$—The Democrats Most Powerful Weapon

Retail giant Target, which operates nearly 2,000 stores and 60 supply chain facilities across the United States, employing more than 400,000 people, drastically cut its fiscal year sales forecast from a one-percent gain to a “low single digit loss.” The company’s first quarter net sales had already declined 2.8 percent (to a still hefty $23.8 billion), prompted by a sharp decline in foot traffic in many of its stores.

Target gave two reasons for its eroding prospects. The first is not surprising. Consumers are already cutting back, fearing that tariff-induced higher prices will leave them short of funds for basics, this coupled with DOGE-prompted cuts in government services that will force Target’s consumer base to pay more for expenses, such as school lunches and health care. To further diminish the outlook, unlike Home Depot, which promised to hold prices steady, albeit while offering a more limited selection of merchandise, Target has not ruled out raising prices in what Chief Operating Officer Michael Fiddelke generously described as an “ever-changing tariff landscape.”

While these effects should to some degree be felt across the retail landscape in the coming months, the second reason for Target’s woes is far more interesting. Although the company did not totally cave on tariffs, it did on DEI. When it eliminated the program, Black leaders called for a boycott, an “economic blackout.” As a result, Target reported that comparable store sales declined 5.7 percent year-over-year in the first quarter.

According to Americus Reed, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, Target has become the “poster child” for consumer blowback on the war against DEI and, “though many companies have pulled away from the sweeping social justice commitments made years ago, few had aligned their brands as much with these efforts as Target.”

Democrats spend a lot of money in this country. In the same way as businesses run by evangelical Christians, such as Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby, drew like-minded customers while willfully discriminating against gay Americans and women seeking abortions or even contraception, those on the left, as well as fair-minded members of the center or right, can be more selective about where they spend those dollars—and where they do not.

Boycotts, if conducted by committed people willing to make sacrifices and undergo hardship to right injustice, have had notable success in the United States, none more so than that which took place in Birmingham, Alabama in 1956.

While most schoolchildren are aware that Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a Birmingham bus—although who knows how long teaching that incident will continue—far fewer Americans realize what began four days afterward.

On December 5, 1955, using an earlier successful boycott of service stations in Mississippi as a model, Black leaders initiated a similar offensive against bus lines in Birmingham. While the effort was almost totally successful in denying the buses its substantial Black ridership, it left Black workers desperate to find an alternate means to get to work, usually for low-paying jobs that they relied on to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. The risks to ordinary Black Alabamans for adhering to the boycott were enormous, so some means to bypass public transportation had to be found.

Resourcefulness won out. An organized system of carpools was created so that Black workers could get to their jobs, driven either by the car’s owner or someone who the owner designated. Black taxi drivers lowered their rates for those needing to get to work. Some white housewives picked up their employees and drove them back and forth. Many simply walked long distances, awakening very early and getting to bed very late. For them, shoes were donated to replace ones that wore out.

The boycott began to pinch. Bus revenues plummeted and the leader of the boycott, a twenty-six-year-old churchman named Martin Luther King, Jr, was arrested. Legal challenges were initiated on both sides. In June 1956, a federal district court ruled that racial segregation of buses in Alabama was unconstitutional. Alabama appealed and the boycott continued. In November, the Supreme Court ruled that the district court had been correct.

Still, Alabama vowed not to comply. But the financial costs were too high. On December 20, 1956, buses in Alabama were desegregated and the Black riders returned. The boycotters had won, and their victory rippled throughout the nation and is generally considered one of the major spurs to the 1960s Civil Rights movement.

It is no secret that the economy will make or break Trump’s presidency. He has already sown the seeds of disaster—as I have written repeatedly—not only with his bouncing-ball tariff pronouncements, but also because of the feeling that he has no real economic policy beyond kneejerk executive orders that more often than not are rescinded. Most savvy financial analysts are expecting a serious decline somewhere down the road although there is no real consensus on how long the road may be.

Democrats are in a position to help that along.

It would not be possible, of course, to refuse to buy any products from all the companies that went along with Trump’s initiatives or who were discriminating even before he took office. Expecting Americans to forego Amazon deliveries, for example, is beyond fanciful. But, pardon the pun, Targeted boycotts can not only be effective in deterring the specific company, but also might help dissuade others who fear they could be next.

An ad hoc campaign has already begun. Sales of Teslas have dropped steeply and the Washington Post lost tens of thousands of subscribers, including this one, after Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s endorsement before the presidential election. What is needed now is for leaders on the left to pick one or two major companies, particularly those where consumers have alternatives, and urge Americans not to buy from them. Conversely, other companies, such as Costco, Levis, and Apple, which refused to abandon their DEI initiatives, should be patronized. (Not really a deprivation with Costco).

In the end, since both the presidency and Congress have been given over to a crew of cruel, heartless, self-interested hypocrites who love to trumpet their Christianity but would make Jesus cringe, and a judiciary that, although showing glimmers of resistance, cannot be relied on to deter America’s descent into anti-democracy, it falls to what conservatives love calling “we, the people,” to do the job.

We may not have the executive, the legislature, or the courts, but we do have our wallets. It is only a question of using them effectively.