Or look at Tesla and X, both of which suffered major commercial damage — from falling sales and advertiser boycotts to declining brand trust — after Elon Musk’s open attacks on American democracy.

The US is not a democracy in the first place.

Both recent and historical examples already show that boycotts can have an overwhelming impact — and have helped achieve some of the most important social and political advances.

All of the examples listed so far are minor things, not anywhere near “the most important social and political advances.” Slavery was not ended in the US through boycott. China, the USSR, the DPRK, Vietnam, Cuba, and so on did not form AES states out of boycott. Iran has not repelled attack via boycott. The USSR did not defeat Nazi Germany through boycott.

Boycotts have led to the end of state-sanctioned systems of discrimination and segregation. The boycott of slave-produced products contributed to the abolition of slavery. Strategic boycotts of South African products helped end apartheit in South Africa.

This is just lying in a way that promotes bootstraps individualism, tbh. “Contributed to” is not the same as “achieved.”

It is entirely conceivable that some of these systems would still exist today without private individuals standing up for what they believed in and channeling that conviction into determined boycotts.

It’s really not. Political power derives from the barrel of a gun, not “voting with your wallet.”

Let’s look at the examples of impact mentioned to be more specific:

The supermarket chain Target saw billions wiped off its valuation during boycott campaigns following its rollback of DEI initiatives.

And yet it’s still standing and is still a major supermarket chain.

Or look at Tesla and X, both of which suffered major commercial damage — from falling sales and advertiser boycotts to declining brand trust

Also still standing.

When Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off air under political pressure, the backlash was immediate. People canceled subscriptions, advertisers panicked, and suddenly — miraculously — the show was back. Late-night hosts openly credited the people who boycotted Disney with forcing that reversal.

And yet if the advertisers had calculated that the mechanisms of power would benefit more from him staying off the air, they would have done that.

Individualist boycotts as a tactic confuse the difference between money and power. Let me expand on that. These trivial examples you name, of people “voting with their wallet” and it having a monetary impact on a single corporation, did not change the underlying power dynamics of the entity itself. What it impacted, if anything at all, was surface level behaviors.

There is an inherent impotence in these kind of boycotts that is intended to be there. The capitalists are not bothered if some people make different purchasing decisions now and then. What they are bothered by is when the working class as a collective wants the power that the capitalists have. What they are bothered by is when a people who are the target of imperialism repel invasion and occupation with indigenous power of their own.

Those who have the power set the initiatives. If an anti-racist and anti-patriarchal organization was in charge of the region that US occupies, an initiative like DEI would be a legal obligation with punishment and follow-through if ignored. But more than punishment alone, society could be reorganized around combating racism and sexism on a system-wide level. For a comparison to veganism, if the same kind of organization (one in charge of the same region in question) was against factory farming, the same kind of moves could be made: system-wide rearrangement of food production, punishment for companies doing mass abuse of animals. There would be no need to “trust the forces of the market to respond to demand” (as a libertarian might say) because we, the collective, would be defining how the market gets arranged in the first place. Whether fully planned or not, there would be fundamental designs that the people could decide on.

The capitalist markets cannot be trusted and cannot be regulated by purchasing habits. Slavery in the US was ended, in no small part as a result of a civil war, but the power was still largely in the hands of racist settlers, so slavery transformed into segregation and segregation transformed into mass incarceration, which is where it’s at today (and even then, there was more bloodshed along the way - so much murder of black people, the Black Panther Party and the attacks on it, the assassination of MLK, Fred Hampton, and so on).

The lane I pick is that boycotts are at best supplementary to a militant movement and since veganism doesn’t have one setting the ideological line, it resorts to distortions like this article, which promotes liberalism rather than a grounded view of history and present. So, go vegan if you want to. Encourage others to if you want to. But let’s not delude ourselves that boycotts are more than what they are.

But knowing that revolution may be a long way off, I’d even say “getting out the vote” in somewhere as fucked as the US and pressuring legislators on factory farming would be more effective than boycotting. Look at what the anti-abortion people did, electing people who would whittle away at abortion laws over time in state by state. Even though I don’t like that they did it, it was to some extent effective. That’s at least taking power seriously to a degree. “Voting with your wallet” as a strategy for change is more like saying, “I’m going to disengage from the power struggle itself and hope that the absence of my presence is enough of a loss for those making the decisions to force their hand.”

One of the reasons this so often fails is for the same reason companies will spend more money on union-busting than they will doing a minor increase in pay. It’s about power. Profit is actually a secondary abstraction, not the root of it. Taking a loss for a couple quarters can be fixed, especially when companies can offload losses onto mass layoffs and face zero consequences. Losing power cannot be so easily fixed.

To be honest boycotts don’t have much political power at all, especially not the impromptu disorganized kind. Can’t just expect the invisible hand of the market to magically turn your faint signals into action

There’s a reason why BDS isn’t just B. Boycotting has many limitations.

Might be cowardice, but in my 58 years of an animal free diet, I’ve never been a vocal advocate for others to do the same. I always viewed it as a personal choice. My wife and kids are carnivores, while I quietly did my thing. However, I’ve always been surprised at how threatened carnivores are if the subject comes up. “Are you sure you don’t want a steak” or waving a hunk of animal flesh in my face. Would they do the same to a Hindu, a Muslim, or an Adventist? Is religious abstinence somehow more moral? I rarely go out to restaurants with other people, or even my family, because I don’t want to A) sit there and not eat anything, making everyone uncomfortable or B) watch them struggle and limit their choice of venue trying to please my dietary restrictions.