Stephen Daisley
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On the corporate world’s response to current racial unrest, Professor Brayden King, chair in management at Northwestern University, puts it best: ‘There are a lot of corporate leaders who are genuinely sympathetic. There’s also a wariness of being on the wrong side of the issue and having their reputation damaged. At this point there’s more risk in not speaking out than in speaking out.’
That calculus of risk should serve as a warning to radicals. Their ideas might be in favour for now, but a capricious capitalist class that maintains ‘a workplace environment in which decency, respect and dignity [are] absent’, while reworking Ta-Nehisi Coates into corporate talking points, is hardly a reliable guardian of progress.
The left have an in-built suspicion of corporations, but the right lacks a similar defence mechanism. Right-wingers have come to reflexively defend corporations in the erroneous belief that they are on the same side (and, more importantly, because the left is forever railing against them). This is a fallacy based on an oversimplification rooted in a myth. Corporations are not your friend; they do not share your values; they do not especially like you. If they could choose their customers, they would not choose you.
Conservatives need to unlearn their affinity for big capitalism, not least if they object to corporations talking sides in the culture wars. If big business is waging war on conservative instincts and traditions, why are conservatives expending so much political capital maintaining favourable corporate tax and regulatory regimes? What is the point of right-wingers boycotting this company, or that, if right-wing policies are still geared to boosting their bottom lines? This needn’t involve adopting stances antithetical to economic growth or free enterprise, but it can mean reorienting the culture war onto the democratic battlefield. There are pleasures to be derived from victimhood and conservatives may wish to luxuriate in them, but while the right feels culturally embattled it enjoys unrivalled political power. Why not use it?
Because you read about conservative
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