The Midas Cult is Susan-Collins-level concerned
“It certainly looks like MAGA is going Marxist if not even Maoist,” write a clutch (stock? wunch?) of capitalism boosters in Fortune. Are they worried about Donald Trump’s attacks on the Constitution and the rule of law? Or over voting rights and the fate of our democratic republic? Not as much as they are the fate of free-market capitalism (blessed be its Holy Name) and Trump’s peevish attacks on domestic icons of profit. But write what you know, it’s said. Capitalism is their lane.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice at the Yale School of Management, and John Pepper, former CEO and chairman of Proctor & Gamble and The Walt Disney Company, etc., etc., are the lead authors in warning that Trump presents a clear and present danger to American business.
Rather than get straight to the point, they begin with an obligatory swipe at Democratic New York City mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, over the prospect of the Big Apple under Mamdani “going socialist.” But his proposals are small potatoes. Trump’s actions are “far more dangerous to capitalism than a city-run grocery store.”
As much as Trump has maligned China as an economic competitor, he seems in his second term to have decided that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. The Vapors in 1980 were Turning Japanese. Donald Trump, who’s been stuck there for 40 years, is turning Chinese.
“President Trump is imitating [the] Chinese Communist Party by extending political control ever deeper into the economy,” the writers caution, quoting Greg Ip’s Aug. 11 warning in The Wall Street Journal about Trump’s march toward state capitalism:
It certainly looks like MAGA is going Marxist if not even Maoist, especially across Trump’s vicious personal targeting of individual business leaders; government crackdown on business freedom of expression; weaponization of government powers; apparent extortion of businesses; and insertion of government into an unprecedented, outsized role in private sector strategic investment, capital flows and business decision-making.
The Republican Party and the MAGA mob have already abandoned democracy for a dictator. How much worse could it get?
Both Marxism and Maoism claimed to champion “ordinary people” against corrupt or exploitative elites, while both targeted intellectuals, bureaucrats, and traditionalists, and purged institutions to enforce ideological purity, especially during Stalin’s “Great Terror” and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” Both centralized leadership to the point of creating a cult of personality, demanding intense loyalty and the glorification of the sole figure who could fix the country’s problems. Both prized loyalty over expertise, sidelining critics and dissenters in favor of a tightly controlled political narrative. Sound familiar?
The essence of market capitalism is that owners—shareholders and the management they appoint share in the profits. These deals give share of profits to government in return for favors. Friedman said that federal government should never own anything—that it should not run a surplus because it would have funds to invest in the private sector. What strategic decision-making rights would the government have in such deals, then?
Speaking of ordinary people, a lot of them are pissed off enough about their lot in free-market capitalism as practiced for the last century that they elected Trump twice. Notice above who doesn’t share in the rich men’s gains.
But it’s Trump’s personal attacks on paragons of profit that most upset Team CEO. They lament Trump’s “long history of targeting individual CEOs in highly vicious, personal terms for perceived offenses.” Trump attacks his fellow billionaires just for speaking their truth, poor things.
Cracking down on the free expression of the plebs is one thing, but “cracking down on businesses for exercising their freedom” of economic expression “resembles the purges of Maoist China far more than American democratic norms.”
Akin to Mao Zedong directing business decisions as a part of his wildly disastrous Great Leap Forward central economic planning initiative, Trump has plunged the US government headfirst into an unprecedented active role in directing private business decision-making and capital flows. Last month, he ordered Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey to replace cane sugar with other sweeteners that the firm uses, despite the lack of scientific evidence supporting such a move and despite the fact that the CEO of Coca-Cola is accountable to his board and shareholders, not Donald Trump.
Taking over cities and disappearing people off the street is one thing two things, but desecrating the temples of industry and insulting its priests is high-order blasphemy. You get the idea.
Perhaps rather than act as apologists for industry titans, the writers might urge them to stop enabling Trump’s turn as emperor by not offering tribute or kowtowing as if he is one. Maybe watch more South Park.
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