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While the GOP increasingly flirts with anti-corporatism, the executives at Amazon do not seem terribly disturbed. Their focus remains pandering to their natural enemies, even as they alienate their natural allies. Amazon\u2019s repeated public prostrations to the Left have been less than effective at reducing political pressure on the company. March 25 saw Democrats and Republicans in the House interrogating<\/a> the CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Alphabet. Along with other Big Tech stocks<\/a>, Amazon underperformed the market<\/a> broadly on the day of the hearing. While neither current Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos nor incoming CEO Andy Jassy were present at the hearing, they should still be worried: Despite all the left-wing pandering and censorship peddled by Big Tech, they have found no friends in the Democratic Party. Many of the Democrats participating in the interrogation evinced a belief that Big Tech is still, despite the last four years, insufficiently censorious. Each new demonstration of loyalty to the Left by Amazon is met with fury by conservatives, but no equivalent jubilation on the other side. Has there been an outcry of thanks from progressives for their public service in banning \u201ctransphobic\u201d books?<\/p>\n Not in the least. Instead, Amazon\u2019s accommodations have been rewarded with a growing bipartisan abhorrence for mega-cap tech companies. The Left opposes Amazon because it is a hugely successful multinational corporation led by a fantastically wealthy man, and they will continue to do so as long as they oppose corporate power and the rich \u2014 in other words, as long as the Left is the Left. But now the Right is growing to oppose Amazon because it is openly hostile to the cultural values held by everyone not<\/em> on the left.<\/p>\n When Amazon removed Ryan T. Anderson\u2019s book \u201cWhen Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement\u201d<\/a> from its catalogue, it alienated conservatives. When it removed a documentary about Clarence Thomas from its catalogue,<\/a> it alienated conservatives. When it removed the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council from its \u201cSmile\u201d charity program<\/a>, it alienated conservatives. And yet the Democratic Party has not softened its rhetoric in the least. One need only look at Thursday\u2019s congressional hearing for proof.<\/p>\n Have we made the point, Bezos and Jassy? They will never accept you. The mob cannot be bought off. In the eyes of the radicals, no number of banned books or censored conservatives will atone Amazon of its original sin: being a corporation. The Left is no more fond of Amazon than it was when Ryan Anderson could still sell books on the platform. But all these tech giants have, or had, a natural defender in conservatism, a movement that has historically been oriented toward defending businesses (even the mega-caps) from the interventions of the state. Now they are losing their support, and there is little reason to believe that the next Republican president or Republican-controlled Congress will respond to years of censorship by doubling down on free markets. From Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley to President Trump to Tucker Carlson, conservatives are increasingly showing an enthusiasm, if mostly in rhetoric, to forgo their party\u2019s historical inclinations and use the whips and reins of government to curtail the Left\u2019s intrusion into the boardroom.<\/p>\n While GOP messaging is shifting dramatically on the question of big business, Republicans in national politics will be close to powerless for around four years at a minimum when it comes to corporate policy. Until there is a Republican president and Republican Congress, the internal debates concerning what exactly should be done about woke capital are largely theoretical, and a political solution to the problem will be impossible. But Amazon\u2019s shareholders do not have to wait for a national election to act, nor do the shareholders of any other company.<\/p>\n The left-wing pandering of corporate America has incensed the Republican Party to the point that many of its most prominent members are advocating retribution against corporations explicitly for their political activism. That is a threat, largely self-imposed, to Amazon\u2019s bottom line, which means it is a threat to shareholders, a threat which shareholders would be foolish to ignore. A natural point investors should focus on is attempts to promote viewpoint diversity, such as the shareholder resolution proposed by the National Center for Public Policy Research<\/a> and subsequently shot down by Amazon\u2019s Board. Insisting on a broader range of political and social ideologies at the company could make a genuine difference in the way Amazon operates.<\/p>\n The conservative conflict with Amazon is not, or should not be, just another partisan squabble \u2014 it is a fundamental question about the role of tech giants. Are they tools for activists, utilized from time to time to make sure nobody can read books skeptical of administering hormone blockers to children? Or are they publicly traded companies, like any other, responsible first and foremost to their investors? Nobody is trying to make Amazon a \u201cconservative corporation,\u201d we would just prefer if the stewards of investor capital did not needlessly antagonize customers, investors, and potential regulators. That is not politicization of the boardroom \u2014 it is the exact opposite.<\/p>\n Ultimately, if Big Tech does not want to be fighting a war on two fronts, they need to stop the censorship. They need to promote ideological diversity at their companies. When conservative shareholders make requests, they should not be thoughtlessly dismissed. It might upset the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department, and surely some employees will complain on Slack channels, but that is better than the alternative: the consistent, careless alienation of the half of the country that would normally be on their side.<\/p>\n This is not going away by itself. For better or worse, there is a major shift under way in how Republicans think about the tech companies that hold their values in contempt. In addition to the prominent examples mentioned earlier, Florida governor Ron DeSantis (an early lead for the 2024 Republican nomination, according to prediction market PredictIt<\/a>) introduced legislation in February that would impose fines on tech companies that deplatform candidates for public office<\/a>. Amazon and other Big Tech companies are appeasing their perennial enemies, the Left, but getting nothing in return except Republican threats.<\/p>\n This situation is untenable. So long as Amazon behaves like a progressive nonprofit, it will be at best be held in serious suspicion by many Republicans. There is no reason to expect that to go away \u2014 unless Amazon stops antagonizing those who are traditionally insistent on letting businesses operate free of government intervention. Maybe the populist shift within the conservative movement will convince Big Tech to tone down the wokeness. Maybe someone at Amazon will realize that the Left is not the only threat, and that a massive company that seems to lack any conservative perspectives makes for an excellent punching bag for the new GOP. Or maybe the executives won\u2019t listen to reason, but then at least we get to say, \u201cI told you so.\u201d<\/p>\n It is possible that the executives at Amazon and elsewhere are simply activists, promoting woke ideology out of genuine conviction. It is also possible that they are simply assessing risk, operating under the assumption that the Democrats are a greater threat to their independence and success than the Republicans. The former is a problem because that is not why corporations exist, and the latter is a problem because it has unambiguously failed. Whichever explanation is true does not particularly matter. The result is the same. Senator Rubio stated it outright in his op-ed: \u201cThe days of conservatives being taken for granted by the business community are over.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In adopting the progressive social agenda, Big Tech has embraced a natural antagonist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":924967,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"authors":[{"ID":"210281","display_name":"Jerry Bowyer","first_name":"Jerry","last_name":"Bowyer","user_nicename":"jerry-bowyer","href":"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/author\/jerry-bowyer\/","twitter":"","hedcut":false,"avatar":false}],"category":{"href":"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/post\/category\/business","value":"Business"},"corner_response":null,"is_corner_post":false,"is_magazine_article":false,"more-stories":null,"section":false,"subtitle":"In adopting the progressive social agenda, Big Tech has embraced a natural 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Loses, Again"},"content":{"rendered":" \n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\tNRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\tP<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t<\/span>rofessor Richard Wolff<\/span> of UMass\u2013Amherst seems to be a courteous man, so I will put this question as courteously as I can: Rounded off to the nearest 100 million, how many people have to be put to death under socialism before the world\u2019s most murderous school of economics runs out of second chances?<\/p>\n Last week, Professor Wolff debated Arthur Brooks, formerly the president of the American Enterprise Institute and now a professor at Harvard, on the resolution: \u201cSocialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity.\u201d The debate was hosted by the Abigail Adams Institute, which is \u201cdedicated to providing supplementary humanistic education to the Harvard intellectual community.\u201d Here, that worthy mission was not accomplished. I do not deny that socialism is an important subject for the consideration of students at Harvard and elsewhere, but to put \u201csocialism or no?<\/span>\u201d forward as a contest between two propositions on equal intellectual footing is akin to hosting an earnest debate on whether the Earth is flat.<\/p>\n (It isn\u2019t.<\/a>)<\/p>\n Because Professor Brooks holds Professor Wolff in such obviously high regard, I am inclined to give the old red the benefit of the doubt. But it is difficult. His case for socialism, at least as presented in this debate, is a familiar admixture of crude half-truths, moralistic posturing, and dorm-room utopianism. It is not clear whether this is an instance of Professor Wolff\u2019s being intellectually lazy or assuming \u2014 not without some reason \u2014 that Harvard undergraduates are. He argues for the creation of business enterprises in which decisions are made on a majority-rule basis, as though that sort of thing had never been tried and found to fail. (I do love the idea of Pfizer\u2019s vaccine researchers and Chad down in human resources having an equal say about whether to pursue an mRNA vaccine or a protein-subunit approach. Everybody believes in majority rule until there\u2019s a sufficiently high price for being wrong.) Completely ignoring the important epistemic critique of socialist decision-making put forward by Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek<\/a>, Professor Wolff insists that socialist goals can be realized by the simple combination of central planning and labor: \u201cWe decide what we want to produce,\u201d he says, emphasizing the majority-rule model, and then \u201cput people to work.\u201d<\/p>\n Put people to work<\/em> is a refrain with a long and bloody history in the socialist enterprise. Aleksandr\u00a0Solzhenitsyn wrote some books about it, if you\u2019re interested in learning more. No, I don\u2019t think gulags and mass starvation and misery and repression are what Professor Wolff wants. I don\u2019t think they are what most socialists want \u2014 but they are what socialism reliably produces. That isn\u2019t bad luck \u2014 it is the nature of the system.<\/p>\n At this point, we can expect a chorus of \u201cReal Socialism Has Never Been Tried.<\/span>\u201d<\/p>\n Professor Wolff\u2019s variation on that theme is to insist that there is no such thing as socialism<\/em> but many socialisms \u2014 and the ones that have murdered and immiserated all those millions of people aren\u2019t the ones he has in mind. Ah, but of course. The one he wants to try is imposing \u201cdemocracy\u201d on businesses, meaning the effective abolition of property rights. He believes that it is unjust that profit accrues to capital-holders, as though workers did not have the option of exchanging a portion of their wages for capital \u2014 a choice many of them make and subsequently grow wealthy from.<\/p>\n Wolff insists that capitalist economies are \u201cunstable\u201d because they go through occasional periods of recession, as though there were not examples of cyclical phenomena to be found across the spectrum of human social activities. I\u2019m especially perplexed by his insistence that \u201cthis crazy downturn we\u2019re living through now\u201d illustrates the brittleness of capitalism: We had a worldwide epidemic that forced genuinely unprecedented restrictions on the U.S. economy, and, as a result, we experienced \u2014 this is amazing \u2014 only two quarters of contraction before resuming growth. The overwhelming majority of Americans right now say their financial situation now is either unchanged from or an improvement over their financial situation before the epidemic, during which vast enterprises reorganized themselves in a remarkably short period of time while pharmaceutical companies brought three vaccines to market with impressive speed. It would be difficult to think of a better example of the innovation and flexibility of capitalist economies.<\/p>\n The U.S. economy hasn\u2019t been in recession since the second quarter of last year \u2014 would it be too much to ask a professor of economics to look at the GDP chart<\/a>?<\/p>\n
