Yes, big business is moving left
Timothy P. Carney
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A crucial part of the Democratic Party‘s self-identity is that it is the champion of the little guy and the Republicans are the party of corporate America. This dogma has always been somewhere between a falsehood and an exaggeration, and a new paper suggests corporations are shifting hard toward Democrats these days.
In other words, “woke capital” is a real thing.
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Over recent years, any casual observer has witnessed corporate America siding again and again with the Left on the culture wars and with the Democratic Party on purely partisan matters. Most famously, when President Joe Biden and Georgia Democrats decided to brand Georgia’s post-COVID election overhaul as a new “Jim Crow law,” it was a purely cynical move to drive up turnout.
In the end, the first elections under this new law resulted in record turnout, record early turnout, and record black turnout. It was a good law, and Democrats likely knew that, but they also knew that crying “disenfranchisement” is the most effective way to mobilize supporters. Corporate America joined the Democrats in this.
Corporate America has also jumped with both feet into gender ideology, a brand-new dogma that proclaims gender to be an interior sense of self that is not connected to sex. Corporations such as the Los Angeles Dodgers are so wedded to the rainbow flag that they will celebrate stridently anti-Catholic groups in a very historically Catholic city.
This creates an awkward dynamic for economic liberals, who see their side as the side of the little guy, arrayed against the economically powerful.
“Woke Capital” is a “myth,” they say.
All over the major media, you will hear dismissals of the notion that big business is aligned with the Democratic Party and is a battalion in the culture wars.
Most side with the center-left media on this score. As researchers Eitan Hersh and Sarang Shah sum up the conventional wisdom: “The dominant narrative among social scientists still maintains that companies’ occasional activism on liberal social causes and bipartisan donation behavior are something of a mirage, masking a persistent alignment with the Republican Party.”
Hersh and Shah polled the public and found that Democrats believed corporate America was tacking right while Republicans believed corporate America was tacking left. Again, the standard explanation is that Republicans are just being fed conspiracy theories by a right-populist media.
So Hersh and Shah went ahead and polled business leaders. “In the last decade, have businesses become more Republican, more Democratic, or about the same?” Business leaders — Republicans, Democrats, and independents — answered, “More Democratic.”
This was true whether the question was about all businesses nationwide, the businesses in your state, or your own business.
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The authors wrote: “Business leaders essentially think that the Republican identifiers are correct. Business leaders in general, and within every partisan cohort, believe that the national business community, the state business community, and their own business has become more aligned with the Democrats in the last decade. With regard to their own companies, it is the Democratic business leaders who are most likely to perceive a Democratic shift.”
The social scientists and the liberal media are wrong: Corporate leaders are tacking to the Left.