patrick.net

The question, then, is what conservatives do now. One proposed solution is to dust off America’s antitrust machinery, to start breaking up these corporate behemoths. And certainly there’s a case to be made that, say, Google has grown so massive as to be anticompetitive. But antitrust action won’t solve the problem at hand. Break up Google and you’ve got…two Googles, both as woke as the first one was. The issue isn’t that these companies aren’t competitive and innovative — Silicon Valley does nothing if not creatively destroy — but that they’re acting as agents of bad cultural change. ...

Still, the operative idea is a good one. If woke capitalism is to be stopped, businesses need to be disincentivized against it. To that end, the most effective tool in the conservative arsenal is probably the good old-fashioned boycott: turn the left’s tactics around on it. Isolate and pressure these businesses. There is precedent here. When France declined to support the war in Iraq back in 2003, conservatives launched a boycott of French wines, and French businessmen later admitted that their sales had taken a dent. And while research suggests boycotts tend to damage a company’s reputation more than its revenue, in today’s flashbulb online world, nothing is more important than public image.

The trick to any pressure campaign will be to sustain it in the long run, to make sure companies can’t wait it out until the news cycle dashes on to its next shiny object. Fortunately there is precedent here too. When Hasbro announced it was going to make Mr and Mrs Potato Head gender-neutral, it kicked up a wave of fury, and not long afterwards, it sent a tweet clarifying that the spuds would remain sexed after all. It was a small win, but those matter in a culture war. We shall fight in the toy-store aisles and the Mulberry Streets and the midscale Florida grocery stores. And so forth. The point is that conservative public pressure can make a difference, even against a corporate giant.