What The New York Times' Frank Bruni doesn't get about Big Business

Generally speaking, liberals and leftists know where they stand vis-a-vis corporations. Big businesses are a lot like oxen or large bulls. They're dumb, and relentlessly focused on their own self-interest. But they're also incredibly powerful entities, and can be extremely useful and constructive, if appropriately corralled and harnessed.

So that's why the left works towards taxes, regulations, and so forth: to keep corporations focused on socially useful wealth creation, and to prevent them from goring their workers, trampling the environment, or eating the metaphorical rose bushes.

But every so often things get shaken up. When nine black churchgoers were recently gunned down in Charleston, the tragedy sent South Carolina's demented insistence on flying the Confederate battle flag rocketing back to the top of the national consciousness. And this time, major players like Walmart, Sears, eBay, Apple, Amazon, Boeing, and BMW responded by pulling Confederate flag paraphernalia from their physical and digital shelves, or by backing Gov. Nikki Haley's call for the flag to come down.

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When Arizona, Indiana, and Arkansas tried building potential openings for anti-gay discrimination into their laws, corporations like Apple, Intel, and Walmart were front and center in the backlash that scuttled those efforts. Big Business is also pushing for reforms in American immigration policy, and showing increasing enthusiasm for sustainability and green energy, to name some other examples.

So what should we make of this? To start, we should be considerably more measured than New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, who compiled the above list in a column published yesterday. Bruni then concluded that "corporations aren't always the bad guys."

"Sometimes the bottom line matches the common good, and they're the agents of what's practical, wise, and even right," he said.

Bruni threw in the to-be-sure proviso that these companies were motivated by self-interest. The stunning success and popularity of liberal social movements — particularly where gay rights are concerned — has given Apple, Intel, Walmart, and the like the chance to market themselves and pump up their brand names by jumping on the bandwagon, and all at minimal danger of alienating potential customers.

But Bruni doesn't carry that insight to its necessary and sobering conclusion. Namely, that the convergences between social liberalism and corporate interests were happy accidents. Contra the implication of his column, there's almost nothing to be learned here.

Actually, the one thing that can be learned is the danger these sorts of convergences present to liberalism and the left. Andrew Gelman's Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is a few years old now, but it's still an essential breakdown of how political ideology, voting, and class intersect in America. What Gelman found is that the culture war is almost entirely an elite affair. The upper class tends collectively towards right-wing economic thinking, but it is viciously split on social issues. And that split motivates their voting: Gay marriage, abortion, etc. is why the Obama coalition includes a lot of upscale urban whites and college-educated professionals. The lower class, while more socially conservative as a whole, is also more economically liberal, and it's the latter force that motivates their voting.

Bruni observes that corporations are responding to social liberalism more forcefully than Congress — he quotes a corporate flack arguing that "a lot of corporations have to be far more democratic than democratically elected officials" — but this concentration of social liberalism in the upper class is likely why. As inequality has grown, the bulk of Americans who do most of the economy's consuming has moved higher and higher up the income ladder. In other words, the group of buyers businesses care about most is becoming more socially liberal.

Corporations have no intrinsic need to discriminate against gay Americans, women, or black people. But they have no intrinsic need not to, either. They'll go wherever the market wind blows. Conversely, they do have an intrinsic need to keep their costs down and their profits up. That means always pushing for the freedom to bleed more labor from their workers for as little recompense as possible, to despoil natural ecosystems without internalizing the cost of that damage, and to transform financial markets into ATMs for the wealthy elite who constitute the corporate world's central nervous system.

So now that the social left is ascendant, there's a risk that the economic left will be abandoned in the dust. Libertarians, for example, are quite capable of championing gay rights, legal abortion, and privilege-checking. And then they will still gut the social safety net, endorse the mythos that market success is all about hard work and personal character, and call for reducing every last American to all-purpose economic widgets for the use of corporate power.

You can see bubbles of this risk in Bruni's column. Beyond his misconception of corporations' "democratic" impulses, Bruni praises the business community for being a "big tent" political force. But this obviously only follows if economic questions don't factor into calculating the size of the tent. Bruni ignores that Big Business' interest in immigration reform lies largely in pushing down working class wages, and creating a class of high-skill workers indentured to the company that sponsors their visa.

Bruni even goes so far as to praise corporations for being free of "partisan bickering," and quite possibly they are. But only because they're autocratic, top-down institutions. The people with power in the corporate regime give commands, and the people without power obey. Which, again, is linked to their need to ruthlessly cut costs and boost profits.

There's certainly an argument for amending the Constitution to transform the national legislature into a proportionally representative parliament — as opposed to the geographically ensconced, bicameral, veto-point-ridden mess it is now. But the implication that command-and-control hierarchies are an enviable model for a national people's common governance is creepy, to say the least.

In short, when they're against you, corporations can be the most implacable of adversaries. And when they're with you, they can be quite the useful war-hammer. So it's understandable to breath a sigh of relief when you find yourself in the latter situation.

But if the left stands for anything, it stands for the belief that societies are judged by how they treat their most powerless and unfortunate members. When that's your moral lodestar, the friendship of corporations will always be a conditional and passing thing.