 percent of attendees at the WEF conference are male.)[4]

As The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist observed in 2013, “[o]rdinary folk trust Davos Man no more than they would a lobbyist for the Worldwide Federation of Weasels.”[5] This distrust took on considerable political weight in the 2016 Presidential campaign, as the populists who voted for Trump recognized that a minority comprised of “people from ‘anywhere’” ruled the majority of people who came from “somewhere.”[6]

The first group … holds “achieved” identities based on educational and professional success. Anywheres value social and geographical mobility. The second group is characterised [sic] by identities rooted in a place, and its members value family, authority and nationality.

Whereas Anywheres, whose portable identities are well-suited to the global economy, have largely benefited from cultural and economic openness in the West, he argues, the Somewheres have been left behind—economically, but mainly in terms of respect for the things they hold dear. The Anywheres look down on them, provoking a backlash.[7]

The disdain in which elites now hold non-elites was another critical emergent trend Lasch identified. As Christopher Lasch explained, “the new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.”[8]Many of Lasch’s new elites dismissed the masses’ values as “mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women.”[9]

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing—not because they wish to overthrow the old order but precisely because their defense of it seems so deeply irrational [to the new elites] ….[10]

This tension was perhaps nowhere more pronounced than with respect to religion. When Lasch write over two decades ago, “[a] skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes. ... The elites’ attitude to religion ranges from indifference to active hostility.”[11]

If anything, today’s elites have become even more hostile to religious values. As Samuel Gregg observes, the Davos Man’s moral creed is “a mélange of social liberalism, environmentalism, and a new order of a borderless world. Religion is … considered the refuge of fanatics and anyone stupid enough to be skeptical of gender ideology and techno-utopianism.”[12]

In contrast, modern right-wing populists are highly religious. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center analysis, for example, Tea Party members were “much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on … social issues.”[13]Likewise, a subsequent Pew analysis found that “white born-again or evangelical Christians and white Catholics … strongly supported Donald Trump ….”[14]

Today’s elites thus hold non-elites in at least as much disdain as did the elites of Lasch’s period. The Clerisy, in particular, scarcely bothers to conceal its disdain for the traditional middle and working classes.[15]This disdain manifests itself in a variety of ways, perhaps most notably through the increasing separation between the working class and the elites.

The increasing geographical separation between the elites, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other, with the former migrating to the coasts and large cities and the latter remaining in rural areas, has been widely remarked.[16]Even when they live in relative geographical proximity, however, the elites are increasingly walling themselves off from non-elites. As Joel Kotkin observed, for example, “large sections of the [San Francisco] Bay Area … resemble a ‘gated’ community, where those without the proper academic credentials, and without access to venture funding are forced into a kind of marginal nether-existence.”[17]

Ditto Portland (or, more precisely, Beaverton). The bottom line is that the values, beliefs, and tastes of social justice warrior CEOs like Phil Knight have radically diverged from those of red state populists. In many cases, it simply would not occur to SJWs like Knight that there are folks who would take offense from the Kaepernick ad. And, if it did, Knight and his ilk simply won't care. 

Welcome to the new world.

Nike has decided to make out of work quarterback Colin Kaepernick a central piece of its 30th anniversary advertising campaign:

Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. #JustDoItpic.twitter.com/SRWkMIDdaO

— Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) September 3, 2018

Predictably, this has caused anger and consternation in some right of center quarters.

Colin Kaepernick will be featured in Nike's 30th anniversary "Just Do It" campaign, announced just days before the NFL season is set to begin

People are destroying their @Nike products in response pic.twitter.com/wcpnibBbUv

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) September 4, 2018

As a lapsed football fan who has never owned a Nike product (not on purpose, it just worked out that way), I probably would not have paid much attention to this kerfuffle but for the fact that it implicates my two most recent scholarly projects.

In Book Review Essay: Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization by Peter Kolozi, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3206963, I point out that:

Although American conservatism in recent decades has been characterized by its rhetorical embrace of free market capitalism, Kolozi reminds us that it was not always so. To the contrary, there is a long tradition of skepticism about—and sometimes outright hostility to—capitalism among important strains of American conservative thought. ...

Kolozi’s concise and eminently readable text raises the intriguing possibility that the seemingly immutable conflation of conservatism and capitalism may have been a temporary aberration. Post-war conservatism in the United States was a somewhat rocky marriage of traditionalists, libertarians, and, somewhat later, neoconservatives. These conservative tribes were united mainly by a shared opposition to Communism. Given a seemingly binary and existential choice between what passed for capitalism in the post-war West and Soviet communism, American conservatives opted for the former. Yet, despite Frank S. Meyer’s famous fusionism project, which sought to create a new syncretic conservatism merging the various tribal traditions, the pre-existing fault lines persisted. With communism having been taken off the table as an existential threat, it may have been inevitable that those fault lines would rupture.

If it is possible that conservatives are going to abandon their long love affair with big business, it seems almost certain that big business is going to abandon conservatives (especially the brand of conservatives Hillary Clinton famously dismissed as deplorables).

I explore the reasons for that development in my article Corporate Purpose in a Populist Era, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3237107.  In it, I observe that both left- and right-wing populists historically have viewed corporate directors and managers as elites opposed to the best interests of the people. Today, however, right of center populists find themselves increasingly at odds with an emergent class of social justice warrior CEOs, whose views on a variety of critical issues are increasingly closer to those of blue state elites than those of red state populists.

To be sure, as Josh Barro perceptively argues, brands like Nike have profit maximizing reasons for aligning themselves with woke coastal millennials, who are at the core of the supposedly most desirable marketing demographic. But there is also something else going on here, which I explore at length in my article:

The values of the elites (the Oligarchs and Clerisy, as Kotkin calls them), on the one hand, and those of non-elites, on the other, have been diverging for several decades. In his 1995 classic The Revolt of the Elites, Christopher Lasch identified the emergent split between what he called the New Elites and the rest of society.[1]Lasch identified several trends that have accelerated in subsequent years. First, he argued, American elites had become increasingly global, rejecting nationalism and patriotism, and refusing to be tied to places or people.[2]Today we refer to those elites, as well as their global counterparts and those who aspire to join them,[3]as Davos Man:

January is when the World Economic Forum (WEF) holds its annual conference at a Swiss mountain resort to “improve the state of the world.” More than a business meeting for 2,500-plus globetrotting academics, executives, politicians, and lobbyists, it is a tribal celebration for leaders who worship a holy trinity of ideas: capitalism, globalization, and innovation. In a 2004 essay, Samuel Huntington, who popularized the term “Davos Man,” described this breed of humans as “view[ing] national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing.” (And, yes, more than 80 percent of attendees at the WEF conference are male.)[4]

As The Economist’s Schumpeter columnist observed in 2013, “[o]rdinary folk trust Davos Man no more than they would a lobbyist for the Worldwide Federation of Weasels.”[5] This distrust took on considerable political weight in the 2016 Presidential campaign, as the populists who voted for Trump recognized that a minority comprised of “people from ‘anywhere’” ruled the majority of people who came from “somewhere.”[6]

The first group … holds “achieved” identities based on educational and professional success. Anywheres value social and geographical mobility. The second group is characterised [sic] by identities rooted in a place, and its members value family, authority and nationality.

Whereas Anywheres, whose portable identities are well-suited to the global economy, have largely benefited from cultural and economic openness in the West, he argues, the Somewheres have been left behind—economically, but mainly in terms of respect for the things they hold dear. The Anywheres look down on them, provoking a backlash.[7]

The disdain in which elites now hold non-elites was another critical emergent trend Lasch identified. As Christopher Lasch explained, “the new elites, the professional classes in particular, regard the masses with mingled scorn and apprehension.”[8]Many of Lasch’s new elites dismissed the masses’ values as “mindless patriotism, religious fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and retrograde views of women.”[9]

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television. They are at once absurd and vaguely menacing—not because they wish to overthrow the old order but precisely because their defense of it seems so deeply irrational [to the new elites] ….[10]

This tension was perhaps nowhere more pronounced than with respect to religion. When Lasch write over two decades ago, “[a] skeptical, iconoclastic state of mind is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the knowledge classes. ... The elites’ attitude to religion ranges from indifference to active hostility.”[11]

If anything, today’s elites have become even more hostile to religious values. As Samuel Gregg observes, the Davos Man’s moral creed is “a mélange of social liberalism, environmentalism, and a new order of a borderless world. Religion is … considered the refuge of fanatics and anyone stupid enough to be skeptical of gender ideology and techno-utopianism.”[12]

In contrast, modern right-wing populists are highly religious. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center analysis, for example, Tea Party members were “much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on … social issues.”[13]Likewise, a subsequent Pew analysis found that “white born-again or evangelical Christians and white Catholics … strongly supported Donald Trump ….”[14]

Today’s elites thus hold non-elites in at least as much disdain as did the elites of Lasch’s period. The Clerisy, in particular, scarcely bothers to conceal its disdain for the traditional middle and working classes.[15]This disdain manifests itself in a variety of ways, perhaps most notably through the increasing separation between the working class and the elites.

The increasing geographical separation between the elites, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other, with the former migrating to the coasts and large cities and the latter remaining in rural areas, has been widely remarked.[16]Even when they live in relative geographical proximity, however, the elites are increasingly walling themselves off from non-elites. As Joel Kotkin observed, for example, “large sections of the [San Francisco] Bay Area … resemble a ‘gated’ community, where those without the proper academic credentials, and without access to venture funding are forced into a kind of marginal nether-existence.”[17]

Ditto Portland (or, more precisely, Beaverton). The bottom line is that the values, beliefs, and tastes of social justice warrior CEOs like Phil Knight have radically diverged from those of red state populists. In many cases, it simply would not occur to SJWs like Knight that there are folks who would take offense from the Kaepernick ad. And, if it did, Knight and his ilk simply won't care. 

Welcome to the new world.

[1]Lasch, supra note 30, at 5 (descrbing the new elites)..

[2]See id.at 35 (arguing that the loyalties of modern elites are international rather than regional, national, or local).

[3]As Samuell Gregg notes:

Davos Man isn’t limited to business titans, heads of multinational corporations, and people who work in financial markets. He also takes the form of transnational officials who work in institutions such as the United Nations or the European Commission in Brussels as well as people employed by international NGOs. Nor will anyone be surprised to learn that Davos Man enjoys the company of actors and celebrities.

Samuel Gregg, Davos Man, Globalism, and the Case for Free Trade, Acton.Org (Feb. 08, 2017), https://acton.org/pub/commentary/2017/02/08/Davos-Man-globalism-and-the-case-for-free-trade.

[4]Gillian Tett, Davos Man Has No Clothes,ForeignPolicy.com (Jan. 16, 2017), https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/16/davos-man-has-no-clothes-globalization/.

[5]Davos Man and his Defects: The Global-Leadership Industry Needs Re-Engineering, The Econ., Jan. 26, 2013, at [TBA].

[6]The New Political Divide, and a Plan to Close It, The Econ., Mar. 25, 2017, at [TBA] (describing a survey of populism by David Goodhart.).

[7]Id.

[8]Lasch, supranote 30, at 28.

[9]Id.at 29.

[10]Id.

[11]Id. at 215.

[12]Gregg, supranote 152.

[13]The Tea Party & Religion, PewForum.Org(Feb. 23, 2011), http://www.pewforum.org/2011/02/23/tea-party-and-religion/.

[14]Gregory A. Smith & Jessica Martínez, How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis, PewResearch.Org(Nov. 9, 2016), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/.

[15]Kotkin, supranote 30, at 71 (“Contempt for the middle orders is often barely concealed among those most comfortably ensconced in the emerging class order.”).

[16]See, e.g.,Josh Kron, Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America, TheAtlantin.Com(Nov. 30, 2012), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/(“The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside.”).

[17]Kotkin, supranote 30, at 45.

[1]Lasch, supra note 30, at 5 (descrbing the new elites)..

[2]See id.at 35 (arguing that the loyalties of modern elites are international rather than regional, national, or local).

[3]As Samuell Gregg notes:

Davos Man isn’t limited to business titans, heads of multinational corporations, and people who work in financial markets. He also takes the form of transnational officials who work in institutions such as the United Nations or the European Commission in Brussels as well as people employed by international NGOs. Nor will anyone be surprised to learn that Davos Man enjoys the company of actors and celebrities.

Samuel Gregg, Davos Man, Globalism, and the Case for Free Trade, Acton.Org (Feb. 08, 2017), https://acton.org/pub/commentary/2017/02/08/Davos-Man-globalism-and-the-case-for-free-trade.

[4]Gillian Tett, Davos Man Has No Clothes,ForeignPolicy.com (Jan. 16, 2017), https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/16/davos-man-has-no-clothes-globalization/.

[5]Davos Man and his Defects: The Global-Leadership Industry Needs Re-Engineering, The Econ., Jan. 26, 2013, at [TBA].

[6]The New Political Divide, and a Plan to Close It, The Econ., Mar. 25, 2017, at [TBA] (describing a survey of populism by David Goodhart.).

[7]Id.

[8]Lasch, supranote 30, at 28.

[9]Id.at 29.

[10]Id.

[11]Id. at 215.

[12]Gregg, supranote 152.

[13]The Tea Party & Religion, PewForum.Org(Feb. 23, 2011), http://www.pewforum.org/2011/02/23/tea-party-and-religion/.

[14]Gregory A. Smith & Jessica Martínez, How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis, PewResearch.Org(Nov. 9, 2016), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/.

[15]Kotkin, supranote 30, at 71 (“Contempt for the middle orders is often barely concealed among those most comfortably ensconced in the emerging class order.”).

[16]See, e.g.,Josh Kron, Red State, Blue City: How the Urban-Rural Divide Is Splitting America, TheAtlantin.Com(Nov. 30, 2012), https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/red-state-blue-city-how-the-urban-rural-divide-is-splitting-america/265686/(“The new political divide is a stark division between cities and what remains of the countryside.”).

[17]Kotkin, supranote 30, at 45.