Bob Iger and the unhappy politics of electoral inevitability
Americans seem stuck with the leaders we've got.
Here is how a big part of the economy works now: If you are a working schmuck who’s lucky enough to fund a 401(k) for your retirement and smart enough to fill it with index funds (as you should), you own hundreds of tiny, algorithmically selected pieces of the American experience at any given moment.
Trying to follow the to-ing and fro-ing of your own money can be dizzying. In brief, your happy retirement (mandatory SEC disclosure on this blog’s forward-looking statements: inshallah) hinges on the success of the same huge companies you might like to complain about for whatever reason at any given moment, as I particularly enjoy doing.
In fact, the hundreds of tiny pieces of the economy you own include some tiny, highly abstracted pieces of yourself. In Hollywood you can work for Disney and help make a Star Wars TV show, stream it on Disney+ (preferably with ads), and then profit off your own activity as both customer and worker on the back end in your role as a shareholder. Just like George Lucas!
But when you’re a worker-customer-owner in the Disney nation-state, there’s a middleman whose whole job is to keep your composite identities cleanly separated: the once and future CEO, Bob Iger.
It’s management, through Iger, that decides whether you’re going to work at Disney. It’s management that decides whether that Star Wars show is going to get targeted at your consumer demographic. And Iger does all this to make sure your returns as a shareholder stay rock solid, because that’s the only place where you’re his boss.
But as some guy with a retirement plan who’s just puttering around on the computer over lunch and reading about Disney’s current shareholder fight with utter emotional detachment, am I Iger’s boss, really? It doesn’t feel like it. My index-fund-loving bannerlords at the Vanguard Group, Disney’s largest investor, apparently told little pieces of my retirement to go march in support of Iger and to crush Nelson Peltz’s activist uprising. I guess I hope Vanguard chose well. And I guess I hope Bob does a good job with all the power he’s consolidated as Disney’s constitutional monarch. I have no idea! I just need passive income when I’m too old to work anymore!
Iger’s latest triumph at the company he retired from as CEO for the first time in 2020 reminded me of the skeptical piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times about the Iger Restoration in November 2022:
One of the basic economic arguments for why CEO pay needs to be monarchically high is that the talent pool for would-be saviors is a millimeter deep. After all, on paper anyway, the only people qualified to run a world-spanning entertainment company are the ones who have already done it. This is the part of the American corporate feedback loop where meritocracy begets dynasty, in which Iger begets Iger.
…Iger had built Disney into a behemoth during his reign, gobbling up Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm and 21st Century Fox to add to the company’s treasure pile of ESPN, ABC and its theme park business. Disney watchers had marveled at many of these deals. Yet Iger’s biggest responsibility as a leader was to find a successor who could master the world he created, and he failed. Thus it is written that the great builder Iger created even the sorry conditions requiring his return.
I hadn’t really been thinking about my own (detached, mediated, passive and utterly inconsequential) existence as a Disney microshareholder when I noted some of the “18th Brumaire” qualities of Iger’s somewhat farcical and Napoleonic return. Once the enterprise gets big and complicated enough, politics in the imperial court gets harder to master for whoever doesn’t already have the job. Even if you’ve got voting rights, seems more likely than not you’ll just be looking at the same faces you’ve already got.
But what are you supposed to do with that kind of observation as a voter, either as shareholder or citizen? In national politics, Donald Trump, 77, and Joe Biden, 81, both having already been president, are both set to be their respective parties’ standard-bearers despite being far more disliked than they are liked. More through action than in words, Republican and Democratic party activists — the Vanguard and BlackRock management teams of American electoral politics — have decided this is the best they can do.
Having reported on the pretty sectarian 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries and more recently watching U.S. House Republicans repeatedly threaten to drown their new Speakers in a dunk tank makes me wonder if the party managers’ electoral calculus is more correct than not. Once the Igers of the world already know how things work, events start conspiring against their departure, even if nobody seems all that happy. And nobody is all that happy.