Companies that want to attract younger consumers and employees have flexed their power in response. Doing so has put them at odds with the young and value-conscious Americans who fuel sales of America’s biggest brands. It’s not difficult to see why tensions have risen as Republicans have increasingly embraced an angry, racist nationalism and an anti-democratic ethos. But the very fact that these things are happening at all is due to important shifts in the American political landscape – ones which may eventually become seismic. Many of the companies coming out against the Georgia law did so only belatedly and under pressure, and many of the Republican politicians decrying “woke capitalism” are just hoping to score points with their base. It’s easy to dismiss all of this as a public-relations stunt. This threat isn’t idle – efforts are under way to hit companies on their bottom line, with Georgia Republicans voting to strip Delta of a lucrative tax break and Trump calling for boycotts of companies like Coca-Cola. Republicans were blistering in response, with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, accusing the private sector of behaving like a “woke parallel government” and warning of “serious consequences” if they didn’t stop. But it struggles to explain what happened in the past few weeks, as large companies such as Delta and Coca-Cola spoke out against Georgia’s new voter-suppression legislation. That, at least, is the conventional narrative. If Republicans are the capitalists, then Democrats are the socialists. Democrats, meanwhile, have drifted to the left economically, embracing much higher taxes and a new era of trust-busting. Businesses could rely on Republicans for the regressive tax cuts and supply-side economics that helped their bottom lines – and the personal bank accounts of their executives. Even Donald Trump, who briefly campaigned as an economic populist in 2016, governed like the plutocrat he was. O ne of the central facts of modern American politics has been the strong bond between the Republican party and the country’s business elite.
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