Ubers and brews

Maybe Joan Walsh is correct in thinking that these Republican operatives are stupid.  But one thing this should make clear is that conservatives see hipsters as their demo.

Here’s Feinberg’s whole “Free the Brews” pitch. You’ll see why they pay him the big bucks.

Young Americans are really interested in the craft brewing industry.  In fact, I’ve got a couple of friends who brew beer in their basement right now.  They’d rather leave their jobs, and become an entrepreneur, and start their own brewery.  It really actually is something that marks our generation.  It’s a cultural phenomenon.

We actually did an experiment where we use technology on Twitter.  We wanted to — overall we wanted to know what do young people care about?  How do they form their communities online?  And so we did a really intense analysis of their Twitter streams.  We found out that craft breweries and craft beer were actually the largest cultural segment in North Carolina.  So we set about to talk about craft breweries because it’s what they care about, so we care about it.

Just like a lot of other businesses, it’s one that’s marked by tons of government regulations, tons of cronyism where businesses are trying to keep the little guy down…So we did a Free the Brews campaign.  It featured young entrepreneurs that we’re really supporting and who were really trying to cut through the red tape and get started.  We got hundreds of people into that event.  In Asheville, North Carolina we have over 500 people that we were able to impact through our Free the Brews event.

…We’ve been able to get tons of these young Americans interested in the ideas of freedom, not because we came through with a really great way to talk about marginal tax rates, but because we were able to talk about freedom and regulation about something that they care about.

Nobody asked Feinberg to define “tons.” Feinberg’s career is a case study in the way wingnut welfare creates a culture of dependency, or alternatively, the debilitating effects of affirmative action for white people.

His craft beer remarks let Rachel Campos-Duffy segue into the way her Latino-outreach organization, LIBRE, has worked with GenOpp on the issue of “freeing” food trucks, too. The main area of overlap seemed to be that GenOpp’s targets tend to eat the food – millennials love “having a truck pull up and bring delicious food directly to you,” Feinberg explained — while LIBRE’s targets tend to make the food. But both groups will benefit if Big Government doesn’t overregulate the growing food truck industry, Campos-Duffy argued. (It’s a variation on the right’s embrace of Uber, Airbnb and Burning Man.) She explained that LIBRE is working in Florida with “the fast food truck communities” to fight “big government, and cronyism, and over-regulation [of] the little guy.”

Again, Walsh is making fun of these guys.  But here's what they're on to. The most celebrated social and business trends today are products of exploitation and  regulatory arbitrage. The media habitually mistakes consumerism for "cool." And the vanishing concept of full time employment with benefits  is often papered over as the blooming of "entrepreneurship." 

In other words, a hardline conservative economic agenda is currently enjoying a society wide marketing boom.  Of course, Republican strategists are going to take advantage of that.