Its very essence is a betrayal of the decentralized, self-sufficient way of life that conservatives defend.
Its very essence is a betrayal of the decentralized, self-sufficient way of life that conservatives defend.
I n a 1981 broadside against the concept of fusionism, Russell Kirk thundered that “talk of forming a league or coalition” between libertarians and conservatives “is like advocating a union of ice and fire.” For very different reasons, one could say the same about talk of a union between conservatives and ESG.
The environmental, social, and governance investing (ESG) movement calls for what are essentially political considerations to be factored into investment decisions. It also serves as an extremely powerful and wide-reaching tool of social engineering and ideological control, wielded by nominally non-governmental actors.
Of course, state bureaucracies have never passed up an opportunity for interventionist meddling, and the number of ESG-related government regulations has soared in recent years. But even without that more explicit form of regulation, the systemic nature of ESG and the private or parastatal sources of its power are inextricably linked to the regulatory state. The bureaucratization of government inevitably has the downstream effect of bureaucratizing private corporations. And even more to the point, the two do not operate as distinct entities: Mass bureaucracies in both the corporate and governmental spheres are populated and operated by a specific class of technocrats who, more often than not, work in lockstep, and who move between the “private” and “public” spheres on a routine basis.
Jordan McGillis sees ESG differently. In an NRO piece last week, McGillis posited that the problem with ESG is its ends, rather than its means. “A reconfigured ESG could enable the Right to exert influence over economic and social outcomes without resorting to the cudgel of government policy,” he argued. “For the Right to discard in its entirety the role of ethical values in investing is to cede the moral high ground to the Left. . . . Investing, like education, is values-laden — and can be no other way.”
Yet arguing for an assertive, values-driven conservative approach to the economy is one thing; suggesting that conservatives should accommodate themselves to ESG is quite another. To embrace ESG is to embrace the class that operates it, and the ideological justifications it offers for its power. McGillis’s case for a technocratic central-planning scheme directed by large-scale corporate bureaucracies is wrong for the same reasons that a technocratic central-planning scheme directed by large-scale government bureaucracies is wrong: It rests on a distinction between the public and private spheres that doesn’t exist to a meaningful extent, at least in this context; and it assumes that the mass bureaucratic apparatuses that have increasingly supplanted regional institutions, local social ties, and decentralized control — a phenomenon that the sociologist Pitrim Sorokin aptly dubbed “colossalism” — could ever be appropriated in the service of truly conservative ends.
In reality, ESG is an expression of the interests, power, and ideological goals of what National Review co-founder James Burnham famously called the “managerial elite” — a class that came to power alongside the large-scale bureaucratization of the American political system, economy, and broader society at the turn of the 20th century. Where the bourgeois elites of the old ruling class got their power from local family firms and entrepreneurial capitalism, the managerial elite gets its power from the operation of mass bureaucracies. Where the bourgeois elites of old were individualistic and capitalist, the managerial elite is collectivist and technocratic. And where the bourgeois elites of old saw themselves as preserving societal order, the managerial elite constitutes an activist, interventionist, and ultimately, destabilizing societal force. The managerial apparatus — large corporations, consulting and lobbying firms, labor unions, nonprofit foundations, financial institutions, the education system, the administrative state, and so on — applies a perpetual squeeze to pre-existing social arrangements, structures, and institutions that predate or sit outside its purview, either for ideological reasons or simply due to the “crowding out” effect that bureaucratic expansion exerts on local civic associations.
Social engineering and top-down transformation are the very raison d’être of the managerial elite, and the material basis of the class’s power. It seizes one chance after another to intervene in American life, from the War on Poverty and the Great Society to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates and yes, ESG. These campaigns blur the distinction between public and private, partially because they are dominated by the same class and partially because they operate in service of the same class interests. One need only consider “regulatory capture,” in which federal regulators and the power players in the industries they are supposed to be regulating work in tandem to box out smaller competitors, or the “revolving door” between regulators and the companies they regulate, to see what I mean.
McGillis argues that “a more conservative approach would be to pivot in a different direction and emphasize sound corporate governance, national resilience, and constructive social policy.” But that pivot is impossible. There will never be a “conservative ESG” for the basic reason that the entire class that operates the system is dispositionally progressive, cosmopolitan, and hostile to basic conservative ideas. Nor should we want there to be a “conservative ESG,” because ESG’s very essence is a betrayal of the decentralized, self-sufficient way of life that conservatives defend. Embracing ESG would mean embracing its central premise: Rule by a remote, faceless, and democratically unaccountable bureaucratic apparatus is an acceptable substitute for republican self-government. And what self-respecting conservative believes that?