Are Corporations Good Now?

H aving spent much of the last year acting as a cheering section for whatever political causes were de rigueur among the woke, Amazon, Inc. has now decided to move on to more concrete action. Last night, the megacorporation’s founder, Jeff Bezos, announced that it will support the Biden administration’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan — including its corporate-tax increases. Referring to his decision, Bezos elected to use that most friendly of pronouns: “we.”

You’ll forgive me for asking: Is this latest intervention from Amazon’s head honcho a sign of intolerable corruption, or it is merely another indication of how admirably in touch with America’s “pillars” the Democrats are? It can be tough to keep up these days.

Progressivism has done well out of the country’s corporations of late. But it was not always thus. Indeed, at one time, the very idea that big companies might play a leading role within politics was anathema to the American left. In 2015, Kent Greenfield observed in the Atlantic that while the “American left is notoriously fractious,” the “belief that unites more than most is this: Corporations are not people.” Back then, the position Greenfield was describing was being advanced almost daily. “I don’t care how many times you try to explain it,” Barack Obama contended during the 2012 election. “Corporations aren’t people. People are people.” What did Obama mean by this? In part, he meant that he disliked the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. But he also meant that Americans should not ascribe human or political attributes to large companies — a point that Elizabeth Warren quickly echoed as unambiguously as possible:

Mitt Romney’s the guy who said “corporations are people.” No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They thrive. They dance. They live. They love. And they die. And that matters. That matters.

Two years later, amid a bitter fight over the extent to which the Religious Freedom Restoration Act should apply to Hobby Lobby, Wharton’s Amy Sepinwall put the case pithily in the Washington Post: “a corporation,” she submitted, “can’t have a conscience.”

Do progressives still believe this? Did they ever? Praising Major League Baseball for moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta last week, Barack Obama said that the organization was “taking a stand.” Such pronouncements have become common over the last year, starting last summer, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. “We’re entering the age of corporate social justice,” the Harvard Business Review suggested in June, which, among other things, meant that corporations should exhibit “a commitment to taking a stance, even if it alienates certain populations of consumers, employees, and corporate partners.”

And goodness me did America’s corporations oblige. So compliant were they, in fact, that at the height of their acquiescence it became impossible to order something as anodyne as a replacement dishwasher tray without being informed in 32-point font that the Acme Corporation of Wichita “stood fully” with Black Lives Matter. For months, multinational companies used the language of conscience with abandon. They cared, respected, empathized, affirmed, grieved, supported, funded, and helped. They believed things and declared things and avowed things — and they rejected things, too. They called on people and called out people. They stood in solidarity. Some even prayed.

In these endeavors, they were encouraged, sustained, and applauded by progressives of all stripes. But why? If, as Hobby Lobby’s critics so vehemently insisted, Justice John Marshall was correct to say that a corporation is “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law”; if, as we were told by the dissenters in Citizens United, businesses “have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires”; if, as Elizabeth Warren submitted, corporations cannot have hearts or love — if all these things are true, then how exactly could a company such as Nike or Apple or Unilever “take a stand” or do the “right” thing? Justice Ginsburg was widely praised by progressives for arguing that it was irrational to ascribe a single interest or moral worldview to “for-profit corporations” because the “workers who sustain the operations of those corporations” tend to have such a diverse array of views. But, if this is true, then what on earth were activists doing hectoring executives?

And where did they think it would end? Yesterday’s announcement moves Amazon way beyond platitudes and into open lobbying for the strings to the public purse. A cynic might suggest that this is classic self-dealing; for a company with Amazon’s market share, what’s not to like about investments in roads and rural broadband, and a tax environment that makes it more difficult for one’s competitors to operate? Either way, one has to ask whether progressives consider such lobbying to represent an acceptable use of Amazon’s power. Not too long ago, Harry Reid was denouncing the Koch Brothers’ foray into politics as an “un-American” and “evil” attempt to “buy the country.” Amazon is considerably richer than Koch Industries, and Jeff Bezos is considerably richer than the Kochs, and yet it seems distinctly unlikely that he will be denounced by progressives on the floor of the Senate for having had the temerity to wade into questions of spending, taxation, and the appropriate size of the state.

Funny, that.