Stephen Soukup: Conservatives Should Continue the Fight Against ESG

Leftists currently dominate shareholder activism, but does that mean conservatives should give up the fight?

At National Review OnlineStephen Soukup and Russ Greene answer a resounding NO.

Stephen Soukup

Stephen Soukup

Soukup — who serves as the vice president and publisher of The Political Forum (a program of the National Center) — and Greene, a senior fellow at Stand Together, are responding specifically to a piece by Julius Krein in Compact Magazine entitled “Why the Right Can’t Beat ESG.”

ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance investing — seemingly harmless terms that mask an ugly agenda by leftists to use corporate money to fund their priorities on the shareholders’ dime.

Soukup and Greene write, in part:

Krein is correct on this point: The right waited far too long to enter the fray. The ESG movement captured the largest public pensions, asset managers, and proxy advisers before most conservatives had even heard of the term. As a result, the left had at least a 15-year head start before the right even got serious….

Over the past several years many influential progressive organizations have advocated for government to mandate that all corporations transition “From Shareholder Primacy to Stakeholder Capitalism.” Krein has long been an enthusiastic participant in this effort, attempting to build a bipartisan coalition in favor of mandatory stakeholder capitalism, never understanding, or at least never acknowledging, that the normative model of stakeholder capitalism is explicitly and intentionally based on moral principles that conflict with those of some 4,000 years of market and capital evolution.

In other words, increasing conservative opposition to ESG, stakeholder capitalism, and their largely post-capitalist moral priorities has become a serious inconvenience for Krein and his compatriots.

Read the entire piece here.



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