Dogs won’t eat the dogfood? Try a little rebranding.
The highest compliment that conservative critics of the Left’s linguistic gamesmanship can be paid is when the erstwhile champions of the latest faddish progressive euphemism declare that it has been rendered gauche by its ignorant detractors. Like so many coded left-wing catchphrases before it, “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance) investing may be going the way of the dodo.
“I never said I was ashamed,” said Larry Fink, CEO of the investment firm BlackRock, which has styled itself one of the preeminent vehicles for the promotion of ESG investing, in a statement provided to Axios. “I’m not ashamed.” Fink’s transformation into a corncob was occasioned by comments Axios insists Fink most certainly did make during a presentation at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
“I’m ashamed of being part of this conversation,” Fink reportedly related. His sense of dishonor was triggered by Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s efforts in 2022 to make BlackRock into an avatar for ESG investing while pulling $2 billion in state assets managed by the firm. Despite his self-professed insistence that he is not, in fact, “owned,” Fink has promised to retire this shorthand for using investment capital as a tool to socially engineer America’s boardrooms. “I’m not going to use the word ESG because it’s been misused by the far left and the far right,” Fink insisted.
Fink’s comments likely presage a familiar campaign in which the Left attempts to vilify the verbiage it coins because the conditions the word is meant to describe are increasingly resented by the broader public. It will follow the trajectory traced most recently by those invested in burying the word “woke” because even those who subscribe to the ideas it promotes now believe the word has become an insult.
The phenomenon of wokeism isn’t going away, of course. Redistributive social justice is too valuable to disappear, but it will be subject to a rebranding effort. Likewise, the extortion racket commonly referred to as “ESG” — the act of holding investment capital hostage in the pursuit of progressive political goals by non-legislative means — isn’t going away.
But whatever euphemism succeeds this initialism, the behavior it describes will be familiar enough to recognize the new ESG when we see it. Not long ago, Fink himself aptly described the goal of ESG investing: “Behaviors are going to have to change,” Fink said. “You have to force behaviors, and, at BlackRock, we’re forcing behaviors.”
Progressives can call the strong-arming of business interests whatever they like, but so long as the dogs just won’t eat the dogfood, the endless cycle of branding and rebranding progressive ideas will continue apace.