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A small but influential minority of American conservative intellectuals has never liked free markets. These conservatives—in Britain or Canada they would be called “red Tories”—hold paternalistic views on economics and traditionalist views on culture and society. They believe the welfare state and trade protectionism accomplish more good than bad and that the state has a duty to defend the traditional family and encourage religious observance. Free markets, in this outlook, create a lot of economic growth and prosperity, especially for the wealthy, but ransack the mores and conventions of ordinary working people.
Britain’s red Tory sensibility has a long lineage. It is perceptible in the poetry of William Wordsworth, the novels of Charles Kingsley and the political writings of William Cobbett and Thomas Carlyle. In the U.S., forms of anti-free-market traditionalism appear in the social criticism of the Southern Agrarians and Richard Weaver, and more recently in the work of so-called common-good conservatives and other exponents of “postliberalism.” JD Vance fits somewhere in this tradition.
On its face, anti-free-market traditionalism has a certain cogency. The breakdown of traditional marriage and family, its exponents might say, was hurried along by a private-sector entertainment industry that since the 1970s has disparaged conventional marriage and idealized sexual license. Unregulated markets encourage consumerism, which in turn makes people lazy and licentious. And so on.
What right-leaning critics of markets fail to appreciate, however, is that the cultural pathologies they lament often don’t originate in the private sector at all—and that markets frequently offer effective antidotes to those pathologies. Consider the ways in which, over the past few years, the private sector has rebuffed the advancement of transgender ideology.
Readers may approve or disapprove of transgenderism—the belief, to oversimplify, that any person may declare himself to be of either sex or some other “gender” entirely—but it is plainly destructive of traditional customs and mores. That is why social conservatives find it alarming and progressives don’t. What bears remembering is that transgenderism mostly isn’t a product of the commercial sector. It is promoted by activists in the nonprofit sector, by public school and university administrators, and by public-sector busybodies from state civil rights commissions to the Pentagon. Even religious institutions cheer-lead for transgenderism. Walk through the wealthy parts of any large or mid-size city and you can’t help noticing churches adorned by banners aggressively promoting the transgender message.
The one unambiguously for-profit institution that does promote trans ideology—the mainstream media—is, perhaps not coincidentally, slowly dying. Some clinics, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies profit from transgender surgeries and hormone drugs. But the medical field is so replete with public money, so heavily regulated by the state, and so dependent on third-party payment that their behavior is best described as rent-seeking.
The consequent spread of transgenderism tempted the advertising divisions of some for-profit corporations to believe they could market their wares by appealing to trans values. This happened most visibly in April 2023, when Bud Light paid the “trans woman influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to promote its brand. A large segment of the beer-consuming public expressed outrage, and the brand hasn’t recovered. Bud Light had been the top-selling beer in America for a generation; it is now No. 2, behind Modelo Especial, and falling.
The point isn’t that Bud Light, or its owner, Anheuser-Busch InBev, was severely punished (the company will be fine), but that it’s no longer glamorizing transgender influencers. The commercial sector turned out to be one of the few spheres in which ordinary Americans could register their feeling that transgenderism isn’t a thing to celebrate.
Several multinational corporations, meanwhile, are significantly curbing or scrapping their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, chief among those commitments the doctrine that trans identity must be lavishly accommodated for and applauded. Brown-Foreman, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowes, Molson Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Tractor Supply Co.—these and others have withdrawn from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a guide meant to tell investors how friendly listed companies are to “LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion,” “transgender workplace best practices” and so on.
But why did these companies embrace transgenderism and other left-wing causes to begin with? The answer is complicated, but the salient point is that none of it was a response to market forces. Corporate America’s promotion of progressive political aims was never about enriching shareholders by responding to customers. It was, and remains, a losing effort by corporate and asset managers to satisfy the demands of a vast network of activists, transnational organizations, government regulators, left-wing politicians and tenured experts.
This network, as Paul Tice has documented in “Race to Zero,” published earlier this year, is united by the belief that environmental, social and governance considerations—especially on climate and “equity”—ought to govern the allocation of shareholder resources. Whether managers believe in the causes they purport to champion is beside the point; they must pretend to believe in them if they’re to keep the activists, regulators and other scolds off their backs.
Whatever else this describes, it doesn’t describe a free market.
By contrast, in those places where ordinary buying and selling can happen in relative freedom—in retail and service industries—buyers have punished progressive activism. Last year, to stick with the example of transgender ideology, when Target brought out a line of trans clothing items for children, customers revolted. The news media portrayed the backlash as a result of stupidity and misinformation, but parents knew what they saw—a “Pride collection” for children—and didn’t like it. Target’s stock lost about $10 billion in valuation.
Nobody’s claiming that Target has learned its lesson and no longer sells “tuck-friendly” feminine swimsuits, items marketed to boys who imagine they are girls. This year the company still featured similar merchandise, although only in “select stores.” Still, the free market offered to ordinary Americans a rare means of resistance to what many of them believe to be a baleful form of sexual confusion.
Another source of resistance to trans ideology: the labor market. Multiple social-science studies indicate that individuals identifying as “trans” are less likely to land public-facing jobs than their non-trans correlatives. People identifying as transgender and their allies in the cause will regard this as an outrageous form of discrimination. Their complaint may be valid. What common-good conservatives and other right-leaning critics of the free market might ponder, however, is that the free exchange of goods and services has a way of frustrating the progress of moral insurrections.
Americans’ apprehensions about transgenderism at last found political expression in 2024. Republicans across the country challenged their Democratic opponents to state their views on men competing in women’s sports. Democrats’ inability to speak clearly about so obvious an injustice told many voters all they needed to know. Donald Trump’s TV ad highlighting Kamala Harris’s past claim that prison inmates have a right to taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”) is widely seen as among the most effective ads of the 2024 cycle.
If this is the moment the nation begins to recover its sanity about the sexes, America’s red Tories might wish to thank the free market.
A small but influential minority of American conservative intellectuals has never liked free markets. These conservatives—in Britain or Canada they would be called “red Tories”—hold paternalistic views on economics and traditionalist views on culture and society. They believe the welfare state and trade protectionism accomplish more good than bad and that the state has a duty to defend the traditional family and encourage religious observance. Free markets, in this outlook, create a lot of economic growth and prosperity, especially for the wealthy, but ransack the mores and conventions of ordinary working people.
Britain’s red Tory sensibility has a long lineage. It is perceptible in the poetry of William Wordsworth, the novels of Charles Kingsley and the political writings of William Cobbett and Thomas Carlyle. In the U.S., forms of anti-free-market traditionalism appear in the social criticism of the Southern Agrarians and Richard Weaver, and more recently in the work of so-called common-good conservatives and other exponents of “postliberalism.” JD Vance fits somewhere in this tradition.
On its face, anti-free-market traditionalism has a certain cogency. The breakdown of traditional marriage and family, its exponents might say, was hurried along by a private-sector entertainment industry that since the 1970s has disparaged conventional marriage and idealized sexual license. Unregulated markets encourage consumerism, which in turn makes people lazy and licentious. And so on.
What right-leaning critics of markets fail to appreciate, however, is that the cultural pathologies they lament often don’t originate in the private sector at all—and that markets frequently offer effective antidotes to those pathologies. Consider the ways in which, over the past few years, the private sector has rebuffed the advancement of transgender ideology.
Readers may approve or disapprove of transgenderism—the belief, to oversimplify, that any person may declare himself to be of either sex or some other “gender” entirely—but it is plainly destructive of traditional customs and mores. That is why social conservatives find it alarming and progressives don’t. What bears remembering is that transgenderism mostly isn’t a product of the commercial sector. It is promoted by activists in the nonprofit sector, by public school and university administrators, and by public-sector busybodies from state civil rights commissions to the Pentagon. Even religious institutions cheer-lead for transgenderism. Walk through the wealthy parts of any large or mid-size city and you can’t help noticing churches adorned by banners aggressively promoting the transgender message.
The one unambiguously for-profit institution that does promote trans ideology—the mainstream media—is, perhaps not coincidentally, slowly dying. Some clinics, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies profit from transgender surgeries and hormone drugs. But the medical field is so replete with public money, so heavily regulated by the state, and so dependent on third-party payment that their behavior is best described as rent-seeking.
The consequent spread of transgenderism tempted the advertising divisions of some for-profit corporations to believe they could market their wares by appealing to trans values. This happened most visibly in April 2023, when Bud Light paid the “trans woman influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to promote its brand. A large segment of the beer-consuming public expressed outrage, and the brand hasn’t recovered. Bud Light had been the top-selling beer in America for a generation; it is now No. 2, behind Modelo Especial, and falling.
The point isn’t that Bud Light, or its owner, Anheuser-Busch InBev, was severely punished (the company will be fine), but that it’s no longer glamorizing transgender influencers. The commercial sector turned out to be one of the few spheres in which ordinary Americans could register their feeling that transgenderism isn’t a thing to celebrate.
Several multinational corporations, meanwhile, are significantly curbing or scrapping their diversity, equity and inclusion commitments, chief among those commitments the doctrine that trans identity must be lavishly accommodated for and applauded. Brown-Foreman, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowes, Molson Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Tractor Supply Co.—these and others have withdrawn from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, a guide meant to tell investors how friendly listed companies are to “LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion,” “transgender workplace best practices” and so on.
But why did these companies embrace transgenderism and other left-wing causes to begin with? The answer is complicated, but the salient point is that none of it was a response to market forces. Corporate America’s promotion of progressive political aims was never about enriching shareholders by responding to customers. It was, and remains, a losing effort by corporate and asset managers to satisfy the demands of a vast network of activists, transnational organizations, government regulators, left-wing politicians and tenured experts.
This network, as Paul Tice has documented in “Race to Zero,” published earlier this year, is united by the belief that environmental, social and governance considerations—especially on climate and “equity”—ought to govern the allocation of shareholder resources. Whether managers believe in the causes they purport to champion is beside the point; they must pretend to believe in them if they’re to keep the activists, regulators and other scolds off their backs.
Whatever else this describes, it doesn’t describe a free market.
By contrast, in those places where ordinary buying and selling can happen in relative freedom—in retail and service industries—buyers have punished progressive activism. Last year, to stick with the example of transgender ideology, when Target brought out a line of trans clothing items for children, customers revolted. The news media portrayed the backlash as a result of stupidity and misinformation, but parents knew what they saw—a “Pride collection” for children—and didn’t like it. Target’s stock lost about $10 billion in valuation.
Nobody’s claiming that Target has learned its lesson and no longer sells “tuck-friendly” feminine swimsuits, items marketed to boys who imagine they are girls. This year the company still featured similar merchandise, although only in “select stores.” Still, the free market offered to ordinary Americans a rare means of resistance to what many of them believe to be a baleful form of sexual confusion.
Another source of resistance to trans ideology: the labor market. Multiple social-science studies indicate that individuals identifying as “trans” are less likely to land public-facing jobs than their non-trans correlatives. People identifying as transgender and their allies in the cause will regard this as an outrageous form of discrimination. Their complaint may be valid. What common-good conservatives and other right-leaning critics of the free market might ponder, however, is that the free exchange of goods and services has a way of frustrating the progress of moral insurrections.
Americans’ apprehensions about transgenderism at last found political expression in 2024. Republicans across the country challenged their Democratic opponents to state their views on men competing in women’s sports. Democrats’ inability to speak clearly about so obvious an injustice told many voters all they needed to know. Donald Trump’s TV ad highlighting Kamala Harris’s past claim that prison inmates have a right to taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”) is widely seen as among the most effective ads of the 2024 cycle.
If this is the moment the nation begins to recover its sanity about the sexes, America’s red Tories might wish to thank the free market.
