By Jerry Bowyer
Monday, April
19, 2021
Senator Marco Rubio is sending a
warning to Amazon, and the company would be foolish to ignore it. In the pages
of USA Today, Senator
Rubio sided with Amazon workers attempting to unionize in Bessemer, Ala. “When
the conflict is between working Americans,” wrote the senator from Florida,
“and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against
working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers.” It may seem
a small thing for a single senator to take a moral stand (that makes no
promises of action) concerning a relatively minor dispute, but Rubio’s op-ed is
deceptively revealing. It is just the latest example of a fundamental shift in
the Republican Party’s attitude toward “big business,” away from the
laissez-faire attitude conservatives have usually held and toward open
hostility for woke capital’s most notorious propagators. And Big Tech
businesses, Amazon being one of the worst offenders as of late, have no one to
blame but themselves.
While the GOP increasingly flirts with
anti-corporatism, the executives at Amazon do not seem terribly disturbed.
Their focus remains pandering to their natural enemies, even as they alienate
their natural allies. Amazon’s repeated public prostrations to the Left have
been less than effective at reducing political pressure on the company. March
25 saw Democrats and
Republicans in the House interrogating the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet. Along with
other Big Tech stocks,
Amazon underperformed
the market broadly on the day of the hearing.
While neither current Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos nor incoming CEO Andy Jassy were
present at the hearing, they should still be worried: Despite all the left-wing
pandering and censorship peddled by Big Tech, they have found no friends in the
Democratic Party. Many of the Democrats participating in the interrogation
evinced a belief that Big Tech is still, despite the last four years,
insufficiently censorious. Each new demonstration of loyalty to the Left by
Amazon is met with fury by conservatives, but no equivalent jubilation on the
other side. Has there been an outcry of thanks from progressives for their
public service in banning “transphobic” books?
Not in the least. Instead, Amazon’s
accommodations have been rewarded with a growing bipartisan abhorrence for
mega-cap tech companies. The Left opposes Amazon because it is a hugely
successful multinational corporation led by a fantastically wealthy man, and
they will continue to do so as long as they oppose corporate power and the rich
— in other words, as long as the Left is the Left. But now the Right is growing
to oppose Amazon because it is openly hostile to the cultural values held by
everyone not on the left.
When Amazon removed Ryan T.
Anderson’s book “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender
Movement” from its catalogue, it alienated
conservatives. When it removed a documentary
about Clarence Thomas from its catalogue, it alienated conservatives. When it removed the Alliance Defending
Freedom and the Family Research Council from its
“Smile” charity program, it
alienated conservatives. And yet the Democratic Party has not softened its
rhetoric in the least. One need only look at Thursday’s congressional hearing
for proof.
Have we made the point, Bezos and Jassy?
They will never accept you. The mob cannot be bought off. In the eyes of the
radicals, no number of banned books or censored conservatives will atone Amazon
of its original sin: being a corporation. The Left is no more fond of Amazon
than it was when Ryan Anderson could still sell books on the platform. But all
these tech giants have, or had, a natural defender in conservatism, a movement
that has historically been oriented toward defending businesses (even the
mega-caps) from the interventions of the state. Now they are losing their
support, and there is little reason to believe that the next Republican
president or Republican-controlled Congress will respond to years of censorship
by doubling down on free markets. From Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley to
President Trump to Tucker Carlson, conservatives are increasingly showing an
enthusiasm, if mostly in rhetoric, to forgo their party’s historical
inclinations and use the whips and reins of government to curtail the Left’s
intrusion into the boardroom.
While GOP messaging is shifting
dramatically on the question of big business, Republicans in national politics
will be close to powerless for around four years at a minimum when it comes to
corporate policy. Until there is a Republican president and Republican
Congress, the internal debates concerning what exactly should be done about
woke capital are largely theoretical, and a political solution to the problem
will be impossible. But Amazon’s shareholders do not have to wait for a
national election to act, nor do the shareholders of any other company.
The left-wing pandering of corporate
America has incensed the Republican Party to the point that many of its most
prominent members are advocating retribution against corporations explicitly
for their political activism. That is a threat, largely self-imposed, to
Amazon’s bottom line, which means it is a threat to shareholders, a threat
which shareholders would be foolish to ignore. A natural point investors should
focus on is attempts to promote viewpoint diversity, such as the shareholder
resolution proposed by the National Center for Public Policy Research and subsequently shot down by Amazon’s Board. Insisting on a
broader range of political and social ideologies at the company could make a
genuine difference in the way Amazon operates.
The conservative conflict with Amazon is
not, or should not be, just another partisan squabble — it is a fundamental
question about the role of tech giants. Are they tools for activists, utilized
from time to time to make sure nobody can read books skeptical of administering
hormone blockers to children? Or are they publicly traded companies, like any
other, responsible first and foremost to their investors? Nobody is trying to
make Amazon a “conservative corporation,” we would just prefer if the stewards
of investor capital did not needlessly antagonize customers, investors, and
potential regulators. That is not politicization of the boardroom — it is the
exact opposite.
Ultimately, if Big Tech does not want to
be fighting a war on two fronts, they need to stop the censorship. They need to
promote ideological diversity at their companies. When conservative
shareholders make requests, they should not be thoughtlessly dismissed. It
might upset the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department, and surely some
employees will complain on Slack channels, but that is better than the
alternative: the consistent, careless alienation of the half of the country
that would normally be on their side.
This is not going away by itself. For
better or worse, there is a major shift under way in how Republicans think
about the tech companies that hold their values in contempt. In addition to the
prominent examples mentioned earlier, Florida governor Ron DeSantis (an early
lead for the 2024 Republican nomination, according to
prediction market PredictIt)
introduced legislation in February that would impose fines
on tech companies that deplatform candidates for public office. Amazon and other Big Tech companies are appeasing their perennial
enemies, the Left, but getting nothing in return except Republican threats.
This situation is untenable. So long as
Amazon behaves like a progressive nonprofit, it will be at best be held in
serious suspicion by many Republicans. There is no reason to expect that to go
away — unless Amazon stops antagonizing those who are traditionally insistent
on letting businesses operate free of government intervention. Maybe the
populist shift within the conservative movement will convince Big Tech to tone
down the wokeness. Maybe someone at Amazon will realize that the Left is not
the only threat, and that a massive company that seems to lack any conservative
perspectives makes for an excellent punching bag for the new GOP. Or maybe the
executives won’t listen to reason, but then at least we get to say, “I told you
so.”
It is possible that the executives at
Amazon and elsewhere are simply activists, promoting woke ideology out of
genuine conviction. It is also possible that they are simply assessing risk, operating
under the assumption that the Democrats are a greater threat to their
independence and success than the Republicans. The former is a problem because
that is not why corporations exist, and the latter is a problem because it has
unambiguously failed. Whichever explanation is true does not particularly
matter. The result is the same. Senator Rubio stated it outright in his op-ed:
“The days of conservatives being taken for granted by the business community
are over.”
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