When commercial transactions require consumers to adopt political ideologies to conduct business, everyone suffers — consumers, vendors, shareholders, and businesses alike.
Stakeholder capitalism has long cloaked itself in the language of enlightened governance, promising to harmonize profit with social virtue and stakeholder well-being. Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, citizens have begun to push back against corporate boardrooms attempting to seize lawmaking authority.
In the United States, President Donald Trump has issued numerous executive orders that shift federal acquisition priorities away from controversial DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives and false promises of “equitable” outcomes. Meanwhile, in France, public institutions adopting imported ideological standards, such as DEI and “inclusive language,” face increasing criticism.
In order to increase transparency and combat this corporate progressivism, 1792 Exchange and France’s Observatoire du Wokisme have pooled data on Fortune 500 and CAC 40 companies. The new collaboration integrates 1792 Exchange’s Corporate Bias Ratings into the Observatoire’s Index du Wokisme en Entreprise, providing a growing level of international transparency into how multinational corporations are using the investments of often unwilling shareholders to reshape public norms without a democratic mandate.
This partnership signals an emerging coalition intent on steering multinational companies back to their traditional, classical principles: protection of private property, viewpoint neutrality, and equality before the law. It further illustrates a deep philosophical tension within contemporary capitalism.
The feel-good pledges that CEOs commit to, such as achieving “net zero” carbon emissions or “gender equity” in executive ranks within arbitrary timelines, seldom face shareholder votes and frequently contradict statutory norms regarding discrimination and corporate neutrality.
Domestic examples abound. Major U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase, have de-banked religious advocacy groups without transparent justification, including that of former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback. Energy giants such as Shell and BP publicly advocate for aggressive ESG mandates that disproportionately harm domestic small businesses.
This activity is even more deleterious in Europe, where the European Parliament has attempted to codify many of these changes despite a widespread lack of understanding of their potential long-term economic repercussions. Regulatory mayhem has followed, with the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in Europe facing repeated delays in its full implementation due to the significant hardships it poses to industry, agriculture, and the United States. On the social front, the Digital Services Act has acted as a bludgeon against citizens concerned about unchecked immigration.
Stakeholder capitalism has compelled supermarket chains and multinational corporations in France to issue statements, often in English, endorsing gender ideology and racial quotas, thereby circumventing the French constitutional commitment to colorblind republicanism and the scrutiny of the French populace. The Index du Wokisme en Entreprise will now enable French citizens to trace these impositions, potentially back to American corporate sponsors.
This movement reflects themes expressed by both conservatives and traditional liberals. For example, environmentalist Michael Shellenberger highlights how the European Union seeks to utilize American social media giants to censor speech globally. This same concern shook the European establishment when called out by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February.
According to Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions report, only 27% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in banks, reflecting a 27% decline over 20 years. In comparison, 51% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police, a number that has declined by only 14% during the same period despite unrelenting “social justice” campaigns.
French intellectuals have long warned of this dynamic. Olivier Vial, founder of Observatoire du Wokisme, has written extensively about how deconstructionist theory migrated from universities to institutional policies in media and commerce. Now he has operationalized his theoretical critique into a tool for accountability. With 1792 Exchange providing comparative data on the world’s largest 500 companies, French lawmakers and journalists who still care about liberté will now be equipped to expose a company like Airbus for supporting sex changes for children in Herndon, Virginia, while lobbying for nationalist procurement rules in Paris — if they are brave enough to face their more censorious colleagues.
Some defenders of ESG and other forms of corporate social activism argue that corporations are simply responding to consumer demand. However, this is fundamentally untrue. They are choosing to react to a small but vocal group of activists, despite the vast majority of investors rejecting the activist shareholder proposals that seek to push companies into social engineering. The Manhattan Institute reported that, in 2022, the average ESG resolution received only 23% shareholder support.
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The political implications are significant. In the United States, the House Financial Services Committee has aimed to advance legislation that would prevent ESG-influenced proxy voting by asset managers managing retirement funds. France’s National Assembly has debated a deregulatory response to energy insecurity and ESG, arising from the Paris Climate Accord, which contradicts republican values and places its economy at a global disadvantage. The partnership between 1792 Exchange and the Observatoire du Wokisme provides policymakers with a data-driven tool to take decisive action.
By ensuring that corporate behavior is transparent, accountable, and open to scrutiny, this transatlantic alliance affirms that freedom belongs not just to the giants of industry and the plutocrats who virtue signal in Davos but to the citizens whose trust they require. Shareholders and citizens on both sides of the Atlantic are ready to embrace this transparency.
Daniel Cameron is the former Attorney General of Kentucky and CEO of 1792 Exchange.