Conservatives have sat in paralysis for a good part of the past 25 years now not knowing how to address the left’s radical transformation of society that is canceling conservatives and forcing the left’s rules on everyone. Amazon bans our books and only a few people who are ridiculed compare it to George Orwell’s 1984.
It’s because we think the takeover is being done by private corporations and actors in a free society, so we don’t know how to react. Most of us aren’t ready to call it communism or socialism; it doesn’t seem to violate the Constitution.
The reality is, while on the surface the new situation may appear to involve private actors, the truth is much more sinister. And it’s been done deliberately this way, in order to sneak it past the scrutiny of half of society that believes in a free society and the Constitution. We’re basically being ruled by a hybrid oligarchy of government and large corporations.
We need to stop defending Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other massive corporations as private actors allowed to do whatever they want. They are no longer operating as purely private actors. They get subsidies from the government, they are regulated by the government and they regularly succumb to pressure from activists who use the government to punish them if they don’t.
The right rarely threatens corporations over politics, it’s something that originated on the left. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was famous for starting it, making race-related demands that were followed up by boycotts and complaints to the government.
The Human Resources departments of corporations have long lists of rules and regulations they must comply with, that most people are unaware of because they operate behind the scenes. Many of these rules get promulgated by obscure left-wing bureaucrats working in federal agencies, or in the fine print of bills with hundreds of pages of text. They are rarely publicized so no one ever finds out about them unless they work in HR — and the left flocks to HR departments due to its tendencies for low-level bureaucratic control — think Karens — so they’re the least likely people to be whistleblowers.
We saw the early rise of this with Public-Private Partnerships. They fooled people into thinking it was the government hiring the private sector to perform government functions more efficiently than the government. But in reality they have operated like government-sanctioned monopolies, unthreatened by competition so free to charge enormous amounts of money and neglect innovation.
A strange bedfellow in this situation is the self-described “libertarian socialist” and intellectual Noam Chomsky. He has warned for years against eventual societal control by a handful of major corporations. He didn’t foresee the government involvement, and much of his perceptions are off, but he’s one of very few people who have predicted some semblance of this.
For those unfamiliar with Noam Chomsky, the short 2016 documentary “Requiem for the American Dream” discusses this concern. He explains how the biggest corporations now make money from merely moving money around, and how they benefit from American workers who are forced to compete with overworked starving workers overseas.
He points out that bank lobbyists write the laws regulating the bank industry. He rails against bailing out banks, admitting that’s not a true capitalist system. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed to protect freed slaves, ended up predominantly protecting corporations instead, treating them as “persons.”
He starts getting a little off on his analysis when he compares corporations controlling things to students who take out school loans who are then tethered to paying them off for years. He claims that James Madison believed power should be in the hands of wealthy men. This is inaccurate, Madison and the Founding Fathers feared power concentrated in the hands of a few elites — their mistake was not recognizing the equality of women and blacks at the time. Chomsky says he didn’t anticipate the strength of the backlash to the egalitarian efforts of the 1960s — but other than the Civil Rights movement and some aspects of the women’s movement, that era hurt free society by dramatically decreasing the attitude that society needs morality.
Other Chomsky beliefs can be dismissed as straight Keynesian economics. He says taxes on the wealthy have been reduced in recent years, but the data shows the opposite. He claims that there’s no evidence that lowering taxes on the wealthy creates jobs and improves the economy, but there’s plenty out there.
Chomsky cites the Powell Memorandum from 1971 as evidence of conservative support for big business, but it was merely one person’s confidential letter to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, future Supreme Court Justice Jerome Powell ranting about how certain government regulations negatively affect business.
Chomsky thinks one solution is unions, claiming they’re a democratizing force. He ignores the fact that unions are controlled by wealthy hypocrites who are often in bed with big business. Look how the demands of labor unions eventually materialize and coalesce with big business — a few years ago they were fighting for a minimum wage of $15/hour, now that’s passé.
Large corporations govern much of our lives now, and over half the workforce is employed by big business so they are even further constrained; those workers could be fired for engaging in what used to be considered free speech. That number continues to grow every year, thanks to sneaky maneuvers like allowing big businesses like Amazon and Walmart to stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic while locking down small businesses. Studies everywhere report that a quarter to a third of small businesses shut down due to the restrictions. And even so, small businesses are increasingly subject to workplace regulations.
Much of this could be happening organically, it doesn’t matter if it’s organized or not. There are massive numbers of people on the left side of the spectrum who push and push from every angle to get their agenda implemented, and they have discovered this is the way they can fundamentally transform society right under our noses with the right divided over how they’re doing it. Even our Founding Fathers did not envision this coming.