In 2011, when Elizabeth Warren was preparing to run for a seat in the US Senate, she gave a long speech in which she presented the arguments against a certain kind of idealized Ayn Randian vision of the heroic lone capitalist.
In a video that went viral, he said: “There is no one in this country who has become rich all by himself. Did you build a factory? You did it very well. But let me be clear: you transported your goods to market by highways that the rest of us paid for. You hired workers. that the rest of us paid to educate. It was kept safe thanks to police forces and firefighters paid for by the rest of us”.
She praised her hypothetical wealthy businessman: “See, you built a factory and it turned into a fantastic thing, or a great idea, thank God.” But she argued that entrepreneurs owe the system something in return — something that, in her view, meant a higher tax rate.
This argument was later echoed by Barack Obama in his fateful line “you didn’t build this” – which, mind you, Warren didn’t originally say – which in turn gave way to “you built this!” as a major theme of Mitt Romney’s ill-fated pro-entrepreneurship presidential candidacy.
In the Romney-Obama discussion, the line separating the two parties seemed consistent, already well known: you looked to Democrats for versions of Warren’s argument that no successful business is built without some kind of state support, and you looked to Republicans to find a more heroic vision, based on the individualistic vision of corporate America’s success.
Nothing has been quite as consistent since then. The Republican Party in the Trump era continued to be largely pro-business, but its base and speech became more working-class and populist, while many of Romney’s Republicans joined the Democratic coalition.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party remains, by and large, the party of higher regulation and taxation, but much of corporate America has culturally swung into the liberal camp. This process was well under way a decade ago, but it has been accelerated by the anti-Trump backlash, the more left-wing engagements of big business’ younger customers, and especially their younger employees, and the relative ease with which language the radical tone of identity politics can be assimilated to corporate management techniques.
Thus, the current GOP is most clearly the party of local capitalism — of small business, family businesses, what leftists like to call “heritage capitalism”—while the party’s relationship to corporate America is increasingly complex.
A good part of the republican elite wants to continue doing business with big companies, as before. But the party base sees corporate institutions — especially those in Silicon Valley, but also reaching out to more traditional capitalist forces — as cultural enemies, endowed with too much consolidated power and too interested in lobbying, censoring and advertising against views. and socially conservative public policies.
This tension on the right has produced little policy innovation — a sudden right-wing interest in breaking monopolies, a few vaguely pro-trade incursions — and a lot of inconsistency. But last week we saw two more punctual conservative responses to the question: what does the right do when big business turns against conservatism?
One answer is Elon Musk’s solution: you wait until a libertarian billionaire (or maybe, really, a billionaire with the political views of a ten-year-old liberal – but hey, conservatives have more to accept what’s theirs). offered) buy one of the companies whose mix of influence and censorship you fear.
You’re rooting for him to bypass the company’s mostly progressive professionals and change the moderation rules to make them more favorable to right-wing content, or at least not as likely to censor uncomfortable reports about, say, his son. of a Democratic presidential candidate.
And you take the arguments that progressives were making just yesterday about social media moderation policies – if you don’t like it, go build your own social media, you losers! – and hurl them right back in their face.
What Elon Musk himself might actually want to do with Twitter is a subject for another column. Suffice it to say that he would have to do a lot to make his billionaire savior model a real response to the general estrangement between conservatism and big business.
And that brings us to the second answer, Ron DeSantis’ solution, expressed in the Florida governor’s recent war against Disney. You tell big companies that if they decide to become active on the liberal side of the culture wars (or are pressured internally to do so), they may find their special agreements and corporate exceptions threatened or suddenly revoked.
From one perspective, this is no more feasible than Musk’s solution, because an initiative as straightforward as DeSantis’s is quite possibly unconstitutional, an attack on corporate free speech rights. And the governor of Florida himself can expect his initiative to be overturned in court, so he can reap the political benefits of it without actually having to deal with the consequences of what, frankly, looks like a very poorly thought-out policy change.
But there is a conservative argument in favor of the principle of what DeSantis is doing: an argument that while the government has no right to harm you specifically for your political speech, what is being overturned, in Disney’s case, is favoritism. that the company has enjoyed for years in Florida, linked to its bipartisan or even non-partisan positioning.
Interestingly, this argument sounds like a rephrasing of the one made by Warren a decade ago, only now coming from the cultural right. Not with the same conclusion in terms of public policy, of course, but with a similar premise. Warren argued that no one builds a company alone. Now conservatives are embracing a variant of that argument — not to justify progressive taxation, but to suggest that if your company or institution accepts special favors from the government, the public becomes a stakeholder in its success and has the right to opt out of it. give that special treatment if you become a partisan or ideological actor.
Conservative writer Ben Domenech argued last week: “Nearly every institution the left controls and which it has used as a weapon in the culture wars has been created by all Americans and depends on special favorable treatment, even funding, from them.”
This observation applies to public entities, public schools and universities, which attract so much controversy at the moment, but it also applies to internet giants, beneficiaries of a regulatory system that largely immunized them from responsibility for their content (through the famous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). It applies to Wall Street firms bailed out in 2008. It applies to sports leagues that rely on antitrust exemptions and subsidies for their stadiums. And it applies to Disney — because, as Domenech writes, “it was only thanks to the generosity of the people” that it was able to succeed in its decades of lobbying to extend copyright protections.
This argument suggests that all of these institutions enjoy the protections against discrimination afforded by the First Amendment. But the forms of discrimination that work in their favor—that is, all their privileges, immunities, and tax breaks—are fair political targets if institutions enter the arena of culture wars.
“US economic policy is not business neutral in any pure sense, Adam Smithiano,” writes Domenech. “It’s a gigantic and complex web of special treatment given to special interests. So when elites who run these special interests launch a pharisaic moral crusade against the same American people that have benefited them with special treatment […]this insulted, abused public has every right to revoke part of its beneficence.”
I don’t know whether this argument is constitutionally compelling when applied to something that seems as crudely retaliatory as the DeSantis initiative. But it is convincing, seen from some distance.
For example, when the Trump administration passed a tax on the income that wealthy colleges and universities receive from donations, it was evidently not a disinterested move: the aim was to reduce the special treatment afforded to these institutions, precisely because in recent years they have have become increasingly radicalized against conservatism.
It was a political act, a punitive act, a version of what Domenech describes: you get tax dollars from conservatives as well as liberals, so you can’t complain when the right notices you don’t seem to hire conservative faculty and decides to take back some of those tax dollars. And while some said that intent made the measure unconstitutional, few legal figures would have taken those claims very seriously.
Likewise, if the fledgling left-right alliance against Big Tech ever leads to an actual antitrust law, that legislation will clearly be motivated by a conservative desire to punish tech giants for certain much-talked-about transgressions. It seems unlikely, however, that these motivations – mixed with others, of course – will end up becoming arguments for the courts to block, for example, a division of Facebook into parts or a repeal of Section 230.
So while the specifics of the Disney bet may not be confirmed or reproduced, the idea behind it will likely live on, shaping conservative ambitions at the state and federal levels (especially since, as we saw with the fast-food chain wars), food Chick-fil-A, liberals are willing to use the same tactics when the opportunity presents itself, although the cultural weakness of the right means there are fewer notable opportunities.)
Given the chaotic nature of conservatism today, it is more likely that these anti-corporate bets are in many cases more tactical than strategic, more often symbolic than transformative, and that they are just as often gestures made to placate the party’s skeptical base. in relation to companies, but which leave clientelistic relationships intact behind the scenes.
But it’s still a surprising development that the right, which in the past sneered at a “we built it all” line of business success, now tends to adopt its own version of this argument. And while I don’t anticipate that Warren will claim to be justified anyway, it’s proof that ideas can circulate and sometimes reappear in the last place you’d expect them to.
