In wake of insurrection, companies should embrace fuller idea of accountability
As industry lobbying groups around Washington go, the National Association of Manufacturers is a powerful one. Its board includes executives of companies such as Dow, ExxonMobil, Johnson &Johnson, Pfizer and Toyota. And if you’re familiar at all with how the public affairs game tends to work around the nation’s capital, the statement issued by NAM CEO Jay Timmons Wednesday amid all the chaos on Capitol Hill might have caught you off-guard:
Armed violent protestors who support the baseless claim by outgoing president Trump that he somehow won an election that he overwhelmingly lost have stormed the U.S. Capitol today, attacking police officers and first responders, because Trump refused to accept defeat in a free and fair election. Throughout this whole disgusting episode, Trump has been cheered on by members of his own party, adding fuel to the distrust that has enflamed violent anger. This is not law and order. This is chaos. It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such. The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power, and any elected leader defending him is violating their oath to the Constitution and rejecting democracy in favor of anarchy. Anyone indulging conspiracy theories to raise campaign dollars is complicit. Vice President Pence, who was evacuated from the Capitol, should seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to preserve democracy.
Timmons reiterated his position a day later in a Washington Post editorial. A deluge of companies and business interests expressed similar sentiments, albeit not with Timmons’ sharp tongue. The response feels like a sign of a new moment for business and its relationship with politics.
The morass of our campaign financing system often makes it challenging to figure out who’s backing whom. At the same time, a growing army of shadow regulators – institutional investors, journalists, corporate activists, watchdog groups and employee whistleblowers, to name a few – are holding companies to account. For example, Osita Nwanevu of The New Republic published an article on corporate donations financing campaigns focused on gerrymandering and “delegitimizing or undermining the votes” of GOP opponents. Not surprisingly, Nwanevu’s laundry list of companies that donated in 2020 to such efforts included a host of high-profile NAM members.
Needless to say, spotlighting the financial ties between corporations and politicians accused of inciting a violent coup attempt by white nationalists is bad for the brand.
So we could think of these denunciations as attempts to neutralize the PR fallout of aiding an insurrection: “Hey, when we gave them our money, we didn’t mean do that.” That approach would fit with Corporate America’s default justification of “it’s just business” when it comes to participating in politics. After all, companies – and their representative organizations like NAM – often sprinkle money around to candidates on both sides of the aisle to ensure they have access to elected officials and policymakers no matter the outcome of an election.
The reaction to this week’s ugliness suggests that the fallback of political agnosticism is starting to buckle. The bet here is that as both-sides, issue-based engagement in politics becomes increasingly untenable, the businesses that thrive will embrace all the consequences of being a political actor and vote with their checkbooks accordingly.
