The WSJ is unhappy with corporate CEOs siding with the Democrats over the Georgia election law:
The CEO intervention into Georgia election law is different. It concerns a matter that doesn’t directly affect Coca-Cola or Delta Airlines, to cite two companies whose executives condemned the new law. The CEOs are instead injecting themselves into a heated debate over election law and the tension between ballot access and integrity.
The Journal concludes:
The CEOs are also playing into the hands of the Republican Party’s growing anti-corporate wing that is already making hay with Big Tech’s free-speech restrictions.
I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's campus quip that "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."
In my article, Corporate Purpose in a Populist Era, 98 Neb. L. Rev. 543 (2019), I discussed the apparent rise of a right of center populist movement. And, as I explained in my article, Conservative Critiques of Capitalism, American Affairs, Fall 2018, at 113, there is a long history of conservative skepticism of big business:
Although American conservatism in recent decades has been characterized by its rhetorical embrace of free markets, ... it was not always so. To the contrary, there is a long tradition of skepticism about—and sometimes outright hostility to—capitalism among important strains of American conservative thought. And although the NeverTrumpers of both Right and Left continue to deny it, Donald Trump’s “popularity among conservative voters turned out to be more than just a reality-show phenomenon,” largely because Trump “tapped into a deep-seated frustration with the political and economic establishment.” ...
Postwar conservatism in the United States was a somewhat rocky marriage of traditionalists, libertarians, and, later, neoconservatives, united mainly by a shared opposition to communism. Given a seemingly binary and existential choice between Western capitalism and Soviet Communism, American conservatives opted for the former. Yet, despite Frank S. Meyer’s famous fusionism project, the preexisting fault lines persisted. With Communism off the table as an existential threat, the rupture of such a contingent unity along those fault lines may have been inevitable.
If Big Business has decided to throw its lot in with the woke, that rupture may become final.
