Big business can no longer take the support of conservative parties for granted.
The 1990s saw a great uncoupling between left-wing parties and big labor, with President Bill Clinton embracing free trade and Wall Street and Prime Minister Tony Blair ditching Clause 4 (which committed the Labour Party to nationalization) and tea and sandwiches in Number Ten with trade union bosses. Are we now witnessing an equally momentous change on the other side of the divide: an uncoupling between conservative parties and big business?
In America, the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has dismissed the Chamber of Commerce as irrelevant—“I didn’t even know the chamber was around anymore”—while Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has criticized big business for trying to act like a “woke parallel government.” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has lamented the way that “business profits have become increasingly estranged from production and employment”; Jeff Sessions, a former senator for Alabama, has argued that the belief that business leaders “understand the economy best” and have “America’s national interest at heart” is “flawed and dangerous”; and J.D. Vance, a would-be senator for Ohio, has tweeted that the legacy of Reaganite-Thatcherite conservatism is “the rise of China, the decimation of the American family, and a lot of tax cuts for the rich.”
The rising generation of conservative intellectuals, such as Oren Cass, Sohrab Ahmari, Nate Hochman, Christopher Rufo, Ben Shapiro, Gladden Pappin and Ross Douthat, are all, to varying degrees, skeptical about business and critical of “zombie Reaganites.” The fashionable causes on the right are national greatness, Catholic social thought and post-liberalism rather than Schumpeterian creative destruction. The Adam Smith ties of the 1980s are now museum pieces along with copies of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and Friedman’s Free to Choose.
Business-skeptical conservatives are solidifying their position in the conservative establishment with a network of think tanks, magazines and training programs. The think tank American Compass, run by Oren Cass, is hammering out a post-corporate conservatism. Publications such as American Affairs and The American Conservative frequently sound as if they ought to be renamed the American Marxist or the American Spartacist. Ahmari, an Iranian-born conservative who used to work at the pro-market Wall Street Journal, has founded a new magazine, Compact, together with a fellow religious conservative and a Marxist proponent of “labor populism.” American Moment, a training institute that wants to “identify, educate, and credential” rising conservative stars, focuses on “strong families, a sovereign nation, and prosperity for all.”
Grass-roots conservatism has also taken a notably anti-corporate turn since the financial crisis and the bailout of the banks and car companies. In response to the Citizens United decision in 2010, Dale Robertson, the founder of TeaParty.org, pronounced that “corporations are not like people. Corporations exist forever, people don’t. Our founding fathers never wanted them; these behemoth organizations that never die…It puts the people at a tremendous disadvantage.” Conservatives have also taken a page out of the liberal playbook, boycotting and badmouthing corporations that they don’t like.
This new business-critical conservatism naturally starts with opposition to corporate “wokery”: Rubio is even introducing a bill into the Senate to force companies to “mind your own business” and stop indulging in woke posturing. But this new conservatism goes deeper than that—and overturns most of the tenets of the business-friendly conservatism of the 1980s. The new conservatism focuses on the producer rather than the consumer. Is it really worth getting that Amazon parcel to you within 24 hours if it means that workers have to operate like robots? It puts a premium on pro-family policies such as family leave and near-universal tax credits for children, unencumbered by work requirements, all ideas that the Republican establishment has long anathematized. American Compass goes so far as to call for enhanced collective bargaining rights for workers, lamenting the “labor movement’s slow descent into obsolescence.”
The new conservatives are fiercely hostile to globalization and immigration on the grounds that they have delivered lower incomes for workers along with the destruction of America’s common culture. They are equally hostile to the technology and media industries on the grounds that they are degrading our common culture, indeed perhaps even our common humanity, while making a decadent oligarchy obscenely rich. The central idea of the new doctrine is that the common good must be forged by active government policy rather than allowed to emerge from the play of market forces.
British conservatives have echoed many of these themes. The most interesting thinkers on the right such as Nick Timothy and David Goodhart are preoccupied with communitarian questions—how we make a home in the world—rather than with the ideal functioning of the market. “We do not believe in untrammeled free markets,” Timothy famously wrote in the 2017 Conservative manifesto. “We reject the cult of selfish individualism.” Dominic Cummings, one of the leading architects of Brexit and for a while Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, savaged British business’s leading lobbying group, the CBI, as a moribund irrelevance. In the 1980s Tory philosophy was summed up in Norman Tebbit’s phrase that the unemployed should get on their bikes to find jobs. Now the minister for levelling up, Michael Gove, says “you shouldn’t have to leave somewhere you love in order to have a truly fulfilling career.”
It is easy to dismiss all this as so much verbiage. For all his corporation-bashing during the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump ended up cutting taxes on the wealthy and lightening regulations on business, not least by starving the federal government of employees. And for all its populist rhetoric about redistributing opportunity, Britain’s Conservative Party is determined to deliver tax cuts in the run-up to the next election campaign. Rather than bashing corporate wokery with anti-business legislation, conservatives might be better off treating it as a business opportunity: The Daily Wire, which was co-founded by Ben Shapiro, plans to spend $100 million over the next three years on children’s entertainment.