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Notes -
I’ve sometimes heard that the left wing takeover of corporate America is a hollow one - they don’t REALLY cars about minorities, just look at umm their Middle East twitter accounts! They care about $$$ and aren’t true believers
I found an interesting counter point recently.
https://upstreamreviews.substack.com/p/high-republic-low-sales
This is what a corporation that has no idea what their audience is about, but does in fact know clearly what it’s ideology is about.
I’ll summarize the link but you really should read it for yourself, it’s astounding how bad Disney gets the Star Wars franchise: for instance, the books need to be (in addition to all the old touchstones of diversity etc) ANTI WAR. And then there’s the characters, who are somehow all androgynous.
The sales figures reflect an enormous lack of interest of enthusiasm. But it doesn’t matter for Disney - they get to spread the Good Word of gender ideology and anti fascism/anti traditionalism.
The whole thing about the corporations not really caring about these ideologies but are just mouthing the words is what always struck me as hollow. Given that their actions and words are indistinguishable from that of a true believer, why does it matter the true content of their heart of hearts? In terms of consequential actions and decisions, they might as well be true believers, and that's really what matters.
In terms of the actual question of whether they really are or aren't, I think one can make the case that they really are true believers who are willing to sacrifice $ for ideology, but I think it's also likely that they care about $ but are mistaken about how effective the ideology would be for getting them more $. Where things can get messy is that the ideology itself also posits that following the ideology is a route towards more $ and all the other backwards companies that haven't bought into the ideology are leaving $ on the table (implying those backwards companies are the ones prioritizing their status-quo/"regressive"/"conservative" ideology in favor of $). So it could be that they're true believers who got fooled into believing that this was how to make $, or they're profit-hungry cynical capitalists who were misled by the ideology's claims that it will bring in $.
Obviously, any set of decision makers in a large company like Disney is likely to have plenty of both. What's notable is that there seem to have been no decision maker (with enough power, anyway) who was enough of a cynical profit maximizer to actually properly analyze the ideology's claims of profitability and to put a stop to this kind of ideology-prioritizing behavior. I think the way the ideology discourages skepticism and critical analysis of its claims - in fact, encouraging the coercive suppression of such things - could have played a part in the lack of such decision makers being present or being emboldened enough to push back.
Chance of it dying down naturally without direct action of economic or physical nature.
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