On Saturday, former President Donald Trump released a statement through his political action committee urging “Republicans and conservatives to react” against corporate entities that have spoken out against the new series of state party projects and laws that restrict the voting right. He launched a wide network, calling for boycotts of “Major League Baseball (MLB), Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS and Merck,” and urging his supporters, “don’t go back to your products until that give in ”. He reiterated that the 2020 election was stolen from him, again, to be sure.
While Trump’s baseless complaints about the “stolen election” are a point of discomfort for many other elected Republicans, the party has had no problem harnessing the energy of that anger to tighten voting restrictions. And Major League Baseball’s announcement last week that it was removing the All-Star Game from the Atlanta area joined the party in defending its pressure for state-to-state voting law and against the “agreed” turn of corporate America.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, still trying to restore his credibility among the Republican base after Trump’s post-election attacks on him, said the Major League Baseball “has yielded to the fears and lies of liberal activists”. Texas Governor Greg Abbott chose not to make the first pitch in a Texas Rangers game, saying he “would attend an event held by the MLB”. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the master at making a symbolic gesture here or there against corporate America in his latest brand change as a working-class tribune, asked MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to abandon his Augusta National membership if he is really committed to putting pressure on Georgia. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, observed that corporate America seems much less concerned about human rights abuses by its business partners in China than in Georgia. A group of senators are engaging in the ritualistic exercise of drafting legislation to remove a sports league’s antitrust exemption when it does something they don’t like.
However, more striking than these scattered displays of anger were the words chosen by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell about the corporate environment more broadly. “From electoral law to environmentalism, to radical social agendas and the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector continue to meddle in behaving like an agreed parallel government,” McConnell said in a statement on Monday. “Corporations will have serious consequences if they become a vehicle for mobs of the extreme left to kidnap our country from outside the constitutional order.”
The fluctuation of “consequences” for private companies, as they make what they believe to be revenue-maximizing decisions, is new ground for the Republican leader – and for a party whose flirting with corporate responsibility has been limited to, say, a president wanting to remove legal protections from technology platforms because they added fact checks to his letters.
Even the use of corporate as a curse from Republicans is a recent event, and resistance from Delta, MLB, Coca-Cola and others against Georgia’s voting law is the latest in a series of incidents that have eroded the relationship between Republicans and corporate America. Democrats dominated spending on “dark money” in the 2020 election, and several corporations adopted a donor freeze after the January 6 pro-Trump riot on Capitol Hill. The Chamber of Commerce, the business group that was once one of the Republican Party’s most powerful external supporters, endorsed dozens of Democrats in the 2020 election and appears to be politically at its disposal. All of this happens in the midst of a changing electorate, in which Democrats have been accumulating more sophisticated voters, while Republicans orient their messages around distrust of powerful institutions that are supposed to attract the working class.
Congress itself is always a little late in the news, and the Republicans’ most powerful elected legislators are still traditional conservatives in the pro-business movement. But Representative Indiana Jim Banks, the newly installed chairman of the Republican Studies Committee, has urged the party to complete its transformation and compete with the “gift” that Donald Trump “gave the Republican Party”: “to permanently become the Party of the working class. “
In a recent memo to minority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, Banks wrote that Republicans needed to embrace the structure that Trump brought to the fore of the party: harsh opposition to both “illegal immigration and increased legal immigration,” free trade skepticism , “anti-wokeness,” and opposition to corporate entities “whose leadership decided to wage a cultural war against the values of the working class.” In this last line, Banks was quoting Rubio’s article explaining why he supported Amazon’s warehouse workers in Alabama in an attempt to form a union.
Rubio’s opinion piece, much like what we saw of this nascent Republican meddling in the fight against corporate America, was ridiculous. He doesn’t like Amazon’s cultural policy and doesn’t like Jeff Bezos, so he supports this bargaining unit’s efforts to organize itself in that company. This is not a labor policy, and he does not share thoughts on other urgent federal issues that revolve around Amazon, such as its negligible tax contributions.
If Republicans want to present themselves as the anti-corporate party, it takes more than photos of public opinion complaining about how a hypothetical multinational company bent to wake up leftists by dismantling, say, the racist mascot of their ketchup brand. And there are some policy opportunities underway for Republicans to demonstrate a more significant break with party ownership by corporate America.
Unfortunately, these policies would require them to work with Joe Biden. The president, for example, proposed a comprehensive multi-billion dollar infrastructure plan to be paid for a partial reversal of the corporate tax rate that Republicans instituted in 2017, a doubling of the corporate minimum tax that Republicans instituted and a crackdown on international policies tax heavens. In the meantime, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is working with allies to create a global minimum corporate tax rate to prevent a “bottoming race” between countries seeking to attract companies. The Biden government, separately, is looking to pass a law raising the federal minimum wage for workers, a change that has not been made for 14 years due to complete Republican opposition. And if Republicans want to show that they are ready to break the back of the corporate monopolies that are using their influence to wage a cultural war, they could support some of Biden’s most adversary nominees for Senate confirmation.
With some stray here or there, Republicans in Congress will not agree with any of this, not just out of an aversion to working with Democrats, but because they do not believe in what should be done. They are still tied to the supply-side economy and conservative movement, even after Trump showed how flexible Republican-based voters are in their dedication to small government and free markets. And although it is a notable change, they allow themselves to shout at big corporations – job creators! – they restricted this shouting to cultural warfare. Big corporations don’t mind throwing liberals a public relations bone for social justice, because they know that Republicans will always be there to protect their economic interests. When Republicans decide to break that bond, we can have a real conversation about the war between them and corporate America.
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