by J.B. Shurk, American Thinker:
The worst mistake the Deep State ever made was to turn conservatives against Big Business. Traditionally, fighting corporate power was the purview of the political left. Conservatives have generally backed “free markets” because they despise socialism’s predilection for choosing economic winners and losers. Conservative voters have long seen government regulation as more of a threat than Wall Street wheeling and dealing.
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This makes sense. American conservatives largely embrace the principles of the Founding Fathers’ laissez-faire liberalism, and many share policy preferences that overlap with today’s self-described libertarians. For conservatives, the left’s “politics of envy” is unappealing. The left’s desire to redistribute private property within some sort of Marxist system is seen as a dangerous impulse toward legalized theft. The left’s love for collectivism over individual freedom is regarded as insidious. Voters who support limited government do not tend to care how Sam Walton became a millionaire. They are much more likely to applaud individual success as the product of hard work and innovation.
Times are changing, though. Over the last forty years, middle-class Americans who put their faith in “free markets” have gotten smacked upside the head by corporate interests time and again. The savings and loan scandal, pension scams, derivatives-juiced market crashes, the housing collapse, the offshoring of good jobs, tech bubbles, predatory lending, reverse mortgages, and countless other corporate schemes have left working-class Americans in dire straits. All of these various gut punches have produced a kind of “awakening” among “live free or die” Americans: “free markets” are an illusion, and the economic game is rigged.
To be clear, freedom-loving Americans of every generation have known that powerful economic interests manipulate markets and take what is not theirs. When private bankers conspired with corrupt congressmen to establish the Federal Reserve over Christmas in 1913, many horrified observers predicted how the ascending oligarchy would distort markets, weaken the dollar, and instigate unnecessary economic crashes. Since the early nineteenth century, rural Americans have fought agricultural conglomerates committed to undercutting their family farms. Since the early twentieth century, mom-and-pop retailers have struggled to compete against business cartels, Big Box stores, and online behemoths. Landowners have pushed back against railroads, oil companies, speculators, developers, and industrial giants willing to take what they want through intimidation or force. Freedom-loving Americans have always understood that Big Business is a threat to freedom, too.
Still, more often than not, conservatives have found it easier to make peace with large corporations than with larger-and-larger government. At least in the sphere of private commerce, an ordinary citizen exercises some nominal free will: Will I work for this company? Will I buy from this company? Will I move as far away from this company as humanly possible? When it comes to anything within the government’s domain, however, what it wants is what it usually gets. Taxes, prisons, conscription laws, property laws, and business licenses provide Big Government with the tools to grab a citizen’s free will by the throat and squeeze it until it stops kicking.
What’s changed over the last ten years is that the vestigial boundary between private markets and government force has all but disappeared. Strangely enough, the corporate embrace of woke-ism as a social philosophy that should be imposed upon consumers has had the serendipitous effect of shattering the imaginary wall once separating Big Business from Big Government. Parents began asking why Target and Disney were shoving transgenderism and child sex changes down their throats. Moviegoers started resenting how Hollywood studios had replaced entertainment with divisive re-education seminars on “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” and “global warming.” Voters were forced to acknowledge that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and corporate news shows were censoring conservative speech and promoting far-left propaganda. Consumers realized that banks were systematically punishing them for their Second Amendment advocacy, religious affiliations, and political beliefs. All of these corporate provocations fell like sledgehammer blows upon conservatives’ heads, and Americans who once gave corporations a quiet pass became increasingly loud and angry.
Now the veil that has long prevented many conservatives from appreciating corporate tyranny has been removed from their eyes, and more Americans than ever before look at Big Business with suspicion. To be sure, some measure of suspicion has always existed. Conservatives listened to President Eisenhower when he warned them about the military-industrial complex. They experienced how NAFTA and other so-called “free trade” agreements eliminated their jobs and destroyed their once-vibrant manufacturing towns. Many rallied around Congressman Ron Paul when he demanded that the American people “audit the Fed.” But it wasn’t until formerly beloved companies began grooming their children with explicit sex talks and drag queen story hours that a huge swath of the conservative electorate finally had enough of corporate tyranny.
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