Republicans Are Becoming Too Toxic For Big Business

The purchasing power of the GOP’s base started to decline against the purchasing power of the people they despise. And now this is costing them dearly.

Image by Hulda Nelson

by Justin Rosario

The past couple of weeks have not been great for the marriage between Republicans and corporations. Dozens of companies, ranging from Ben & Jerry’s to Delta Airlines have come out against the hundreds of Republican bills designed to suppress voter turnout and reverse election results Republicans don’t like. 

Republicans, who have been dismantling the government on behalf of these same corporations for decades, were furious. Threats were made, tables were pounded, and Mitch McConnell delivered the most laughably hypocritical statement in modern political history. 

Some of those corporations backed down but a lot more ignored the GOP’s outrage and for good reason: Republicans are becoming too toxic for Big Business.

The GOP Used To Be Great For Corporations

To be fair, from a narrow point of view, the Republican Party is still definitely the “pro-business” party. Whenever they’re in power, they cut corporate taxes, erase every possible regulation they can, gut the IRS so it can’t chase down corporate tax cheats, underfund and understaff agencies so they can’t enforce safety regulations, and work ceaselessly to protect the interests of “job creators” who don’t actually create jobs. Or at least they don’t create jobs with living wages. Republicans would also rather die than raise the minimum wage, which is also seen as “pro-business.”

A whole lot of people get pretty damn wealthy under this scheme and the donations keep rolling in for Republicans as long as they deliver. The problem is that in order to sell this to the GOP base, which does not profit from tax cuts for billionaires and allowing corporations to dump toxins in their water, Republicans had to turn to white grievance. They had to get white voters really angry about Black people and Muslims and feminism so they would ignore all the ways Republicans were funneling their wealth to the rich.

Clearly, that worked for half a century. Angry white people voted for Republicans to give away their country to the rich in return for, well, nothing, really. Unless you count someone telling you it’s OK to be a racist as a return on investment. 

While the GOP grew more racist, the country kept growing more diverse. Then the inevitable happened: The purchasing power of the GOP’s base started to decline against the purchasing power of the people they despise.

Just like that, tax cuts and deregulations stopped being the, ahem, bottom line.

The Customer Really Does Come First (Eventually)

Corporations hate boycotts. But not as much as Republicans do. Once upon a time, conservatives could be as openly racist as they wanted. By the 60s, they had to move to dog whistles and it steadily got more obscure from there. Republican consultant Lee Atwater spelled it out in his infamous 1981 interview:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

But Republicans really love their bigotry and can’t resist making it explicit whenever they can. There’s a burning need in them to be “free” to express their loathsome views to the world. The result? Calls for boycotts from the left. Boycotts that, more often than not, work.

Why do you think the right has been screaming about “Hippies” and “Hollywood elites” and “Feminazis” and “political correctness” and “cancel culture” for the last 60+ years? They’ve been slowly but steadily losing the culture wars and they know it. 

In the 1950s, the White Christian heterosexual man reigned supreme. He had all the cultural, economic, and political power, so movies, television, and advertising were geared towards his sensibilities. Today’s media landscape would be completely alien to him. Now, every movie, TV show, and commercial has brown skin, same sex couples, and women in positions of power.

The audience is different and so is the consumer base. The purchasing power of white men who will respond to Republican racism and misogyny is vastly outweighed by everyone who won’t. So when the left calls for a boycott of product X over its support for Tucker Carlson, corporations will follow the money. It’s a numbers game and the right no longer has the numbers. All the tax cuts in the world won’t help you if no one is buying your product.

All of this would be bad enough, but the Republican Party is facing an additional problem; their escalating extremism is making them, literally, bad for business.

Authoritarianism Is Not Profitable

While Republicans were gutting regulations and cutting taxes, they could be relied on to not do incredibly stupid things like start trade wars with several countries at once and then lose all of them. Republican presidents were also at least reasonably competent at maintaining our position in the global economic pecking order. 

That’s not really the case anymore. Trump was phenomenally corrupt and bad at governing. As the extremism he unleashed continues to devour his party, there is no reason to think the GOP will improve. In fact, there’s every reason to think it will get worse. Matthew Yglesias wrote about why back in 2016:

Those who support the regime will receive favorable treatment from regulators, and those who oppose it will not. Because businesses do business with each other, the network becomes self-reinforcing. Regime-friendly banks receive a light regulatory touch while their rivals are crushed. In exchange, they offer friendly lending terms to regime-friendly businesses while choking capital to rivals. Such a system, once in place, is extremely difficult to dislodge precisely because, unlike a fascist or communist regime, it is glued together by no ideology beyond basic human greed, insecurity, and love of family.

This is precisely what Trump tried to do. He repeatedly attempted to use the power of the government to punish his enemies. He tried to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner because Time Warner owns CNN and Trump really really hates CNN. 

Another example was Trump’s war on Amazon and the Washington Post. Both owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, both were on Trump’s hit list from day one. Trump personally demanded the Post Office double shipping rates for Amazon as a way to attack the unfavorable coverage of the Post. It hasn’t happened yet but Trump’s hand picked saboteur Louis DeJoy is still Postmaster General.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how Trump and his administration corrupted the government. There will be years of revelations to come.

Republicans rely on a certain level of economic chaos in order to constrain the Democratic agenda, but that kind of chaos is usually managed and directed. Trump wildly lashed out and Republicans enabled it, resulting in massive losses they could not stem. The pointless trade war with China, alone, cost American companies $1.7 Trillion. That was before the unnecessary devastation of Covid.

It’s true that Trump was uniquely awful at...everything. But the trajectory of the Republican Party is not encouraging if you’re a CEO. These are not serious people. For every Mitt Romney, there are 10 Majorie Taylor Greenes and Matt Gaetzes. The GOP is overrun with grifters and Trump has shown them that being president gives you unchecked power and opportunities to make unlimited money. The grift used to be just running for president, with no intent to win. Now they’ll really go for it. Worse, the Republican base has proven they do not want the person who can competently run the country, they want the person who can scream hate the loudest, regardless of how unfit for office they are. 

I don’t subscribe to the whole “CEOs of major corporations are inherently better than us” mythology, but they have to be reasonably intelligent to be where they are. They have to see where the future of the GOP is headed. Republicans are embracing cult authoritarianism where if the leader does not favor you, you will be destroyed. That future is very bad for their business model.

Place Your Bets

Business is, to some extent, always about managing risk. Is the market ready for a new product? Can we weather a 10% slump in sales? What happens if our supply chain is disrupted? A business that cannot manage risk will fail. The saying “the greater the risk, the greater the reward” has its place, but at some point, the risk becomes too much.

The Republican Party is becoming such a risk. 

The tax cuts and deregulation were worth a lot. So much so that corporations were willing to turn a blind eye to all the racism for a very long time. Citizens United made it so corporations could almost literally buy politicians in a mutually beneficial arrangement. But bribes and “donations'' are not the same thing as swearing fealty to avoid regulatory devastation. That kind of power imbalance is intolerable. 

The icing on this multilayer risk cake is losing the customers. In this age of social media-fueled boycotts, pissing off 75% of your base to keep a handful of angry white men happy isn’t just bad business, it’s stupid business. Stockholders don’t pay CEOs to be stupid. 

Republicans were a safe bet for a very long time and they delivered. But times are changing because that’s what they do. Democrats may be pesky do-gooders with their annoying regulations, antitrust laws, and demands for fair wages but you can still do business with them. That means profit. And profit is all that matters to a corporation. Republicans seem to have forgotten that and it will cost them dearly.

Read an excerpt from this week’s Members Only piece:

Are Cops On Steroids?

"Most of the police officers I've known who have used these drugs consider them a tool of the trade."

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- Between the Derek Chauvin verdict and the horrifying videos appearing in the news with greater and greater frequency, the entire world is watching the United States and our epidemic of police violence, aimed almost exclusively at people of color. The question we keep asking ourselves is, Why? The answer is complicated, but it begins with systemic racism and the deadly tactics that amplify the bigotry of too many white, often male, officers. 

There’s another possible factor in the mix -- one that doesn’t trigger a lot of conversation, but which could possibly be fueling the severity of the crisis. Several years ago, I wrote a piece for The Banter about the prevalence of steroid abuse among police officers and, in some cases, entire police departments. Now might be a good time to revisit what I discovered.

Much like professional sports and bodybuilding where steroids are commonly used to enhance the performance of athletes, police officers have been turning to testosterone, human growth hormone and other anabolic steroids in order to appear more physically imposing, and also, more importantly, to have a better shot at physically subduing a criminal suspect.

Police subdue George Floyd protestors in Riverside. Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG

All the way back in 2004, Philip J. Sweitzer from DePaul University’s DePaul Journal of Sports Law wrote:

Steroid use, as it turns out, is the not-so-quiet little secret of state and city police departments as well as municipal fire departments across the country, not that this should come as much of a surprise. Police officers often find themselves in situations requiring the use of physical force to either subdue or restrain suspects to effect custodial arrests. Therefore, most are occupationally-mandated, functional strength-athletes, whether they wish to pursue this weight training regimens recreationally or not.

Of course, there are significant problems here, beginning with the fact that steroids are controlled substances (HGH isn't a controlled substance, but it often included in the chemical cocktail) and, since the passage of the Steroid Control Act of 1990, the possession of such drugs is a felony. That's probably the most clearly defined problem with illegal steroid possession -- the law. While there are legitimate and beneficial medical uses for testosterone replacement and steroid use, they're notoriously acquired and abused in order to enhance physical strength far beyond mortal men.

What's not so clear, however, are the effects the drugs have on men in high-stress careers where life and death are on the line during nearly every shift.

When Lance Armstrong reportedly experienced "roid rage" as a side-effect of testosterone supplementation, he was said to have marched up and down his team bus, punching the seats and shouting obscenities. (This allegedly occurred during the 2003 Tour de France following the harrowing climb to Luz Ardiden.) When a police officer, on the other hand, experiences roid rage, the consequences are far more serious….

This is an excerpt of this week’s Members Only piece. Continue reading here and get a 2 month free trial on a Banter Membership!: