WHY ARE CORPORATIONS INCREASINGLY LEFTIST?

Because the people who run them are. In the case of the oil industry, as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason noted a decade ago, in the 1990s, “environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green,” thus paving the way for the full-on corporatism and crony venture socialism of the Obama era.

And because the people they cater their products to are. The TV series Mad Men increasingly failed as watchable television after its first couple of seasons. But consider the the arc of the series. It begins in 1960 with Don Draper crafting Lucky Strike pitches to conservative smokers in 1960. In the final moments of the series finale, Draper attends an uber-’70s est session in Big Sur and comes away with the brainstorm to craft the proto-multi-culti Stepford-hippy populated “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coca-Cola commercial. This neatly sums up how the advertising industry responded to coastal elites moving more and more perilously leftward in the 1960s and ’70s.

To build on what Aaron Clarey wrote in the headline link above, Whole Foods have devoted their entire business model to catering to this demographic — which was all fun and games until libertarian-leaning CEO John Mackey came out against Obamacare as “tantamount to ‘fascism’ because ‘the government doesn’t own the means of production, but they do control it.'” That’s an accurate definition of the F-word, but good luck both explaining that to your core audience and keeping them as customers; Mackey quickly capitulated to the mob.