The Conservative Counterculture
In April 2023, the world turned on Bud Light. After the company hired Dylan Mulvaney—a transgender-identifying person—as the face of its advertising, political conservatives decided to launch a boycott of the beer. Normally this would mean very little, since most boycotts do not do serious damage to a company’s sales. However, by the height of this boycott, Bud Light’s sales had dropped by nearly 30 percent.Why was this boycott so effective?
To look for answers, we should turn to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. Pundits and commentators have offered many explanations and theories for his victory, and the fact is that there is probably no single reason behind why he won. However, one factor that clearly played a role in Trump’s victory was the development of a media industry that caters to conservatives. Instead of legacy media institutions (from the mainstream cable networks to so-called “papers of record” such as the New York Times and the Washington Post), more unorthodox outlets such as X, YouTube, and a growing network of podcasts became funnels through which ideas and arguments supportive of Trump could find their way to voters (bypassing the progressive gatekeepers in the mainstream media). Through this new media infrastructure, the Trump campaign was able to reach voters in a more effective manner than it had in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Americans often focus so much on expressions of political power that we forget how important cultural power can be. Traditionally, cultural institutions such as the media, entertainment, academia, and the arts generally promote a politically and culturally progressive message on a wide variety of issues. To provide a notable example, consider the cultural establishment’s persistently hostile narrative about Donald Trump, which began from the moment he came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. The idea that Trump represented a unique threat to democracy was forced down our throats—from debunked narratives peddled by the media about his campaign’s collusion with the Russian government to theories of so-called Christian nationalism, fascism, authoritarianism, and systemically-embedded bigotry that Ivory Tower academics invented to explain Trump’s popular appeal. The overarching narrative created by the cultural establishment was that Donald Trump and his supporters were evil (or at least ignorant stooges of evil). With the obvious caveat that winning or losing American elections involves a web of complex and distinct reasons, this particular narrative about Trump was an important factor in President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. I make these observations as a consistent critic of Trump, but even with my antipathy toward him these biases are quite easy to observe.
The Power of Cultural Narratives
One way to understand the power of cultural narratives is to look at how such narratives have an impact on science, which is supposedly an objective search for truth. Despite this image of science as an objective search for truth, we have good reason to assert that scientists are affected by larger cultural and institutional influences. Thomas Kuhn gave, in my opinion, one of the best theories of how this happens in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argues that science works in paradigms and it is difficult for scholars to find answers outside of those paradigms. Within the scientific community there is institutional and cultural pressure to maintain the current paradigm. Only when there is enough contradictory evidence will scholars begin to consider alternatives to that paradigm. Once a paradigm has taken hold of a scientific discipline, it is difficult for scholars to envision reality beyond that paradigm. In a similar manner, if a cultural narrative takes hold in our society, then as long as there is a reasonable amount of evidence that the narrative may be true there will be powerful cultural elements that reinforce that narrative to the general public or to key subcultures.
Thus, whether or not the narrative was accurate did not matter. Indeed, there were critical elements of it—such as the Russia collusion piece—that were clearly wrong and, in my view, there was plenty of evidence to know it was wrong before the Mueller Report. But narratives only need enough truth to appear superficially plausible to catch the attention of many otherwise disinterested viewers. They do not have to be completely true. There were enough elements of authoritarianism and bigotry in the messages of Trump to make the narrative at least somewhat plausible. The narrative cannot be empirically falsified and thus remains usable for Trump’s political opponents.
The cultural establishment’s narrative had to be displaced if Trump was to win in 2024. Anyone who follows the mainstream media knows that this narrative was on full display this past presidential election season. But what was not clearly evident was a counter-narrative that developed in the alternative media structure that conservatives had developed. That Trump-supportive counter-narrative included such themes as the failure of the Biden administration and the strong economy during the early Trump years before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a counter-narrative that found the Democrats culpable for many of our country’s problems, with the significant increases in immigration (legal and illegal) that our country has experienced in recent years, DEI ideology run amok, and the increased influence of transgender activists in our culture. The counter-narrative portrayed Trump as a victim of politically motivated lawfare and cast him as unjustly maligned by the progressive-dominated mainstream media. That narrative was not merely influential among political conservatives—many moderates and disappointed Democrats also accepted it. Once again, the narrative (or counter-narrative) does not have to be completely true to work. It simply has to have enough truth to be plausible, which was the case of the counter-narrative.
Cultural structures create narratives that shape how people see reality. Once individuals accept those narratives, it becomes difficult to convince them that the narrative can be wrong. In the early part of the twentieth century—especially before the New Deal Era—conservatives largely controlled the cultural narrative. But progressives have since conquered our cultural institutions and now exert near-monopolistic control of the cultural narrative. Republicans can win the presidency in spite of this dominance, but they have been (and remain) at a disadvantage. Indeed, overcoming the progressive narrative was crucial to Trump’s chances of winning the presidency in 2024. His ability to do so played an important role in cementing his electoral victory in 2024.
Conservatives and the Counternarrative
Another example to illustrate the emerging conservative counter-narrative can be seen in the fall of DEI and antiracism. During the racial unrest of 2020, a cultural narrative supportive of antiracism developed in the United States. The most popular books on the NYT and Amazon bestseller lists were White Fragility and How To Be an Antiracist. It was not uncommon for popular antiracist trainers to pick up $20,000 for a talk. Large companies competed against one another to contribute the most to further antiracism and DEI. Fast-forward to today, and we see how that narrative has since changed—and continues to change. Companies such as Walmart are ending their DEI programs. States such as Texas and Florida have passed anti-DEI legislation that defunds DEI offices and removes DEI-inspired programs from college campuses. Conservatives have filed lawsuits challenging the prevalence of DEI policies at companies and in government. Once again, there is a new counter-narrative—much of it developed within the alternative conservative media institutions, where DEI and antiracism are criticized for themselves trafficking in racism and racial tribalism. DEI programs are attacked as being run by grifters who are seeking to get paid rather than to end racism. Support for colorblindness has been championed by conservatives as a way to create a groundswell of opposition to DEI and antiracism. As of now, that counter-narrative is winning the fight against the DEI and antiracism narrative.
All of this brings me back to the Bud Light boycott. What I and many others failed to realize at the time of the boycott was that this alternative media structure had already begun to form. Boycotts cannot succeed by banking on the support of a few celebrities. Simply put, such celebrities are not able to exert control over the behavior of a high enough percentage of the population for them to seriously financially threaten a large company. But they can work if they threaten to alter cultural perceptions of a company. Progressive boycotts often work in this way with the threat of a company’s being seen as racist, homophobic or transphobic. Conservatives used their alternative media network to attack Bud Light as being too “woke”—a campaign that drove down sales so dramatically that it caused other companies to reconsider their support for efforts to promote progressive values. Soon after the success of the Bud Light boycott, Target was hit with similar boycott threats over their promotion of LGBTQ materials—which led them to restrict their sale of the targeted merchandise. And make no mistake about it: Walmart’s recent decision to scale back DEI is a direct result of the astonishing success of the Bud Light boycott.
From a scholarly perspective, the Bud Light boycott represents one of the first battles in the adaptation of political conservatives to their continued cultural disadvantage. Conservatives still operate at a disadvantage in academia and entertainment, but they have created an alternative media system that allows them to have a place at the table and an impact on our culture. It seems likely that when one political group starts to dominate certain cultural industries—just as progressives have dominated traditional media for decades—the opposing political group will learn to adopt and create alternative cultural expressions. This is what appears to have occurred in the new success of conservative boycotts and responsive political messaging.
Through effort, and perhaps some luck, conservative countercultural media have now penetrated into non-conservative areas of our society and can have a meaningful impact on our elections.
Perhaps the best message to learn from this is that a particular political and cultural faction should never assume that its will always have total control over any given institution. The ability of its opponents to adapt and discover alternatives should shake its confidence that cultural dominance is something permanent. From Bud Light to the Harris-Walz presidential campaign, progressives have paid the price for their lack of memory and imagination.
In the near future, I believe that conservatives will not operate at a great cultural disadvantage to progressives in the realm of media influence. With their new media arrangement, conservatives have an ability to promote a narrative more effectively than they have had for decades. The stability of this media infrastructure remains to be seen, and conservatives are still at a distinct disadvantage in other areas of the cultural establishment (e.g., academia and the arts). But this emerging media adaptation indicates that it is possible that political and cultural conservatives may one day find new alternatives to traditional academia and entertainment—alternatives that they can use to regain a cultural foothold.
Image by Steve Cukrov and licensed via Adobe Stock.