What Does the Right Do When Big Business Turns Against Conservatism?

"Back in 2011, when Elizabeth Warren was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate, she had a long riff making the case against a certain kind of idealized Ayn-Randian vision of the lonely heroic capitalist.

In a video that went viral, she told an audience: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for.” She praised her hypothetical wealthy business owner: “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea, God bless.” But she argued that they owed the system something in return — which in her vision meant a higher tax rate.

This riff was later echoed by Barack Obama in his fateful phrase “You didn’t build that” — which, note well, Warren did not originally say — which in turn gave birth to “You built that!” as an important theme of Mitt Romney’s ill-fated pro-entrepreneurship presidential candidacy. In that Romney-Obama argument the divide between the parties seemed consistent, familiar: You turned to the Democrats for versions of Warren’s case that no successful business was built without some kind of state support and to the Republicans for a more heroic, rugged-individualist view of corporate America’s success.

Nothing has been quite so consistent since. The Republican Party in the Trump era remained a mostly pro-business party in its policies but its constituencies and rhetoric have tilted more working class and populist, with many Romney Republicans drifting into the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party remains generally the party of regulation and higher taxation, but much of corporate America has swung culturally into liberalism’s camp. That process was well underway a decade ago, but it’s been accelerated by anti-Trump backlash, the more left-leaning commitments of big business’s younger customers and (especially) younger employees, and the relative ease with which the radical-sounding language of identity politics can be assimilated to corporate management techniques.

As a consequence, today’s G.O.P. is most clearly now the party of local capitalism — the small-business gentry, the family firms, what leftists like to call “patrimonial capitalism” — while its relationship with corporate America is increasingly complex.

Much of the party elite wish to continue doing business with big business as before. But the party’s base regards corporate institutions — especially in Silicon Valley, but extending to more traditional capitalist powers — as cultural enemies, with too much consolidated power and too much interest in pressuring, censoring and propagandizing against socially conservative views and policy.

This tension on the right has produced a little policy innovation — a sudden right-wing interest in trustbusting, some vaguely union-friendly forays — and a lot of incoherence. But in the last week we’ve seen two sharper conservative answers to the question: What does the right do when big business turns against conservatism?

One answer is the Elon Musk solution: You wait for a libertarian billionaire (or maybe really a billionaire with the politics of a liberal from 10 years ago — but look, conservatives have to take what they can get) to buy one of the companies whose mix of influence and censorship you fear. You hope that he will overrule its largely progressive staff and make its moderation rules more favorable to right-wing content, or at least less likely to censor uncomfortable stories about, say, the son of a Democratic presidential candidate. And you take the arguments liberals were making about social-media moderation policies just yesterday — if you don’t like it, go build your own social network, losers — and hurl them back in their smug faces.

What Musk himself might really want to do with Twitter is a subject for another time. But suffice it to say that he would have to do a lot to make his kind of billionaire-savior model a real answer to conservatism’s general alienation from big business.

Which brings us to the second answer, the Ron DeSantis solution, manifest in the Florida governor’s recent war with Disney. You tell corporations that if they decide (or find themselves internally pressured) to become active on the liberal side of the culture wars, they may find their special deals and corporate carve-outs suddenly threatened or revoked.

From one perspective, this is no more scalable than the Musk solution, because a move as direct as DeSantis’s is quite possibly unconstitutional, an assault on corporate free-speech rights. And the Florida governor himself may expect to have his move swatted down in the courts, to reap political benefits without having to actually deal with the fallout of what, frankly, seems like a pretty poorly thought-out policy shift.

But there is a conservative case for the principle of what he’s doing — a case that while the government can’t single you out for special disfavor for your political speech, what is being withdrawn in Disney’s case is special favor, linked to the bipartisan and indeed above-partisanship position that the House of Mouse has long enjoyed in Florida.

Interestingly, this argument feels like a reworking, from the cultural right, of Elizabeth Warren’s argument from a decade back. Not with the same policy conclusion, obviously, but with a similar premise. She argued that nobody builds a business alone, and now conservatives are embracing a variation of that case — not to justify progressive taxation, but to suggest that if your business or institution accepts special government favors, then the public becomes a stakeholder in your success, and it has the right to withdraw that special treatment if you then become a partisan or ideological actor.

“Almost every institution the left controls and has weaponized in the culture wars,” the conservative writer and editor Ben Domenech argued this week, “was created by and depends upon special, favorable treatment — even funding — from all Americans.”

This is true of public entities, public schools and universities, the locus of so much controversy right now, but it’s also true of the internet behemoths, beneficiaries of a regulatory system that largely immunized them from content responsibility (via the famous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). Or the Wall Street firms bailed out in 2008. Or the sports leagues that rely on antitrust exemptions and stadium subsidies. Or Disney — because, as Domenech writes, “it’s only by the generosity of the American people” that Disney has been successful in its decades of lobbying to extend copyright protections.

All of these institutions enjoy First Amendment protections from being discriminated against, this line of argument suggests.

But forms of discrimination that work in their favor — meaning all their privileges, immunities and tax breaks — are political fair game if they enter the culture-war arena.

“U.S. economic policy is not neutral toward business in any kind of pure, Adam Smithian sense,” Domenech writes, “but a gigantic, convoluted network of special treatment for special interests. So, when elites who run such special interests launch a smug, moral crusade against the same American people who have showered them with special treatment … that abused, insulted public is well within its rights to withdraw some of its munificence.”

I don’t know if this argument is constitutionally convincing when applied to something as crudely retaliatory-seeming as the DeSantis move. But it’s convincing at some level of distance.

For instance, when the Trump administration pushed through a tax on endowment income for wealthy colleges and universities, that was clearly not just disinterested policy; the goal was to reduce the special treatment offered to these institutions precisely because they have grown increasingly radicalized against conservatism in recent years. It was a political act, a punitive one, a version of what Domenech is describing: You take tax dollars from conservatives as well as liberals, so you can’t complain when the right notices you don’t seem to hire any conservative faculty and decides to take some of those tax dollars back. And while there were claims that this intention made the measure unconstitutional, few legal figures seemed to take them particularly seriously.

Likewise, if the inchoate right-left alliance against Big Tech ever brought trustbusting legislation to fruition, that legislation would be clearly motivated, in some sense, by a conservative desire to punish the big tech companies for certain high-profile transgressions. But it seems pretty unlikely that these motives — mixed together with others, of course — would be grounds for the courts to block, say, a Facebook breakup or a Section 230 repeal.

So while the specific details of the Disney gambit may not be upheld or replicated, the idea behind it is likely to live on, shaping conservative ambitions at the state and federal level alike. (Especially since, as we saw with the Chick-fil-A wars, liberals are ready to engage in the same tactics when the opportunity presents itself — though the cultural weakness of the right means there are fewer high-profile opportunities.)

Most likely, given the chaotic nature of conservatism at the moment, these anti-corporate gambits will be tactical more often than strategic, symbolic more often than transformative, and quite often just showy gestures to the party’s business-skeptical base that leave cozy relationships intact behind the scenes.

But it’s still a striking evolution, that the right that once disdained an “actually, we all built that” account of business success is now inclined to adopt its own version of that case. And while I don’t expect Elizabeth Warren to claim any kind of vindication, it’s proof that ideas can circulate and reappear sometimes in the last place that you’d expect."