The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  And align they did.

  THE CONFLUENCE OF INTERESTS

  To understand the corporate embrace of authoritarian leftism, it’s necessary to first understand a simple truth: corporations are not ideologically geared toward free markets. Some CEOs are pro-capitalism; others aren’t. But all corporations are geared toward profit seeking. That means that, historically, corporate heads have not been averse to government bailouts when convenient; they’ve been friendly toward regulatory capture, the process by which companies write the regulations that govern them; they’ve embraced a hand-in-glove relationship with government so long as that relationship pays off in terms of dollars and cents. Government, for its part, loves this sort of stuff: control is the name of the game.

  What’s more, corporations are willing to work within the confines provided by the government—in particular, in limiting their own liability. Since the 1960s, the framework of civil rights had been gradually extended and expanded to create whole new categories of legal liability for companies. The Civil Rights Act and its attendant corpus of law didn’t merely outlaw governmental discrimination—it created whole new classes of established victim groups that had the power to sue companies out of existence based on virtually no evidence of discrimination. Those companies, fearful of lawsuits and staffed increasingly by members of the New Ruling Class—people who agreed with the idea that society could be engineered in top-down fashion by a special elect—were all too happy to comply with the de rigueur opinions of the day. As Christopher Caldwell writes in The Age of Entitlement:

  Corporate leaders, advertisers, and the great majority of the press came to a pragmatic accommodation with what the law required, how it worked, and the euphemisms with which it must be honored. . . . “Chief diversity officers” and “diversity compliance officers,” working inside companies, carried out functions that resembled those of twentieth-century commissars. They would be consulted about whether a board meeting or a company picnic was sufficiently diverse.17

  Second, it’s important to note that businesses cater to their customer base—and, in particular, their most passionate customer base. This provides a catalyst for renormalization via market forces: if enough customers can form an intransigent core, dedicated to one ideology, they can direct corporate resources toward appeasing them. Studies show that as we’ve become more polarized, more and more Americans now say they want their brands to make political stands. One research group found that 70 percent of American consumers say they want to hear brands’ stands on social and political issues—this despite the fact that a bare majority of consumers say that brands only do so for marketing purposes. Some 55 percent of respondents claimed they would stop shopping with brands that didn’t mirror their political preferences; another 34 percent said they would cut their spending to such brands.18

  Such desire for politics from corporations resides almost solely with the Left. One study found that survey participants dinged a fake company, Jones Corporation, 33 percent for conservative politics, and said they were 25.9 percent less likely to buy its products, 25.3 percent more likely to buy from a competitor, and 43.9 percent less likely to want to work there. For companies perceived as liberal, no penalty accrued. As James R. Bailey and Hillary Phillips observed in Harvard Business Review, “That a company engaged in conservative or liberal political activity did not affect Republicans’ opinions of that company, but it did for Democrats . . . the 33 percent drop in opinion with Jones Corps engaged in a conservative agenda was entirely driven by participants who identified as Democrats.” In the end, consumers thought that companies being liberal was “merely normal business.” Being conservative? That was punishable activity.19

  Third, corporations seek regularity in their day-to-day operations. They seek to avoid controversy at nearly all costs—whether via legal liability, frustrated consumers, or even staffers. Concerns about troublesome staffers used to manifest in what was called “the company man”—the man in the gray flannel suit, rigid in his outlook, cookie-cutter in his type. Conservatives and liberals alike used to fret about the enforced conformity of corporate life. But corporations have now discovered the magic of quaffing from the well of wokeism: by following the diktats of political correctness in hiring, they can escape censure for the “corporate culture.” After all, they have DiversityTM—an amalgamation of various people of different races, genders, heights, ages, and hair colors . . . all of whom think precisely the same way, and who raise holy hell if anyone different is discovered among them. Corporate heads are now petrified of their own woke staffers, and cater to their every whim. Where old-style bosses used to tell quarrelsome, peacocking employees to sit down at their desks or find themselves standing on the bread lines, today’s bosses seek to comply with every woke demand, up to and including days off for mental health during politically fraught times.

  Finally, all three of the aforementioned factors—the legal structures that provide liability for violating the tenets of political correctness; a motivated and politicized customer base; and authoritarian staffers unwilling to countenance dissent—mean that the true power inside corporations doesn’t lie in their own hands at all: it lies with the media, which can manipulate all of the above. All it takes is one bad headline to destroy an entire quarter’s profit margin. Corporations of all types are held hostage to a media dedicated to the proposition that the business world is doing good only when it mirrors their priorities. It isn’t hard for a staffer to leak a lawsuit to The New York Times, which will print the allegations without a second thought; it isn’t difficult to start a boycott campaign on the back of a clip cut out of context, and propagated through the friends of Media Matters; it isn’t tough to generate governmental action against corporations perceived to violate the standards of the authoritarian Left.

  And so corporations live in fear.

  THE SECRET COWARDICE OF CORPORATE DO-GOODERISM

  That corporate fear used to manifest as unwillingness to court controversy. But as the authoritarian Left moved from “silence is required” to “silence is violence,” corporations went right along. They declared themselves subject to the authoritarian Left structure—and were consolidated by the Borg. That’s most obvious in corporate America’s willingness to engage in every leftist cause, from climate change to nationalized health care to pro-choice politics to Black Lives Matter, on demand.

  In fact, corporate leaders have determined that they will clap loudest and longest for the authoritarians, in the hopes that they will be lined up last for the guillotine. They know that capitalism is on the menu. They just hope that they’ll be able to eke out a profit as the chosen winners of the corporatist game. Centuries ago, governments used to charter companies and grant them monopolies. Today, corporations compete to be chartered by the authoritarian Left, to be allowed to do business, exempted from the usual anti-capitalism of the Left. The only condition: mirror authoritarian leftist priorities.

  Thus, in December 2020, NASDAQ, a stock exchange covering thousands of publicly traded companies, announced that it would seek to require those listed on its exchange to fulfill diversity quotas on their boards. According to the Wall Street Journal, NASDAQ told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it would “require listed companies to have at least one woman on their boards, in addition to a director who is a racial minority or one who self-identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.” Any company that did not do so would be called on the carpet by NASDAQ and made to answer for its lack of diversity or be subjected to delisting. Smaller companies would be hardest hit by the requirements, of course, but NASDAQ had no problem putting its boot on their neck. The New York Stock Exchange similarly set up an advisory council to direct “diverse” board candidates toward publicly traded companies. Goldman Sachs stated it would not help roll out initial public offerings for companies without a “diverse” board member. The civil rights movement that once sought to treat people by individual merit rather than group identity has been turne
d completely on its head—and corporations, which supposedly used to stand for the meritocracy, are pushing that moral inversion.20

  Many are doing so under the guise of so-called stakeholder capitalism. In late 2020, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, laid out his support for what he called “the Great Reset.” Schwab explained in Time that the Covid pandemic had pushed forward a key question: “Will governments, businesses and other influential stakeholders truly change their ways for the better after this, or will we go back to business as usual?” Now, this was truly an odd question. Prior to the pandemic, the world economy was in the midst of a boom time. Unemployment rates in the United States had dropped to record lows; economic growth was strong. What, then, was the impetus for corporations “changing their ways for the better”? Indeed, what did “the better” even mean?

  According to Schwab, the problem was free markets. “Free markets, trade and competition create so much wealth that in theory they could make everyone better off if there was the will to do so,” wrote Schwab. “But that is not the reality we live in today.” Free markets, he said, were “creating inequality and climate change”; international democracy “now contributes to societal discord and discontent.” Yes, the time had come to move beyond the “dogmatic beliefs” that “government should refrain from setting clear rules for the functioning of markets,” that “the market knows best.”

  Instead, Schwab recommended a “better economic system” rooted not in doing the bidding of shareholders, but in acting in the interest of “stakeholders”—acting “for the public good and the well-being of all, instead of just a few.” What would metrics of success look like? Not profitability. Oh no. The success of companies would revolve around their “gender pay gap,” the diversity of their staff, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of taxes paid. Corporations would no longer be so low-minded as to focus on producing goods and services at the best possible price for the most possible consumers. Now corporations would be in the do-gooding business.21

  This commitment to “stakeholder capitalism” versus “shareholder capitalism” has become increasingly popular in the business world. That’s because it allows business leaders to retain control over the levers of power—they’re Platonic philosopher-kings, sitting atop vast empires but acting for the benefit of the masses—without being answerable to lowly shareholders, those greedy investors who have actually put their own savings and faith into the company. Such nonsense is also pleasant to the ears of the authoritarian Left, which can now—with the permission of the business community, no less!—dump regulations and commitments on corporations in the name of the so-called public good. No wonder Joe Biden has called for “an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,” suggesting his antipathy for the dreaded stock market.22 And the US Business Roundtable agrees—in an August 2019 statement, they explained, “While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.”

  Putting shareholders second sounds kind and nice. It isn’t. It’s sinister. It’s placing unnamed, uninvested interests in charge of corporations, and placing corporate heads in positions of untrammeled power—so long as they please the true powers that be: members of government, members of the press, and their politically like-minded peers. Capitalism creates wealth and prosperity for all because it is rooted in a fundamental truth: your labor belongs to you, and you have no right to demand the products of my labor without giving me something I want in return. Stakeholder capitalism doesn’t create wealth or prosperity. It just traffics in unearned moral superiority, turning the engine of growth into a second quasi-government, unanswerable to those it is supposed to represent in the first place—and it simultaneously forwards the lie that corporations that do seek to do business alone are somehow morally suspect.

  DESTROYING DISSENTERS

  In October 2020, CEO David Barrett of Expensify, a corporation that specializes in expense management, sent a letter to all of the company’s users. That letter encouraged them all to vote for Joe Biden. “I know you don’t want to hear this from me,” Barrett wrote, quite correctly. “And I guarantee I don’t want to say it. But we are facing an unprecedented attack on the foundations of democracy itself. If you are a US citizen, anything less than a vote for Biden is a vote against democracy. That’s right. I’m saying a vote for Trump, a vote for a third-party candidate, or simply not voting at all—they’re all the same, and they all mean: ‘I care more about my favorite issue than democracy. I believe Trump winning is more important than democracy. I am comfortable standing aside and allowing democracy to be methodically dismantled in plain sight.’”23

  What were Expensify employees supposed to think of the letter? If they signaled their support for Trump, certainly they could expect to lose their jobs. But Barrett obviously didn’t care. His politics were the right politics. His opponents were wrong.

  Yet few concerns about the power imbalance between Barrett and his employees materialized. Instead, praise came pouring from the rafters.

  In reality, Barrett wasn’t taking a business risk in issuing this letter. He was doing the opposite. He was signaling that he and his company were members of the righteous coterie of right-thinking corporations.

  Such signaling isn’t merely done via external public relations. It’s enforced in rigorous fashion internally. Employees are subjected to bouts of “diversity training” with “experts” like Robin DiAngelo, who maintain that white supremacy pervades all of American life; that it is impossible for members of victimized groups to be racist; that meritocracies are themselves representative of racist hierarchical thinking; that believing you aren’t racist is excellent evidence that you’re racist; that white women’s tears are a form of racism; that racist intent is absolutely unnecessary in order to label action racist, since only impact and harm matter.24 All it costs them is $20,000 a pop to both indoctrinate their workers into the requisite politics and to ensure against the possibility of a discrimination lawsuit!25

  This garbage is wildly ineffective. A controlled study of one diversity training course found that there was “very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overall—the two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions.”26 Actually, diversity training tends to drive more anger and discrimination, because people don’t like being told they are racists or that they must follow a set of prescribed rules in order to alleviate their supposed racism.27

  But effectiveness isn’t the point. Preventing blowback is the point—and creating an environment of conformity on controversial issues. And corporations pour billions into doing both. As of 2003, corporations were spending $8 billion per year on diversity efforts. And in America’s biggest companies, the number of “diversity professionals” has increased dramatically over the past few years—by one survey, 63 percent between 2016 and 2019. Nearly everyone now has to sit through some form of indoctrination designed by the authoritarian Left—indoctrination that requires struggle sessions, public compliance with the new moral code, and kowtowing to false notions of racial essentialism. All of this is designed to cram down false notions of systemic privilege and hierarchy.28

  Meanwhile, for those corporations that refuse to comply, the cudgel is available.

  When Goya CEO Robert Unanue appeared at a Trump White House event to tout his work during the pandemic, leftists began a nationwide boycott. Something similar happened when LGBT activists targeted Chick-fil-A over founder Dan Cathy’s support for traditional marriage, encouraging local Democratic politicians to try to stop the chain’s expansion into their cities.29 When billionaire investor Stephen Ross held a fund-raiser for Trump in 2019, leftists launched a boycott against Equinox and SoulCycle, both companies in which Ross had investments. Chrissy Teigen tweeted, “everyone who cancels their Equinox and Soul Cycle memberships, meet me at the
library. Bring weights.”30

  No one would want to be Goya or Equinox. So when, in June 2020, leftist organizations including Color of Change, NAACP, ADL, Sleeping Giants, Free Press, and Common Sense Media called for Facebook advertisers to pause their spends to pressure Facebook into restricting content on its platform, more than a thousand companies complied. Those companies included the brands REI, Verizon, Ford, Honda, Levi Strauss, and Walgreens.31

  And that’s the goal for the authoritarian Left: to cow everyone into silence, except those who agree with them. Corporations generally survive boycotts—statistics demonstrate that most boycotts are wildly unsuccessful at removing revenue. But boycotts can impact the overall health of a brand, and can certainly generate sleepless nights for the companies targeted. As Northwestern Institute for Policy Research professor Braydon King argues, “The no. 1 predictor of what makes a boycott effective is how much media attention it creates, not how many people sign onto a petition or how many consumers it mobilizes.”32 Companies hate media attention they can’t control. Which is why they so frequently apologize, back down, and beg for mercy.

  Which, of course, only starts the cycle anew.

  The purging of the public square has now reached epidemic proportions. All it takes is one bad story about your business to put you squarely in the authoritarian leftist cultural crosshairs. And it’s now easier than ever to manufacture and spotlight such stories. In October 2020, Yelp—a site that allows members of the public to review businesses—announced that it would place an alert on a business if “someone associated with the business was accused of, or the target of, racist behavior.” That means that if someone resurfaced a Trump-supporting post from a janitor, you could find yourself on the wrong end of a Yelp alert. And if there was “resounding evidence of egregious, racist actions from a business owner or employee, such as using overtly racist slurs or symbols,” such evidence being “a news article from a credible media outlet,” the business would be hit with a “Business Accused of Racist Behavior Alert.” Yelp had now created a Stalinesque system of woke snitching, in which all it would take to forever destroy a business would be an account of racism about an employee, a twenty-two-year-old reporter looking for clicks, and an email address. Between May 26 and September 30, more than 450 alerts were placed on business pages accused of racist behavior related to Black Lives Matter alone.33