DEI versus “Praise the Lord”

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Ned Cole is perhaps the most important entrepreneur you’ve never heard of. In 1954, this builder from Austin, Texas created the world’s first housing development where every home had central air conditioning. Overnight, he transformed the lives of middle-class families of the sweltering Deep South. Residents reported eating heartier meals and having more energy. Housewives were liberated from the endless cleaning away of dust blown in through open windows.

Most of the houses still stand and form part of a pleasant neighbourhood with parks, schools and churches — lots of big, very full churches. Cole’s innovation was widely copied and soon Southern cities became a sprawl of affordable fully air-conditioned suburbs. The Sun Belt was born. Growing prosperity and population have made this region a powerful force in US electoral politics from Nixon’s victory in 1968 to Trump’s ascendency today.

From a business perspective, what’s important is that 70 years after Cole sold his first $12,000 bungalow, his descendants are not just making the weather in national commerce, they are also now evangelically exporting their distinctive style of capitalism across the world.

Consider Austin as an example. Back in Cole’s day it was a small, economically inconsequential city, reliant on its public university and status as state capital. Now Austin hosts a string of globally relevant tech businesses including Dell, Oracle and Elon Musk’s Tesla. And for more than a decade it has been the fastest growing metropolitan area in the US. The city’s success is down to a compelling marketing campaign to businesses in California, the Midwest and Northeast. Come south, goes the pitch, and benefit from low taxes, minimal regulation and our young, ambitious workforce. But there’s a quid pro quo. Come south, and you need to become a Southerner and ditch any liberal baggage before you cross the state line. To quote Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s memorable 2018 re-election slogan: “Don’t California my Texas.”

Their agenda is not merely to abolish LGBTQ+ employee communities — it is to replace them with equivalent Christian groups

Musk’s odyssey illustrates the power of the South to mould incoming business leaders. Before Tesla relocated from the Bay Area in 2021, Musk appeared to be an identikit centre-left tech bro. But within months of his migration to Austin, he acquired Twitter and began propagating MAGA memes and support for conservative causes. He may have begun his intellectual journey as a reaction to the regulation he battled in California, but being in Austin crystallised his new world view. Austin’s leading cultural figure is Joe Rogan, the world’s top-rated podcaster. Listen to Musk’s recent three-hour interview with Rogan and you can hear how fluently this one-time geek has internalised Texas’s distinctive mix of traditional values and paranoia about the federal government.

But Musk is just the best-known figure in a much wider campaign to export the values of Southern capitalism. Robby Starbuck, another Californian émigré now based in Tennessee, has successfully threatened consumer boycotts of companies who refuse to dial down their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion objectives. He has focused on businesses where a progressive internal culture stood at odds with their conservative consumer base. His victories have included John Deere tractors, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Molson Coors beer.

Starbuck’s success has not been lost on more situationally aware business leaders here. “I worry that, like more traditional activist investors, the anti-DEI campaigners will run out of targets in the US and turn their sights across the Atlantic,” one friend who is an executive at a British business with significant US exposure told me.

Indeed, there are signs this is already happening. The Telegraph recently reported that Florida investment manager James Fishback, was visiting the UK to convince British savers to invest in his new “anti-woke” fund. It also reported he was due to meet Nigel Farage. Now, in the past, I have written approvingly of these sorts of activities as an important challenge to a stifling orthodoxy here in Britain, where the narrow agendas of consultants and hobbyists too often get in the way of commercial imperatives. And there are many Britons on the right who would welcome this new American invasion.

But we need to be clear-sighted about where the arrival of Southern capitalism on these shores may lead. Folks like Starbuck and Fishback are not seeking to recreate a status quo ante, making the British business safe again for good blokes who like a pint and a fag. Instead, they are fired up by a religious zealotry quite alien to the polite agnosticism of Britain. Starbuck’s website proclaims that “God is at the center of everything” he does, while Fishback’s X (Twitter) feed is peppered with religious quotes and cross emojis. Their agenda is not merely to abolish the LGBTQ+ employee communities — it is to replace them with equivalent Christian groups.

A pal who leads a British business recently taken over by a South Carolina- based group gave me a glimpse of the future: “We are told in team meetings that God and faith can enable us to bring our best selves to work. We pray that the Lord will help us grow to become number one in our category. Oh, and there is absolutely no drinking or smoking — ever.”

Are Farage and his beery, rumple-suited City chums ready for corporate prayer circles and compulsory temperance pledges? Somehow, I doubt it.