On money matters, I once supported the president-elect with full throat. I now see how his ideas could take down our nation.
I don’t mean to come off as insensitive. I understand how quickly one can succumb to this myth of entitlement. In 2015 and 2016, even though I was doing financially better than at any time in my life, President-elect Donald Trump’s populist campaign resonated with me. I knew people who lost jobs and contracts to overseas companies and workers. Years before he became a fixture in our politics, Trump would forewarn of the dangers of competition with Asian nations, in particular. On such occasions, when I heard him speak, I usually nodded in concurrence.
What I never thought at the time was: Do my fellow angered Americans realize that offshoring to increase profits for shareholders is a feature of modern capitalism, one advocated by both parties—but, in particular, the GOP’s chief capitalism mythologizers? The mythmaking here is both substantial and recent. As The New Republic contributor (and fellow disaffected Republican) Bruce Bartlett chronicled on these pages, for most of American history, the corporation was only “permitted to exist and enjoy benefits unavailable to other forms of business because they served some sort of public purpose.”
It was understood that these firms had broad constituencies to serve: customers, communities, employees, even other firms. But as Bartlett notes, this began to change in the 1970s with the rise of Milton Friedman and his vision of corporate responsibility, which held that shareholders were solely and wholly entitled to the profits and proceeds of corporate fortunes. It was only after this myth took hold that a corporation could dream of divorcing itself from all those other stakeholders and contemplate sending jobs overseas, chasing cheap wages and easy returns.
This is how we’ve lived for many years. We’ve essentially tolerated it, even as we’ve fitfully complained about all the negative externalities that come from these arrangements. But I want to pose this question: What do Trump voters—and, especially, those in the MAGA community, of which I was once a member—think capitalism is?
We legislate against some of the baser traits of our nature: incitement, theft, violence. Our laws aren’t entirely devoid of protections against avarice (think antitrust regulations), but Americans, collectively, have developed a high tolerance for greed.
There’s that capitalist meritocracy mythology at work. This quietly self-defeating ideology is championed by many who have been failed by both of our major parties, and those concerns have been particularly exploited and manipulated by Republicans who have traumatized them into believing that liberalism, and not capitalism, is the source of their ills; that liberalism is why they work and work but never even break even, much less get ahead.
https://newrepublic.com/article/188939/trump-capitalism-myths-maga-rage