The ESG Wars On the Front Lines of the Discursive Campaigns of the 2024 Presidential Election Cycle

 

The key to any election campaign in liberal democratic states is to find a concept nebulous enough that it is not easily understood by the masses, and then, in the style of the great semiotic master narrative controllers, to seek t invest the term with meaning that can be used to manage the electoral masses into "right" thinking for one faction and against the other. The trick to to find a vehicle--or rather a vessel--that can be emptied out and filled with whatever meaning suits the times, and the ambitions of those seeking to have the masses embrace a particular way of looking at things.  The ideal vessel is one that is capable of filling by completely opposed meaning clusters simultaneously so that mass mobilization campaigns can be centered on the term. In the process the politics of meaning is also affected, and a term that might once have had a stable meaning, and a useful purpose (whether or not in development) will find itself transformed along multiple, and usually inconsistent, tracks.

ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governmental)--as a set of risk managing criteria, as an analytical mode of aligning economic activity with market expectations, law and norms,  and ESG as the embodiment of those orms themselves--appears to be an ideal candidate for a key conceptual vessel around which the political campaigns for the presidency in 2024 can be organized. 

One of the opening salvos in the campaign has revolved around efforts by the Biden Administration to a rule allowing pension fund managers to take environmental, social, and corporate governance factors into account when investing retirees' funds.That effort then produced a (surprising) bi-partisan legislative effort to overturn or prevent the application of that rule; and that legislative effort then became the object of Mr. Biden's highly publicized veto. 

All of the elements for the sanctification, demonization, legalization, politicization, and distortion of ESG are already present. The Republicans and their allies have focused on the use of ESG as a Trojan Horse" to indirectly impose a set of normative values (by mandating one supposes) a particular way of assessing risk and identifying risk factors). The Democrats and their allies have focused on the recklessness of opposition in terms of threats to living standard and alignment with international norms.  Future posts will tease these alignments further as each sides consolidate a narrative of ESG.

The text of Mr. Biden's veto video address may be accessed here.