You don’t become a plutocrat of modern American capitalism without knowing all the right things to say in the public square. Among the managerial and strategic skills and others needed to get to the top of a big company, an ideological suppleness is crucial, an intellectual flexibility that enables the corporate chieftain to bend his views on political and cultural matters to the prevailing winds. It’s the sort of flexibility most easily achieved by not having a backbone.
For the past few years, when cultural progressives dominated the conversation in polite American society, chief executives rushed to demonstrate their commitment to all the shibboleths of the age. Mostly white males, they would boast about their company’s vigorous commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in hiring and promotion; pronounce, from their kerosene-guzzling private jets, their support for “sustainable” growth; leap on social media every time some big news story demanded they show their devotion to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and other trendy causes.
Yet since Donald Trump was elected president, American business leaders have been busy repositioning themselves. In Davos last week, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, the intellectual gymnastics were on impressive display. A panel of chief executives I chaired insisted that Trump’s plans for across-the-board tariffs would do no harm to the US economy, and that his efforts to put a complete stop to most immigration, depriving the economy of the cheap labour that’s helped power US performance in the last few years, wouldn’t hurt growth.
Best of all was when I asked these bosses, some of whom have been the most eager promoters of diversity policies, what they would do now Trump had, in effect, abolished DEI. Their answer: America has always been a meritocracy. Talent, not racial, gender or sexual identity should be the determinant of hiring and promotion in the workforce.
To be fair, the corporate leaders are not alone in suddenly locating the nearest MAGA hat and disowning everything they’ve said for years. Media organisations that were once leaders of “resistance” to the man they had dubbed a fascist are lining up to demonstrate their loyalty with payment of tribute; some, such as Disney, by acquiescing to hefty defamation claims from him in lawsuits, others, like Amazon, with a $US40 million contract for a documentary about Melania.
Members of the Republican Party who once saw their role as reining in Trump’s excesses now indulge them: so far not a single one of even his more eccentric cabinet choices has been voted down by senators.
The timidity and acquiescence are raising concerns that America is losing the pluralism, the complex diversity that has been the hallmark of its liberal democracy for a century or more. That it is leading the global charge towards illiberal democracy; a system in which voters still get to choose their leaders but the delicate network of checks and balances – provision for flourishing opposition, protections for minority rights – have been eroded.
Trump’s strongman instincts were never in doubt but there now seems less institutional capacity or willingness to restrain them. The early actions of his second term deepen these suspicions.
One might have expected his withdrawal of security protection, out of spite, for former aides who have been menaced with explicit terrorist threats to be opposed by powerful voices in the national security establishment. It hasn’t. He seems intent on pursuing his vendetta against General Mark Milley, the military chief in Trump’s first term, with aides now investigating whether to reduce him in rank in retirement. Milley, to be sure, overstepped the mark in openly criticising the commander-in-chief while in office, but again, the lack of any institutional resistance to Trump’s revenge is revealing.
As with all claims about Trump’s threat to established norms, these concerns can be overdone. One senior European former official tried to tell me last week at Davos that the new intimacy between Trump and the leaders of technology companies – vividly emphasised by their presence on the dais at his inauguration – was a dark, unprecedented moment for the world’s leading democracy.
I had to laugh, and point out that no one seemed concerned for the state of democracy when tech company bosses worked hand-in-glove with Democratic presidents, and liberals such as the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg could move smoothly from high political office to key positions at places like Facebook. Nor when those same companies actively blocked the publication of information in the 2020 election that might be harmful to the Democratic candidate.
How “liberal” and “democratic” in any case was the liberal democracy now being mourned by those who have lost power? The takeover of the major US institutions by people of a monolithically progressive viewpoint (unelected for the most part) in the past 20 years happened without popular approval and resulted in an increasingly authoritarian imposition of cultural, economic and social norms. And America is still a nation of laws. The courts have already moved to challenge and block some of the things Trump wants.
Still, there is no doubt that the institutions of American democracy have become more pliant in the past decade or so. Trump, through the extraordinary hold he has over his voters, has established a unique position of popular authority over the US government – and he shows absolutely no forbearance in using that authority to further his goals.
Whether this proves to be, like so much about Trump, uniquely personal to him or whether it marks the beginning of a new institutionalised illiberalism in the world’s most successful liberal democracy will be perhaps the most important question for the next four years.
The Times
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