Bud Light, Marianne Williamson, And The McGovern Dilemma

Maybe it's my age, but in recent days I keep returning to the 1970s, rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade", thinking about the implications of the 1972 election, suddenly realizing that the Teixeira leaks are nothing but a reprise of the Pentagon Papers, and musing that this all carries lessons for the Bud Light fiasco. What brought me to focus on this was remarks by Marianne Williamson, a member of my 1970s demographic, that President Joe Biden “hasn’t done enough” for working-class Americans. She spoke at a restaurant in Dover, NH:

“Now, I am a Democrat. I am a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe that the Democratic Party should stand for unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States,” she went on to tell the restaurant.

“In order for us to win in 2024 and in order for us to repair this country, we have to be willing … to cut the cord with the last 50 years of history, we have to be willing to begin a new era,” Williamson said.

It's hard to determine what Ms Williamson means by cutting the cord with the last 50 years of history, but I would actually trace some part of the problem to the 1972 presidential election, in which the Democrats nominated George McGovern to run on a platform essentially the same as the one they've run on in most elections since, but in the process publicly lost the support of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, over McGovern's opposition to the Viet Nam War.

This in turn became a more general paradigm for the Democrat Party's loss of support from the working class over what Ms Williamson calls the last 50 years of history, and it's hard to think the 1972 election wasn't somewhere in the back of her mind when she said this. And she explicitly calls herself a Roosevelt Democrat, which can only refer to the New Deal alliance of the working class with the Ivy League-prep school upper class embodied in figures like Averell Harriman and Roosevelt himself.

Ms Williamson, however, is more a creature of the Me Decade than the New Deal, prep school, the Ivy League, or the working class, having bypassed the upper-class rites of adultood to do drugs and lead a New Age church. Me Decade types in fact have far less commitment to either party, being essentially hedonistic and narcissistic, which probably is what links them to the current gentry, who fancy theselves more or less non-partisan. This brings us to Bud Light. Brendan Whitworth, the CEO of Budweiser, is a registered Republican. Donald Trump Jr defended Budweiser fior donating slightly more to Republicans than Democrats.

Indeed, Alissa Heinerscheid, who approved Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, could easily be Ms Williamson's granddaughter; the loyalty of both is to their affluent bobo lifestyle, not to any solidarity with the working class. It was Mr Whitworth, the registered Republican (although of the CIA and Harvard Business School faction of Republicans) who belatedly acknowledged that "Anheuser-Busch employs more than 18,000 people and our independent distributors employ an additional 47,000 valued colleagues." Thus Trump fils complains that hurting Bud Light hurts Republicans, while Mr Whitworth adds that hurting Bud Light by the way also hurts the working class, or at least that part of the working class that sells Bud Lignt.

Neither Ms Williamson nor Ms Heinerscheid was available for comment. The working class is not in their wheelhouse.

The Statement Mr Whitworth released on Friday, and the subsequent new "spirit of America" Clydesdale ad, is an attempt to press the reset button back to bland without acknowledging the blunder. As this writer put it,

While [Trump Jr] might want the boycott to end, it looks like a large chunk of people have no interest in doing that, and this video is not going to fix the situation. All of a sudden playing on patriotism isn’t going to fix this problem. Anheuser-Busch still has a long way to go to fix this PR nightmare. It might eventually happen, but this isn’t the fix they’re looking for.

Ms Williamson has essentially the same approach. At her New Hampshire appearance, after paying lip service to the working class, she went on,

“There is no reason why we in this country do not have universal health care, do not have a guaranteed livable wage, do not have free college tuition, do not have paid family leave, and do not have guaranteed sick pay.”

She also hit Biden for not being radical enough on climate change. Specifically, Williamson criticized his administration’s approval of a “$39 billion-dollar project to export liquified natural gas from Alaska,” arguing that “this is at a time when scientists are telling us that we absolutely must be ramping down, not ramping up, fossil fuel extraction.”

Issues like climate change and free college are for the one percent and the college-educated gentry, not the working class, who are fully aware that their taxes will pay for the gentry's kids' college, and electric cars and trucks will make it more expensive for them to get to work. Appeals to McGovern-era Democrat chestnuts won't work any better than appeals to patriotism to make people forget the corporate elites are catering to the latest trans darlings of the rich.

But at least Ms Williamson is saying words that reflect we're still in the 1970s, like it or not.