By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, June 02, 2019
‘Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in
the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the
domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something
closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political
mandates.
Corporatism is a concept closely associated with the
fascist government of Benito Mussolini. The word “fascism” surely has earned
the stink attached to it, but it, too, is widely misunderstood as a body of
policies. As George Orwell wrote back when fascism was still something of a going
concern, the word “fascist” is used as very little more than a term of
denigration.
But the corporazioni
of the Italian fascist model were not the profit-oriented private concerns we
now call “corporations.” They were something closer to consultative associations,
in which the interests of business owners, workers and workers’ organizations,
and the Italian state were, in theory, all represented. The concept, which is a
variation on socialist central planning, was that privately owned businesses
were entitled to a profit, but not too much profit; that the workers were
entitled to as much compensation and to such working conditions as were
consistent with the overall health of the Italian economy and state; and that
the state was entitled to coordinate these calculations and negotiate the
related interests, and also entitled to have its interests trump those of
either the business owners or the workers.
Fascism more or less disappeared as a brand name after
that unpleasantness toward the end of the first half of the last century, but
corporatism never really went away. The German workers’ councils that are much
admired by many American progressives are corporatist undertakings; Senator
Warren’s agenda is fundamentally corporatist. It would impose federal charters
on businesses with more than $1 billion in revenue and empower the federal
government to dictate to those firms the composition of their boards of
directors, their compensation practices, the details of their internal
corporate governance, their personnel policies, the scope and content of their
political speech, and much more. She calls the legislation she is proposing the
“Accountable Capitalism Act.”
Accountable to whom?
There you have it.
Using corporations as instruments of politics is
attractive to politicians for many reasons, cowardice prominent among them. If
Senator Warren wants to increase the purchasing power of low-income workers by
$1 trillion, she could propose legislation that would entail the appropriation
of money for this purpose and distribute that $1 trillion to the workers in
question on any terms she saw fit. But that would bring with it difficulties:
That $1 trillion appropriation would show up on the budget, which would mean an
uncomfortable discussion about raising taxes to pay for it (Senator Warren has
fanciful views about taxation, the progressive version of “voodoo economics”)
or its contribution to the deficit (which is why the Obama administration
leaned on the CBO to endorse, jaw clenched, its ludicrous claims about the
debt-reducing features of the Affordable Care Act) and more. The politically
expedient alternative to that is to impose a mandate on businesses to pay those
workers an additional $1 trillion in wages or benefits, which shows up on the
books as a regulation rather than as
an expenditure. When government
proposes to spend money, somebody — Senator Paul, Representative Amash — can be
counted on to ask, “How do we pay for this?” The corporatist model says to
businesses: “You can figure out how to pay for this.”
Subordinating business interests to political mandates in
the matter of economic policy is old hat. But politics is more than a question
of taxing and spending, and American progressives are now pushing corporatism
to purely ideological ends, for instance by deputizing Facebook, Twitter,
Google, and other tech companies to act as proxy censors to suppress political
speech that progressives do not wish to be spoken, and using employers ranging
from Silicon Valley giants to Starbucks and fast-food restaurants as enforcers
of political discipline, dismissing senior executives and obscure food-service
workers alike for their private political views and speech. The business
corporation has become the disciplinary corporation, an instrument of direct
social domination put to explicitly political and ideological ends.
Sometimes the state takes the lead in this, as in New
York Democrats’ authoritarian efforts to ruin the NRA financially by using New
York’s regulatory whip hand over financial institutions to deny the advocacy
group ordinary financial services. (Marijuana-based businesses face similar
pressure, even when they operate in states where their business is legal.)
Sometimes, progressive business owners take the lead, as in the case of
Salesforce, which has announced that it will forbid certain companies that deal
in firearms to use its software. As a purely libertarian question, Salesforce has
every right to exclude businesses based on its own moral sense. (Set aside, for
the moment, that progressives would deny the same license to firms such as
Hobby Lobby, and even to explicitly religious organizations such as the Little
Sisters of the Poor.) The convulsions of Facebook, which operates
simultaneously under scores of local legal regimes and the pathologically
homogeneous and homogeneously pathological political monoculture of seven very
expensive ZIP codes in California, should alert us to the practical limitations
of such a model.
But there are larger concerns. To what extent do we want
private corporations to function as the effective censors of political speech?
At the moment, progressives are very comfortable with that, mostly because they
believe, with some reason, that they can dominate those corporations and bully
them into submission. To what extent do we want the welfare state offloaded to
the corporate payroll and benefits departments rather than treated as a
straightforward transfer? The fact that millions of Americans have been
effectively held hostage by employer-based health-insurance plans shows one
obvious downside to this model.
The perverse aspect of the contemporary progressives’
remix of classic corporatism is that the very people who believe themselves to
be the main check on corporate power are working to aggrandize corporate power
in ways that are without close precedent, their nearest analogue being the old
“company town” model of corporate paternalism, which is not universally admired
by the American Left. The danger is that the ability and inclination to satisfy
the cultural, political, and social sensibilities of the Fortune 500 will
become in practice a condition of full citizenship.
That may not be exactly what Senator Warren wants. But it
is not exactly not what she wants, either.
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