What Was State Farm Thinking?

C onservatives are annoyed with State Farm because, per a leaked email that was sent to the insurance giant’s agents in Florida, the company intended to help “increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+.” Progressives are annoyed with State Farm because, having been criticized by conservatives for intending to help “increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children Age 5+,” the company reversed course.

What in the ever-loving hell was State Farm doing starting this fire in the first place?

State Farm is an insurance company, not a bordello. It is engaged in one of the most necessary — and one of the most boring — pursuits in the country: playing with the actuarial tables until it can offer customers a cost-effective way of managing their financial risk. State Farm has a natural interest in public policy as it relates to the insurance industry, but, outside of that, nothing the company does requires it to get involved in politics in any particular way. Until roughly five minutes ago, nobody in America had ever wondered what his insurance agent’s parent company thought about any of the hot-button issues that animate our politics. The very idea is preposterous. Deductibles, medical exemptions, loyalty discounts, bundling deals — those are State Farm’s bread and butter. Making more LGBTQ+ books available to pre-K kids? Not so much.

It will never cease to be bizarre to me that so many of America’s companies seem so determined to make this mistake. Right now, somewhere in America, the CEO of some no-name aircraft-maintenance company is considering destroying his business’s well-cultivated reputation for quiet excellence by acquiescing to the demands of his loudest, wokest employees and agreeing to fund abortions on the runway at LaGuardia or send mankinis to the local day care or sponsor an AR-15–buyback program outside the local Bass Pro. Historically, he would have laughed such a suggestion out of the room with a gentle, “Bobby, this isn’t Firing Line — we service small- to medium-size passenger jets.” But now? Now he’s not so sure, and he won’t be until the bad decision he’s about to make explodes in his face, annoys all of the most politically active people in the United States, and causes his stock price to drop 30 percent.

State Farm operates on the franchise model — like McDonald’s or UPS or 7-Eleven. How utterly bewildered the company’s many Floridian franchisees must have been yesterday afternoon when, instead of fielding inquiries about the likelihood of their beating GEICO’s initial offer, they were asked by their customers to explain why they’d been trying to “bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about Being Transgender, Inclusive and Non-Binary.” A few months ago, I changed my car insurance. The guy I spoke to at AAA was a kindly semi-retiree from Naples, Fla. He was a chatty fellow, but I am pleased to say that he seemed about as interested in my views on culture-war issues as I was interested in his: not at all. Instead, we talked about my property-damage-liability threshold, and whether or not I wanted to be protected against uninsured motorists. It was a pleasant — and appropriate — conversation, and I am happy to report that at no point in its 35-minute course did I have any reason to ask him whether he was GenderCool.

In modern parlance, “totalitarian” is often used as a stand-in for “dictatorship” or “tyranny.” But, properly understood, the term means more than that. A “totalitarian” system is one in which nothing whatsoever can exist outside of politics, and in which all aspects of life — however small — are subordinated to political concerns. Under our constitutional system, private companies may engage in whatever political speech they like. But political activism is simply not most private companies’ raison d’être. As a cigar is often just a cigar, so an insurance company should often just be an insurance company. Inexplicably, State Farm forgot this, and it is now in crisis mode as a result. Other businesses that are tempted to throw themselves into the fray would do well to take note of its misfortune.