We live in an era of gesture politics: walkouts, die-ins, marches, boycotts, hashtags, retweets. Our most strident political debates often aren’t debates at all but volleys of symbolic or metaphorical gestures. The point of these national pantomimes is not to make a rational case but to proclaim one’s affiliations and antipathies. They’re at their most repellent after emotionally harrowing events like race riots and mass shootings. Suddenly everybody—authors and intellectuals, politicians at all levels, your aunt Phyllis—sets about transmitting little signs of their crotchets and convictions.
After news of the school shooting on February 14 in Parkland, Florida, we went at it again. A few multinational corporations got in on the action, too, mainly for the purpose of distancing themselves from the National Rifle Association, the organization that, in the eyes of many progressives and gun-control proponents, was all but directly responsible for the murder of 17 people. On Twitter, Delta Air Lines announced that it was “reaching out to the NRA to let them know we will be ending their contract for discounted rates through our group travel program. We will be requesting that the NRA remove our information from their website.”
Now you might wonder what Delta’s executives knew about the NRA on February 14 that they didn’t know on February 13. If they credit the argument that the NRA shares responsibility for mass murders simply because it opposes most regulations on gun ownership, why were they in a relationship with the gun-rights group at all? Of course, Delta executives believe no such thing. They severed relations with the NRA to exempt themselves and their company from the ire of gun-control groups demanding a “boycott.” Fair enough. Delta is a private corporation and free to withdraw its support from any organization it wishes, even as I am free to call Delta a bloated mess of a company that treats its customers about as roughly as it treats their luggage. But in this case gesture politics spilled over into the equally ugly world of crony capitalism.
The lieutenant governor of Georgia, Casey Cagle, responded to Delta by tweeting: “I will kill any tax legislation that benefits @Delta unless the company changes its position and fully reinstates its relationship with @NRA. Corporations cannot attack conservatives and expect us not to fight back.” Cagle presides over the state senate in Georgia, and the capital of Georgia is Atlanta, and Atlanta is home to Delta’s headquarters and international hub. As a major corporation headquartered in a state capital, Delta is the recipient of a dizzying array of local and state tax favors. Cagle was referring to a sales-tax exemption on jet fuel worth $40 million to Delta. The legislature can strip the tax code of that exemption and inflict pretty severe pain on the airline.
Delta’s opportunistic sanctimony may irritate some of us on the right, but Cagle’s bluster is similarly off-putting: Using the power of the law to threaten a private company is the sort of behavior one expects from a ragtag dictatorship. It’s rare to see crony capitalism expressed so menacingly.
Yet if we accept the propriety of the relationship to which Cagle referred in his tweet—the relationship between governments and the companies public officials happen to like—we can expect much more of this sort of thing to happen.
And the public does, for the most part, consider these relationships proper. State commerce agencies devote nearly all their attention to attracting specific companies to “invest” in their states; they offer companies tax exemptions and credits, free or cheap land, and sometimes outright cash in attempts to persuade the companies to uproot from one location and settle in another. Many local and state politicians base their entire political reputations on their talent for “attracting” or “luring” industry, i.e., for bribing them to make decisions that sound like great economic news to voters. All those groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies we see on local news channels—governors wearing hard hats and wielding giant scissors—are the result of just this sort of secret but perfectly legal bribery between corporate attorneys and politicians.
There’s precious little evidence that the states that spend more on economic “incentives” targeted to specific companies actually experience faster growth than states that spend less. But the lack of evidence doesn’t matter because the public likes hearing big jobs announcements, and politicians like having their pictures taken with golden shovels and sending out press releases about the thousands of jobs supposedly coming with all these announcements. When President-elect Donald Trump boasted of having pressured the air conditioner company Carrier not to leave Indiana for Mexico, the media went to work factchecking his claims, but very few registered any strong objection to the use of governmental power to single out one company for special benefits.
The question is whether this ganglion of mutually profitable relationships can survive the era of gesture politics. Private companies want to please the public as much as any politician does, and when they try to please their constituencies by flaunting their cultural allegiances—praising same-sex marriage, say, or censuring a Second Amendment advocacy group—they can expect the politicians to please their constituencies by counterpunching. Casey Cagle has a point: When corporations involve themselves in gesture politics, they can expect politicians to fight back.
And we can expect things to get a lot uglier.
