Wokeism is Doomed

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Fri Apr 14 16:48:17 PDT 2023


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Get Woke, Go Broke... !


What The Bud Light Fiasco Reveals About The Ruling Class

by Jeffrey Tucker
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-bud-light-fiasco-reveals-about-ruling-class/
https://cdn.mises.org/Imperialism%20and%20Social%20Classes_2.pdf
https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/833/pg833-images.html

What were they thinking? How did someone believe that making “trans
woman” Dylan Mulvaney the icon of a Bud Light ad campaign, complete
with a beer can with Mulvaney’s image on it, would be good for sales?
With an ad featuring this person vamping around in the most
preposterously possible way?

Dylan, who had previously been interviewed on trans issues by
President Biden himself, was celebrating “365 Days of Girlhood” with a
grotesquely misogynistic caricature that would disgust just about the
whole market for this beer. Indeed, this person’s cosplay might as
well be designed to discredit the entire political agenda of gender
dysphoriacs.

Sure enough, because we don’t have mandates on what beers you must
buy, sales of the beer plummeted.

The parent company Anheuser-Busch’s stock lost $5 billion or 4 percent
in value since the ad campaign rollout. Sales have fallen 50-70
percent. Now there is worry within the company of a widening boycott
to all their brands. A local Missouri distributor of the product
canceled an appearance by Budweiser Clydesdale horses due to public
anger.

Ads are supposed to sell products, not prompt a massive public
backlash that results in billions in losses. This mistake could be for
the ages, marking a distinct departure from corporate deference to
wackadoodle ideas from the academy and a push for more connection to
on-the-ground realities.

The person who made the miscalculation is Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid,
Vice President in charge of marketing for Bud Light. She explained
that her intention was to make the beer King of ‘Woke’ Beers. She
wanted to shift away from the “out of touch” frat party image to one
of “inclusivity.” By all accounts, she actually believed this. More
likely, she was rationalizing actions that would earn her bragging
rights within her social circle.

Digging through her personal biography, we find all the predictable
signs of tremendous detachment from regular life: elite boarding
school (Groton, $65K a year), Harvard, Wharton School, coveted
internship at General Foods, and straight to top VP at the biggest
beverage company in the world.

Somehow through all that, nothing entered her brain apart from elite
opinion on how the world should work with theories never actually
tested by real-world marketing demands. Would that she had worked at
Chick-Fil-A at some point in her teen years, perhaps even preserving
some friend relationships ever since. It might have protected her from
this disastrous error.

She is a perfect symbol of a problem that afflicts high-end corporate
and government culture: a shocking blindness toward the mainstream of
American life, including working classes and other people less
privileged.

They are invisible to this crowd. And her type is pervasive in
corporate America with its huge layers of management developed over 20
years of loose credit and push for token representation at the highest
levels.

We’ve seen this manifest over three years and ruling-class types
imposed lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates on the whole population
without regard to the consequences and with full expectation that the
food will continue to be delivered to their doorsteps no matter how
many days, months, or years they stay at home and stay safe.

The working classes, meanwhile, were shoved out in front of the
pathogen to make their assigned contribution to herd immunity so that
the rich and privileged could preserve their clean state of being,
making TikTok videos and issuing edicts from their safe spaces for two
or even three years.

In the late 19th century, the blindness of class detachment was a
problem that so consumed Karl Marx that he became possessed with the
desire to overthrow class distinctions between labor and capital. He
kicked off a new age of the classless society under the leadership of
the vanguard of the proletarian classes. In every country where his
dreams became a reality, however, a protected elite took over and
secured themselves from the consequences of their deluded dreams.

The people who in recent decades have drunk so deeply from the well of
the Marxian tradition seem to be repeating that experience with
complete disinterest in the lower classes, while pushing a deepening
chasm that only became worse in the lockdown years in which they have
controlled the levers of power.

It was startling to watch, and I could hardly believe what was
happening. Then one day the incredibly obvious dawned on me. All
official opinion in this country and even the whole world –
government, media, corporations, technology – emanated from the same
upper echelons of the class structure. It was people with elite
educations and who had the time to shape public opinion. They are the
ones on Twitter, in the newsrooms, fussing with the codes, and
enjoying the laptop life of a permanent bureaucrat.

Their social circles were the same. They knew no one who cut trees,
butchered cows, drove trucks, fixed cars, and met payroll in a small
restaurant. The “workers and peasants” are people the elites so
otherized that they became nothing more than non-playing characters
who make stuff work but are not worthy of their attention or time.

The result was a massive transfer of wealth upwards in the social
ladder as digital brands, technology, and Peloton thrived, while
everyone else faced a barrage of ill health, debt, and inflation. As
classes have grown more stratified – and, yes, there is a reason to
worry about the gap between the rich and the poor when malleability is
restricted – the intellectual producers of policy and opinion have
constructed their own bubble to protect themselves from by being
soiled by contrary points of view.

They want the whole world to be their own safe space regardless of the victims.

Would lockdowns have happened in any other kind of world? Not likely.
And it would not have happened if the overlords did not have the
technology to carry on their lives as normal while pretending that no
one was really suffering from their scheme.

The Bud Light case is especially startling because the advent of
commercial society in the high Middle Ages and through the Industrial
Revolution was supposed to mitigate against this sort of myopic
stratification. And this has always been the most compelling critique
of Marx: he was raging against a system that was gradually winnowing
away the very demarcations in classes that he decried.

Joseph Schumpeter in 1919 wrote an essay on this topic in his book
Imperialism and Social Classes. He highlighted how the commercial
ethos dramatically changed the class system.

    “The warlord was automatically the leader of his people in
virtually every respect,” he wrote.

    “The modern industrialist is anything but such a leader. And this
explains a great deal about the stability of the former’s position and
the instability of the latter’s.”

But what happens when the corporate elites, working together with
government, themselves become the warlords? The foundations of market
capitalism begin to erode. The workers become ever more alienated from
final consumption of the product they have made possible.

It’s been typical of people like me – pro-market libertarians – to
ignore the issue of class and its impact on social and political
structures. We inherited the view of Frederic Bastiat that the good
society is about cooperation between everyone and not class conflict,
much less class war. We’ve been suspicious of people who rage against
wealth inequality and social stratification.

And yet we do not live in such market conditions. The social and
economic systems of the West are increasingly bureaucratized, hobbled
by credentialism, and regulated, and this has severely impacted class
mobility. Indeed, for many of these structures, exclusion of the
unwashed is the whole point.

And the ruling class themselves have ever more the mindset as
described by Thorstein Veblen: only the ignorable do actual work while
the truly successful indulge in leisure and conspicuous consumption as
much as their means allow. One supposes that this doesn’t hurt
anyone…until it does.

And this certainly happened in very recent history as the conspicuous
consumers harnessed the power of states all over the world to serve
their interests exclusively. The result was calamity for rights and
liberties won over a thousand years of struggle.

The emergent fissures between the classes – and the diffusions of our
ruling class into many sectors public and private – suggest an urgency
for a new consciousness of the real meaning of the common good, which
is inseparable from liberty. The marketing director of Bud Light
talked a good line about “inclusivity” but she plotted to impose
everything but that. Her plan was designed for the one percent and to
the exclusion of all the people who actually consume the product, to
say nothing for the workers who actually make and deliver the product
she was charged with promoting.

That the markets have so brutally punished the brand and company for
this profound error points the way to the future. People should have
the right to their own choices about the kind of life they want to
live and the products and services they want to consume. The dystopia
of lockdowns and woke hegemony of public opinion – complete with
censorship – have become the policy to overturn if the workers are
ever to throw off the chains that bind them.

The boycotts of Bud Light are but a beginning.


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