Thomas Edsall: Corporations of the World, Unite!

Amazon has removed another book critical of transgender ideology. This time it’s the new book by the cofounder of Partners for Ethical Care, Maria Keffler’s Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult. https://t.co/siQAwcd0zP

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) April 14, 2021

Amazon brutalizes workers, destroys small biz, vacuums subsidies—and uses monopoly power to censor conservatives (remember Parler?).

We’re facing a private tyranny, which can be just as bad as public tyranny. And we need an anti-corporate GOP.https://t.co/TieAQg0bG1

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) April 13, 2021

I’ve got some wonderful news to report.

The Democrats are doing us a huge favor by absorbing all of the neocons like Bill Kristol, Corporate America and the True Cons voters who have cosmopolitan values and who live in the wealthy suburbs and whose politics are tax cuts and virtue signaling about racism and nativism.

Literally all the worst people who were Republicans when George W. Bush was president and John McCain ran in 2008 like the Lincoln Project are becoming Democrats now because the neoliberal establishment vote is consolidating behind Joe Biden. Joe Biden has become the first Republican who has been elected president by the Democrats. The Democrats are now the classic Republican Party which was an Eastern-based alliance of Big Business, Wall Street, upper middle class professionals, coastal elites and utopian social reformers. They are the party of the professional managerial class who watch people like John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert and actually think they are funny.

Thomas Edsall reports this morning on this mixed blessing.

New York Times:

“Woke capitalism” has been a steadily growing phenomenon over the past decade. The muscle of the movement was evident as early as 2015 in Indiana and 2016 in North Carolina, when corporate opposition forced Republicans to back off anti-gay and anti-transgender legislation.

Much to the dismay of the right — a recent Fox News headline read “Corporations fear woke left minority more than silent majority” — the movement has been gaining momentum, obscuring classic partisan allegiances in corporate America.

This drive has a fast-growing list of backers from the ranks of the Fortune 500, prepared to challenge Republican legislators across the nation.

Right now, the focus of chief executives who are attempting to burnish their progressive credentials is on blocking legislation in 24 states that curtails access to the ballot box for racial and ethnic minorities — legislation that, among other things, reduces the number of days for advance voting, that requires photo ID to accompany absentee ballots and that limits or eliminates ballot drop boxes.

Perhaps most threatening to Republicans, key corporate strategists attempting to woo liberal consumers have come to believe that their support for progressive initiatives will generate sufficient revenue to counter retaliation by hostile white voters and the Republican politicians who represent them. …”

Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the founder of the “Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism” who owns The Economist, was the hostess of that big meeting of CEOs that happened over the weekend.

Politico:

“Inside the White House, they are warming to corporate America, too. Biden and his team believe that while the two sides may be at loggerheads over tax rates, they can use business leaders to help move other policy priorities. They talk regularly with corporate America and the White House is considering forming an advisory group of business leaders in much the same way as other recent presidents, including Trump and Barack Obama. …

The cautious courtship between corporate America and the Biden White House could play a critical role in the president’s agenda, as he advances an infrastructure bill through Congress and pushes politically-fraught policies, including on immigration, racial justice and gun violence, without lawmakers. It also reflects a seismic shift in the political landscape, where, not too long ago, Democrats found themselves trying to tamp down opposition from business leaders rather than work with them, and generally business-friendly Republicans were aligning with corporate America rather than periodically bashing it. …

Evidence of that involvement has grown in recent years. PayPal canceled plans to open a global operations center in Charlotte after North Carolina passed a law restricting transgender rights in 2016. Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods raised the age of gun sales after the mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla. school in 2018. But it’s become even more pronounced recently, when Delta and Coca-Cola denounced a contentious Georgia law that places new requirements on voting.

Last weekend, more than 100 business leaders held a rare online meeting to discuss what action they should take in the wake of similar voting bills being considered in states across the country. Lynn Forester de Rothschild, founder of the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism and one of the three people who helped coordinate the meeting, urged Biden to be more vocal about his desire to work with business leaders. …”

I’m a populist.

I’m not a conservative.

Big Business and Wall Street have always been our enemies!

Woke Capital is great for us because their actions on countless social issues whether it is election integrity laws or “trans” laws or religious liberty laws or Southern heritage preservation laws are proof of what we have been saying for literally decades now which is that we shouldn’t be selling out to and coddling these corporations. This is exactly why we need a populist economic agenda. We need to be pro-labor, not pro-capital. We need to be pro-working class, not pro-professional managerial class. Those people have all become Democrats now. The Republicans should dump their unpopular economic agenda and cater to the interest of their actual voters and the majority of Americans.

If the Democrats have become the old Republican Party due to the resorting of the electorate, then the Republicans can and should seek to become the old Democratic Party. The Democracy was the party of all the greats in American history from Andrew Jackson to James K. Polk through most of the people who fought for the Confederacy to William Jennings Bryan and the original Populist movement through Huey Long and the New Deal and down to George Wallace after which it was hijacked by these people. Those people are all descended from the Federalists, the Whigs and the real Republican Party.

From the time of Jefferson and Jackson who were the founders of our great American political tradition, True Democrats have always been suspicious of the monied aristocracy in these big cities and corrupt, educated professionals trying to force their views on the public and censor, trample on and lord it over the common man. The original idea of the Democratic Party which is foundational to republicanism is that the ordinary citizen could be trusted to advance his interest more than any class of privileged elites.

Just look at what Hillary Clinton said this morning who is a museum quality specimen of the self-righteous, ruthless, self-aggrandizing Yankee mentality. You will notice the old cultural themes of elitism, entitlement, humorlessness, moralizing and an uptight yearning to control, micromanage and impose conformity on her fellow citizens. The apple doesn’t fall far from the Republican tree!

Note: Hillary would probably respond by scolding us as “racists.” I suppose there is some truth to the charge. We’ve always been on the side of ordinary White people from the very beginning.