"Rainbow Capitalism" Is Good
Currents
Spend some time in queer circles come June and you’ll come across a bunch of complaints: Rainbow capitalism, homocapitalism, pink capitalism, and pinkwashing. These terms deride the corporate world’s desire to appear LGBT-friendly by embracing Pride Month and adopting rainbow-themed marketing campaigns. The terms carry a connotation of disingenuousness — and it’s not unfounded. The consumerization of the rainbow is but one intersectional river downstream of the headwaters of woke capital: a Machiavellian reallocation of advertising dollars, whose corporate LARPing of social justice has drawn the ire of figures on the right such as Ross Douthat and Andrew V. Abela, as well as figures on the left such as Peter Tatchell and Helen Lewis. Accusations of corporate hypocrisy, it turns out, are a bipartisan practice.
Critics on the right point to rainbow capitalism as picking a side in the culture war, applying a black-and-white (or perhaps rainbow-or-nothing) logic to ongoing and unresolved sociopolitical issues — free speech versus hate speech, cancel culture versus accountability culture, equality versus equity — that require some shades of grey. Meanwhile critics on the left attack rainbow capitalism on the grounds that corporate America is less an ally than a mercenary, one whose support for the cause is skin-deep and subject to the highest bidder. Indeed, when one looks a little closer at big business one begins to see the green behind the multicolour mask. It is perhaps best to remind oneself, however, that there is a third side to every story — just because both ends of the political spectrum agree on something does not make it so. Rainbow capitalism can, in fact, be a force for good, which the negativity biases of Twitter and Facebook do well to obscure.
Online, Pride Month is being hit by political traffic coming in both directions. What was once a moment of unity for liberals of all persuasions has become a time for tribal point-scoring. For the far-right, highlighting the hypocrisies of corporate virtue signaling has become a political tool — a means, not only of rousing the base, but of directing online trolls toward any and all left-associated issues. For the far-left, gaslighting people about the very existence of any such virtue signaling in order to bash Republicans competes with the ever-present impulse to use rainbow capitalism as an excuse to bash capitalism itself.
Offline, however, for the vast majority of the political spectrum, Pride Month has remained less a joke than a jubilee. The pouring of corporate money into campaigns, parades, and events has been good for the corporations themselves, sure, but also good for the economy and beneficial for the cause. In an article for the Foundation of Economic Education (hardly a bastion of LGBT activism), Richard Morrison provides a financial analysis of the cottage industry that rainbow capitalism has spawned — an industry, he stresses, that extends far beyond the LGBT community. Money aside, rainbow capitalism is getting small-business owners, independent start-ups and young entrepreneurs personally invested in Pride Month being a success — a win-win if there ever was one. In economics, there is a saying: In the short term, the economy is a voting machine, but in the long term, it is a weighing machine. It was only a matter of time, as the public threw its weight behind the LGBT movement, that corporations — more often sheep than shepherds — would catch up. On the ground, the festivities transcend the disingenuousness.
It’s easy to play the victim, to naysay, find fault, and whine about how any given progress is not enough, or doesn’t count. At the end of the day, one of the most powerful and influential sectors of society now largely supports LGBT-friendly issues, initiatives, and messaging — and they are willing to produce the cash to back it up. You can look this gift horse in the mouth if you must. All that you’ll find inside is money. Things could be a helluva lot worse.
This is not to say there are no concerns with rainbow capitalism — the corporatization, the politicization, the sidelining of important problems, and so forth — but that such issues are neither definitive of nor unique to rainbow capitalism. Indeed, the ability to think and behave out of pure self-interest in the short-term is one of the foundational elements of long-term capitalistic success, as economist Adam Smith noted back in 1776: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
Non-Christian corporations celebrate Christmas, pumping time and money into lights, music, and décor. One can gripe at the insincerity, of course, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that corporations, acting out of pure self-interest, not only elevate the Christmas experience itself, but do so in a way that CINOs (Christians in Name Only), Jews, Muslims, and Richard Dawkins can all appreciate. In terms of Pride Month, those fighting for the cause would do well to follow Christmas and lean into the hypocrisies in general, while saving the finger-pointing for more egregious culprits. We should channel commercial pandering as a means to make corporations do more, not less.
For hundreds of years, the amoral weighing machine that is capitalism worked against the LGBT community, which lacked the support of the masses. Today, however, after decades of winning the hearts and minds of the public, market forces are pro-LGBT. There is money on the table, so why not grab it? Corporations are willing to jump through the hoop, so why not let them? Even the most anti-LGBT holdovers should prefer to see the money pumped back into local businesses rather than compounding interest in the Cayman Islands. As Michael Jordan famously said, Republicans buy sneakers, too. Well, if the LGBT community can take the higher ground and set purity to one side — in the name of creating a truly diverse and inclusive experience — maybe, just maybe, conservatives will buy Pride tickets too.
