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I happen to know someone who works in management at a rather large multi-national, and they shared a copy of their internal comms strategy for pride month. It was quite interesting in general, but one aspect in particular may be of interest here.
They distinguished between their internal comms and public comms. If employees asked about their plans for pride month, they would talk about the various internal activities/resources/whatever they had set up for it, but the story on public comms was different. "Due to the unprecedented backlash in the US market," they wouldn't be doing/saying anything publicly. Their "stakeholders" have decided that it wasn't worth the risk, and even though they totally totally TOTALLY support everything about pride, they just feel like they have to protect other equities too. Ya know, like, continuing to make money.
They emphasized that this was for the US market only, and that other localities would make decisions locally. Insert twitter meme about various companies having rainbow logos on their US twitter accounts, but not on their "[Company] Middle East" twitter accounts.
I chalk up points for two things. 1) The backlash is actually having an effect, at least for now, this year. 2) The theory that these things have been done so far in large part not because the market cared, but because employees cared. The classic example is that if you're a tech company in the Bay area, you're not really asking, "Should we signal support for this because it will improve our perception in the market?" You're asking, "How many of our employees will revolt if we don't signal support for this?"
Now that the market is showing signs of actually caring about this a little bit, they're rushing to make a distinction: do what they can to continue to placate their internal bands of radicals while not being publicly perceived as political. I'm left with two questions: 1) How long will this distinction be tenable? Perhaps that depends on how strongly the market continues to backlash against overt pride support (i.e., can the right take another scalp next year). 2) Is there sufficient internal appetite in any companies to revolt against the internal shit? If the prior theory was, "They're listening to the market," and this shift in the market response is actually generating a shift in public comms, and if the current theory is, "They're still listening to employees at least enough for internal efforts," then perhaps some companies could well be primed for an internal backlash that actually results in changes there, too.
I don't think I expect (2) to be probabilistically super common, but from what I'm hearing, lots of upper management folks who really just want to make money actually know that woke radicals in their ranks are a serious threat... and really are gradually working on, uh, marginalizing them, to the point that if they have an excuse, any excuse, to move them out without inciting too much leftist backlash, they'll absolutely take it.
I think half of it may be all the backlash they receive from the left too. If McDonalds spends a million dollars sponsoring a Pride parade, and they lose a million dollars of profit from conservatives, that's okay if they get 3 million from liberals, they're up a million on net. But if all the "rainbow capitalism is bad!" and "Kick corporations out of Pride!" memes make them lose a million from liberals, obviously they'll shut up quick.
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One model I've seen activists use is the spectrum of allies: classify people/organizations into "active ally", "passive ally", "neutral", "passive opposition", "active opposition". Other presentations I've seen on this also advise activists to try and move target groups only one step at a time.
Most people who object to the LGBTification of everything have been cowed into "neutral", or at best "passive opposition", but serious right-wing culture warriors (e.g., Rufo) have been able to bring back some "active allies" on the right. OP's friend's company seems to have been moved from the left's "active ally" to "passive ally", at least in its public-facing stance in the US. The spectrum of allies model does not distinguish between true believers and greengrocers, but I don't think that matters too much: the page also quotes that "movements seldom win by overpowering the opposition; they win by shifting the support out from under them." If the non-grifter right wants to stop losing, I think that's a sign they are starting to make some headway.
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I think if pride just meant LGB then there wouldn't be much backlash during pride month.
Gay men and lesbian women seem largely accepted by society, and I don't know of many recent controversies surrounding them.
The TQ part of the alphabet seems to be the lightning rod lately. The Ts mess with long established gender dynamics, more than LGBs ever did. The Qs often seem like they are faking for diversity points or engage in levels of ridiculousness that is hard to take seriously, for example there are popular videos out there of people identifying as birds and goblins. There is a real question of how much I have to buy into some strangers' fantasies and fetishes.
Importantly, as a matter of sheer numbers the TQ part is also a very small section of LGBTQ.
This makes me wonder if some kind of split is coming. LGBs can either continue allying with TQs and risk some society wide backlash. Or they can jettison the political hot potatoes and go fully mainstream tomorrow. I suspect democratic politicians in swing districts will be doing this, and so will large multi-national companies.
I think that the jettisoning's going to happen in five to ten years. We'll wind up with a de facto third and fourth gender (trans man, trans woman); I sure as hell hope that membership there doesn't imply or require irreversible medical treatment. As for queers...they're kinda the sex/gender liberals. We need 'em...but we also need conservatives in order to keep liberals from going insane.
*Consider the aphorism that conservatives are stupid and evil, while liberals are simply insane.
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I don’t think this is true. It certainly wasn’t, historically. L and G were every bit as much the hot potatoes of their day. Monkey pox has nothing on the AIDS panic!
The culture war is always going to be fiercest on the edge of the Overton window. You know—highlighting each others’ worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric.
Asking when the LGBs are going to jettison the TQs is kind of like asking when the Republicans are going to jettison fundamentalists. There can’t be that many of them, right? And they say the darndest things.
I feel that conservatives quietly have jettisoned fundamentalists. Conservatives still accept their votes and donations, but it's not clear to me anything is being done to appeal to fundamentalists.
Roe was overturned. That's a fairly big win for us.
I think that is a win for the religious in general, not just fundamentalists. A fundamentalist specific win would be something like the biblical version of creation being taught in public school classrooms.
Comparable to a general victory for LGBTQs like a ban on discrimination by sexual preference vs a specific win for trans like opening women only institutions to MtF transitioners.
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There's a difference: fundamentalists vote in large numbers so they provide continuing value to the general conservative movement.
Meanwhile:
the Ts are a small number, even within the movement.
Many of the gains of the Ls, Gs & Bs are locked in by judicial ruling so aren't going anywhere. Their allies certainly wouldn't dare roll them back if they sat this one out. Even the GOP has large numbers or even a bare majority in favor of gay marriage.
But I also don't think there'll be a jettisoning for that reason.
Because the "normie" gays like Andrew Sullivan either went on with their lives after winning the important battles or were turned off or defenestrated by the TQs and radicals who still need the movement - either for their unpopular goals or whatever psychological need for belonging or the perception of radical politics they have.
It’s not just voting- you would be unable to run a conservative movement without using fundamentalists to do, well, almost everything. From staffing institutions that help no one’s career path on a resume to activism and volunteering to coming up with ideological veneer to accommodate different groups’ self interest to just providing a safe, cozy community conservative figures can wind up in if they want some time out of the limelight, the right is just critically dependent on fundamentalists constantly and in a wide variety of ways.
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There already are orgs like the LGB Alliance, but unsurprisingly they were declared far-right Nazis. Even non-Queer Theory aligned pro-Trans orgs suffered that fate
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I think possibly a major variable here is that the companies most invested in pushing this stuff have smaller workforces than they did last year.
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Like I said below, I haven't seen much rainbow stuff (logos or anything - maybe a few more flags than usual, and a local church put up a huge rainbow banner a visible location) here, compared to a few years ago, and when it comes to local market decisions, the US boycotts, which haven't been a major news subject, feature at most indirectly. It struck me while cycling home and seeing an Ukrainian flag on the overpass that I keep seeing more Ukraine flag stuff than Pride stuff when out and about.
The internal email just confirms to me that the main reason for company Pride stuff is not selling stuff to customers or anything like that, but satisfying their own employees. Catering to liberal social mores of their educated workforces in a rather facile way is cheaper than providing benefits or anything like that.
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The main goal at a major company is to not rock the boat. Companies barely have owners, they have managers with poor job security. The "owner" is a collection of pensionfunds who are run by managers who run a double digit risk of getting fired every year. The higher up management of the company also have below average job security compared to most white collar workers. Compentence isn't the most important factor when it comes to getting promoted at big companies, avoiding scandals is.
The people who succceed in politics and in the corporate world are the people who have an excellent talent for feeling which way the wind blows. A car salesmen will act very differently when a sterotypical biker walks through the door compared to when a vegan feminist walks through the door. These people are tremendously skilled at reading the room. The ability to read the room and adjust accordingly is probably the most indispensable skill if one wants to be highly successful.
This leads to people high in anxiety struggling with what to say when simply agreeing with everyone else in the room is no longer an option.
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A small majority is able to completely steamroll opposition in some places but not others. Where there is lack of free speech (such as at work) then someone with contrarian views can be effectively silenced.
But that doesn't mean contrarian views don't exist. For example, King County (Seattle) has been a one-party Democratic place for a couple decades now. There is effectively no opposition to far left politics. Yet, 22% of people in the county voted for Trump in 2020. If you look at other urban counties, you'll see similar or higher numbers. Just because people don't have a voice doesn't mean they don't exist.
Your employer can force you to accept woke politics at work for fear of being fired. But no one can (yet) force you to buy a product. This explains the discrepancy mentioned above. Dissident speech will be strongest in the places where it is not banned. A minority can have real power in the marketplace even if they have no power in elite decision making.
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This is classic preference falsification. Timur Kuran wrote the main book on this phenomenon:
Private Truths, Public Lies
The book was a fleshed out scholarly article that you can read here if you prefer:
Private and Public Preferences
That's a pdf and my phone is (too) old and won't open it for some reason. Could you summarize?
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Civil Rights law and its various applications with regard to employment practices are likely to prevent meaningful movement on (2) above. It's one thing to not explicitly market your company as trans-inclusive, it's a whole other kettle of fish to tell people to knock it off with the sexual fad of the week internally. The various trainings will likewise continue for the purpose of providing some degree of protection against lawsuits.
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