As usual, the movement’s hysterical leaders were the last to realize that they’d been shooting themselves in the foot.
As usual, the movement’s hysterical leaders were the last to realize that they’d been shooting themselves in the foot.
T he thing about boycotts is that they don’t work too well in a vacuum. If you start a parade and no one gets in line behind you, you aren’t a leader; you’re just a fool walking down the middle of the street twirling a baton.
The failed boycott-Georgia movement illustrates the limits of the Democratic Party’s tactic of attaching hysterical overreaction and claims of racism to virtually any Republican idea, even a routine package of voting reforms. The Democrats turned the volume up to eleven on the Georgia elections bill signed into law March 25, labeling it the second coming of Jim Crow even before it was signed. Joe Biden, in a “Hello, fellow kids” moment meant to prove he was hip to cutting-edge Democratic thinking, on March 31 asserted that this ordinary, dull piece of good-government legislation was actually worse than Jim Crow, and that most of the country was in the process of becoming something more awful than 1957 Mississippi. “This is Jim Crow on steroids, what they’re doing in Georgia and 40 other states,” Biden said on ESPN on March 31. He was unaware that New York and many other states already have on the books policies comparable to, or more restrictive than, the new Georgia law, such as bans on outside groups’ providing things of value to voters waiting in line at the polls.
The fanciful Jim Crow comparisons were meant to fire up Democratic activists and donors, but once you’ve unleashed such a heinous allegation, the allegation tends to take over. So Biden said he would “strongly support” MLB’s moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta, and two days later, on Good Friday, MLB obliged.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred poured gasoline all over himself and then lit a match when he announced that he was moving the All-Star Game. Later he announced that Atlanta, which is mostly black, would be replaced by snow-white Denver as the game’s host. You really have to be a Democrat to savor the logic of “fighting racism” by yanking jobs and income from black folks and redistributing them to white people. Manfred should change his name to Merkle, the previous standard for bonehead thinking in his sport.
Questions immediately arose. How far did the logic of boycotts go? The Atlanta Braves play 81 games a year in Georgia. Was any state in which the All-Star Game might be played required to have less burdensome voting restrictions, and was MLB suddenly now in the business of perusing voting statutes before scheduling a ball game? Should other corporations and sports leagues doing business in Georgia support boycotts, and wouldn’t that just punish Georgia Democrats and Republicans alike? Was “Let’s own the Republicans by hurting Georgia’s economy” now official Democratic Party dogma? If so, maybe the party should ditch its traditional donkey symbol in favor of an image of Sideshow Bob stepping on an endless series of rakes.
Though Senator Jon Ossoff stated his categorical opposition to boycotts, Senator Raphael Warnock issued tepid support for them, saying, “I think we all have to use our voices” and hinting that Martin Luther King Jr. would have approved. Even when steered toward the right answer by CNN’s Dana Bash (“So, no boycotts?”), he answered merely, “I’m not focused on that. I’m focused on what I can do as a United States senator.” As though speaking out on various things were not the chief occupation of United States senators.
On March 31, Stacey Abrams published a USA Today op-ed in which she said that she didn’t think boycotts were necessary “yet,” but admitted “I can’t argue with” the logic. The CEO of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, James Quincey, blasted the new law as “unacceptable” the same day, saying, “It is a step backwards and does not promote the principles we have stood for in Georgia” while promising to help push for a federal law that would presumably supersede it. The CEO of Atlanta-based Delta Airlines, Ed Bastian, also declared the same day, “I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.” On April 2, he doubled down: “Almost universally, [black voters] are hurt by the law and the legislation that was enacted.” Hollywood began muttering about boycotting Georgia, which in some years is home base to more studio-backed feature films than even California. One film actually did leave: The producers of Emancipation, an expensive film funded by Apple Studios and starring Will Smith, announced they were pulling up stakes on April 12.
By mid April, it was becoming obvious that calling for jobs to be pulled out of your own state was moronic, and also that it was bad business for a supposedly neutral entity to openly ally itself with the policies and messaging of the hysterical wing of the Democratic Party. A poll showed nearly three-quarters of Americans want corporations and sports organizations to stay out of politics. Left-of-Ossoff Democrats had allowed Georgia’s law to blind them to the far more relevant Jordan’s Law: Republicans buy sneakers too. Another poll showed that the net favorability of MLB among Republicans had crashed by 25 points overnight. On April 6, Rand Paul and Donald Trump said they were boycotting Coke.
That same day, Biden gave a completely different answer about whether the Masters should leave Georgia than he had about the MLB All-Star Game: “I think that’s for the Masters to decide.” Biden had just figured out that in a boycott, “the people who need the help the most, the people who are making hourly wages, sometimes get hurt the most.” Had this statement not been equally true seven days earlier, when Biden supported pulling jobs away from Georgia? April 6 was the day that Abrams changed her tune also. A week after her March 31 op-ed, she had figured out that being even mildly pro-boycott was completely untenable. So on April 6, she stealth-edited her USA Today piece to make it clearly anti-boycott: “Boycotts invariably cost jobs,” she now averred, and “instead of a boycott, I strongly urge other events and productions to do business in Georgia and speak out against our law and similar proposals in other states.”
Meanwhile, the woke corporations developed laryngitis. Anybody heard from Ed Bastian lately? I didn’t think so. Quincey, who had initially been gaining a reputation for being one of the wokest CEOs, also went quiet. On April 10, dozens of titans of corporate America joined together on a Zoom call that would supposedly crush Georgia’s law with a thunderous denunciation. But the meeting fizzled out and left nothing behind except a meekly worded, generic statement that didn’t even mention Georgia, and yet still proved too controversial for many invited corporations, notably Delta and Coke, to sign. A New York Times report noted dryly, “People involved in the process said some of the Atlanta companies that did not sign were wary because of the blowback they had received after their earlier statements on voting rights but also did not feel the need to speak again.” Coke’s own separate statement was so milky and controversy-averse that it harkened back to the old days when corporations didn’t see it as a core mission to antagonize half of their potential customers: “We believe the best way to make progress now is for everyone to come together to listen, respectfully share concerns and collaborate on a path forward.” Even Hollywood, as usual the last to grasp the wisdom of not taking target practice on its own big toe, came to its senses, with Black Panther II director Ryan Coogler announcing on April 16 that while he vigorously opposed the new law, the production would still be shot in Georgia, like many other Marvel movies. Coogler gave every other studio and production company doing business in Georgia license to stay there, which is what they wanted to do anyway.
The lesson for conservatives is, as always: Brace yourself and do what’s right. The Democrats will oppose good policies, then lie about them, often hysterically, because that’s their playbook. They will indiscriminately and fatuously lob accusations of racism that are not even close to being true. Conservatives can win these fights, but only if we have the fortitude to take a few punches.