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Freedom of disassociation?

The party of business and culture wars is not feeling the love

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 most famously helped break up Standard Oil in 1911. Appetite in Washington, D.C. for protecting economic competition from monoplies has waxed and waned since then. Industry consolidation in recent decades has shrunk players in various sectors with little purist pushback about competition so long as the kickbacks from megadonors grease the palms of the right people. Especially the Right’s people.

“Republicans and their longtime corporate allies are going through a messy breakup as companies’ equality and climate goals run headlong into a G.O.P. movement exploiting social and cultural issues to fire up conservatives,” Bloomberg reports. Republicans now treat businesses catering to public demand and longterm corporate interest as “woke capitalism.”

Jamelle Bouie has noticed it too. “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” Maybe second. Republicans’ first principle is maintaining power (New York Times):

I wrote last year about this notion of “woke capitalism” and the degree to which I think this “conflict” is little more than a performance meant to sell an illusion of serious disagreement between owners of capital and the Republican Party. As I wrote then, “the entire Republican Party is united in support of an anti-labor politics that puts ordinary workers at the mercy of capital.” Republicans don’t have a problem with corporate speech or corporate prerogatives as a matter of principle; they have a problem with them as a matter of narrow partisan politics.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has a running feud with companies he sees as catering more to corporate self-interest than Republicans’ political ones. He’s attacked Disney. Now that Elon Musk as turned Twitter into a magnet for MAGA racists and antisemites, advertising on Twitter is a bad look. Companies like Apple that hope to sell products to more than that niche audience of bigots have begun pulling advertising. DeSantis decries Apple’s freedom of dissassociation a “raw exercise of monopolistic power.” Have conservatives suddenly become born-again anti-monopolists?

Bouie finds:

Nonetheless, there is something of substance behind this facade of conflict. It is true that the largest players in the corporate world, compelled to seek profit by the competitive pressures of the market, have mostly ceased catering to the particular tastes and preferences of the more conservative and reactionary parts of the American public. To borrow from and paraphrase the basketball legend Michael Jordan: Queer families buy shoes, too.

The Market doesn’t care about the GOP’s culture-war hysterics. Or about Republicans when forced to choose between them and profits.

Sociologist Melinda Cooper writing in Dissent believes the conflict reveals a tension between “private, unincorporated, and family-based” capitalism (of the Trump variety) and “the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned” kind. The former includes more right-wing ideologue billionaires of the sort who buy more influence with Republicans in Washington than with Democrats. The latter capitalists’ interests are more cosmopolitan.

Republicans toss around freedom like Mardi Gras necklaces. But freedom of association? Not so much.

The GOP should take a lesson from Karl Marx, Bouie suggests:

Throughout his work, Marx emphasized the revolutionary character of capitalism in its relation to existing social arrangements. It annihilates the “old social organization” that fetters and keeps down “the new forces and new passions” that spring up in the “bosom of society.” It decomposes the old society from “top to bottom.” It “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices” as well as “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproduction of old ways of life.”

Or, as Marx observed in one of his most famous passages, the “bourgeois epoch” is distinguished by the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Under capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

In context, Marx is writing about precapitalist social and economic arrangements, like feudalism. But I think you can understand this dynamic as a general tendency under capitalism as well. The interests and demands of capital are sometimes in sync with traditional hierarchies. There are even two competing impulses within the larger system: a drive to dissolve and erode the barriers between wage earners until they form a single, undifferentiated mass and a drive to preserve and reinforce those same barriers to divide workers and stymie the development of class consciousness on their part.

With capitalism, the devil is in the details. The only real hierarchy capital cares about is its own. The monster Republicans thought they controlled is out of theirs. “It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear.

I’ve written before that modern corporate capitalism is like the clever inventions at the heart of both the many science fiction films of the 1950s and Mary Shelley’s older classic. Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) summarized their common plots in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

Dr. Ian Malcolm Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and um, screaming.

Some of us took the lesson to heart. Conservatives in relentless pursuit of private and personal gain are the ones now doing the screaming. From Galaxy Quest (1999):

Guy Fleegman Did you guys ever WATCH the show?

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