The Transgender Influencer Can Disaster: America’s Obsession with Culture Wars and Its Impact on Business

VTwenty billion dollars a can of beer: that’s what Budweiser, the king of brewers in St. Louis (Missouri), cost a single canister of Bud Lite. The latter had been decorated with the image of a transgender influencer, who was quick to promote it on Instagram.

Forty-five clip seconds later, disaster was unleashed. Revolt around barbecues: In the Midwest, deep America stopped buying the famous light beer, whose sales fell by 20%. Panic on Wall Street, where the capitalization of the company lost 20 billion dollars (18.6 billion euros). An earthquake never seen, which, far from being anecdotal, reflects the state of the debate in the United States.

Global warming threatens the planet, Russia attacks Ukraine, conflict rages with China, but the subject that obsesses America is the fate of transgender people, the culmination of the cultural battle between conservatives and woke.

What a change in eight years, when Donald Trump was campaigning to defend white workers in the deindustrialized regions of the Rust Belt! Today, the United States is engaged in a new isolationism to promote “America first”. The fight focuses on the culture war, whose cantor is the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, contender for the Republican nomination for 2024.

Of course, this reaction is not a guarantee of success. The Supreme Court’s decision, which removed the federal right to abortion in the summer of 2022, is a Pyrrhic victory that led to the mobilization of women and the relative defeat of Republicans in the midterm elections. By dint of going too far, Ron DeSantis is in trouble against Donald Trump.

Nevertheless: it is the dominant subject, and companies can no longer stand being called upon to take a position on all societal issues. The climax was rightly reached during the murder of African-American George Floyd by a white Minneapolis police officer in May 2020. Stunned America did its collective soul-searching.

Negative value

The ebb first concerned the environment. After having been negative in markets at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, oil has rebounded, contributing to inflation. The little Republican music coming from the oil states of the South and the Midwest was threefold: disinvesting means increasing American dependence, it means driving up the price of a gallon of gasoline, which for a time exceeded 5 dollars, it is to have a stock market performance less pension funds. These States have adopted laws banishing public investments from environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria, and the idea of ​​”divesting” carbon energies has receded in a complex world: can we treat companies that promise to to use the carbon windfall to reinvest in renewables and those that vaguely promise to capture carbon?

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