In this week’s Shareholder Primacy podcast (here at Apple, here at Spotify, here at YouTube), Mike Levin and I talk about the all-of-government war on proxy advisors.

Which was timely, because – as we didn’t know when we recorded – ISS just created a new website, www.protectshareholders.com, apparently aimed at making the case for proxy advisors and fighting back against all of the political attacks.

My initial social media reaction was, “OMG,” which apparently was inscrutable to many, so I’ll elaborate here.

To me, ISS’s website does not appear to be a targeted lobbying approach aimed at asset managers or politicians; it appears to be directed at largely a general audience, like public-facing PR. Certainly not geared toward low-information voters, but maybe toward reporters who will communicate to a general audience, or other general audiences who may have sway with politicians. And it is surprising – shocking – to me when a technical matter of corporate governance reaches that level of political salience. Which happened, for example, in the context of SB 21, when I posted that this kind of controversy was unequivocally bad for Delaware.

Now, back in the day – the “day” meaning late 1800s, early 1900s – corporate law was very much a matter of general political concern, and that’s largely because corporate law was the only mechanism to regulate corporate behavior. Beginning in, oh, the 1920s or so, states began to hive out substantive corporate regulation from corporate law – leading to the illusion (and I do mean illusion) that corporate law was something not regulatory, and therefore removed from ordinary political considerations.

So in some ways, the move back almost feels like the natural order; but it also represents a deep lack of faith in the efficacy of the regulatory state, which is why the turn to corporate governance as a substitute.

That said, my suspicion is that this particular effort by ISS is misguided, because – if they’re targeting something like a general audience – most normal people are unlikely to be persuaded by a message that protecting institutional shareholders is a moral imperative. The structural role that ISS plays is by organizing a force that has the heft to push back against oligarchic control of America’s economic resources. That is a message that the public can understand and, I think, support, but it’s not a message that ISS, as a representative of institutions with fiduciary obligations to maximize equity value, can deliver.

Or maybe that’s just a me thing.