Commentary
Merriam-Webster defines a republic as “a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.”
In our republic, Democrat activists now aim to eliminate the Senate filibuster, which requires a two-thirds majority to pass most legislation; to do away with the Electoral College, which allows even the least populated states to have a say in electing the American president; and to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional justices to, in effect, legislate via the judiciary. As I wrote for Independence Day, Americans should heed Benjamin Franklin’s admonition about how precarious republics can be. Franklin is said to have told a woman outside the Constitutional Convention that delegates had bestowed “a republic, if you can keep it” upon the populace of the young country.
But I fear the notion of a republic is ceding to an oligarchy; rule by a small clique of phenomenally wealthy elites who are able to thwart even the democratic process to affect the daily lives of Americans.
A Long History of Money and Influence
Money, of course, has long had an outsized influence on the democratic process. Most of the founders were wealthy merchants, traders, and planters. Today, multi-millionaires tend to dominate most of the membership of the Senate and a lot of the House. Just last night, Dan Goldman, one of the heirs to the Levi-Strauss fortune, effectively “purchased” a plurality win for a seat in the House of Representatives by dropping a reported $5 million of his own money to win the Democratic primary in the newly created, deep-blue, 10th New York Congressional District.
"The Bosses of the Senate" by Joseph Keppler in Puck magazine (1889). Public Domain
But all those wealthy senators and representatives faced the voters in a democratic process and had to earn their support to make policy. And sometimes, money alone doesn’t carry the day. In another primary yesterday, Carl Paladino, a multi-millionaire real estate developer in western New York, appears to have lost the Republican nod to run in the red-leaning 23rd New York Congressional District after contributing at least $1.5 million to his own campaign.
But the danger to the republic—and “democracy”—is more nefarious than just fat-cat rich guys and their donors. The republic is imperiled now, not at the ballot box, but by billionaire fund managers, CEOs, and former CEOs imposing their personal views on publicly held corporations to influence corporate, national, and international policymakers.
To be clear, this isn’t about corporate “rent-seeking,” the phrase economists use to describe companies seeking special favors from the government to subsidize their business or inhibit competitors. No, this is about companies going well outside their lane to impose their political, social, and even ethical or religious views on their employees and suppliers.
American Express, the charge-and-credit card company, has been slammed for alleged “woke” corporate policies in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at that Manhattan Institute, alleged to Fox Business’s Stuart Varney in March that “American Express is hosting a critical race theory-style training program for its employees, teaching them that the United States is fundamentally racist, that capitalism is fundamentally racist, and then promoting the idea that all of their white employees have white privilege that they need to atone for.”
But that should come as no surprise: the leading shareholder of American Express, with more than 20 percent ownership, is Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company of billionaire investor Warren Buffet. Buffet, of course, is a long-time Democrat booster and big dollar donor, closely aligned with Bill and Hillary Clinton. But Buffett insists his support for policy goals supported by the Left is all about his shareholders. A couple of years ago, after spending about $30 billion on wind turbines to turn Iowa into the “Saudi Arabia of wind-power,” Buffet insisted he did not make the investment to “do good” but to take advantage of production credits for wind farms. Companies, Buffett says, should not be “moral arbiters.” (And we certainly believe that he believes that, don’t we?)
But at least Buffet seems to be (mostly) staying in his lane and acting as a mere corporate rent seeker, exploiting governmental favoritism to enhance his bottom line.
Bill Gates, along with his ex-wife and their “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” is quite a bit further out over his skis than Buffett. He reportedly gave $1 million to fund an “Equitable Math Curriculum” that had, among its basic precepts, this rather questionable notion about Mathematics borne of Critical Race Theory:
“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict." [Emphasis in the original.]If only I had been able to convince my Calculus professor of that theory in my college mid-term.
Gates has also advanced the idea that humans should abandon animal meat proteins in favor of “synthetic beef.“ ”You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time,” the billionaire software tycoon said. Gates was wildly ridiculed for the statements. Now the nation’s largest owner of farmland, with over a quarter-million acres, he’s also piqued the interest of elected representatives; the people we choose to inquire about such things:
It’s Not Just the Billionaires
Self-described “progressives” on the Left side of the political aisle have been pressuring executives of investment companies to adopt their agenda for some time.A professor at the Left-leaning New School, Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of one-time Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, has criticized opinion commentators on Fox News. In January, after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Riots, Khrushcheva accused Fox News of “defending the violence and promoting baseless conspiracy theories.”
But then she went on to name and shame executives of funds that are major shareholders of Fox News parent company NewsCorp. In what seemed to me something akin to a veritable doxing of these investment executives, the professor wrote of Bill Stromberg, CEO of T.Rowe Price, a 16 percent shareholder of NewsCorp, that while “Stromberg presents himself as a good citizen and a good Catholic, he clearly has little regard for the Bible’s teachings.” She called Kelly Ayotte, the former senator from New Hampshire who sits on the company board “morally bankrupt.”
It’s Increasingly the Administrative State, Too
At the governmental level, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been moving since 2021 to assess claims of so-called “ESG” (Economic, Social, Governance) reporting that has come into fashion among the investment community in recent years and about which I have written previously.These initiatives seem to be, in the SEC’s words, “to identify any material gaps or misstatements in issuers’ disclosure of climate risks under existing rules. The task force will also analyze disclosure and compliance issues relating to investment advisers’ and funds’ ESG strategies.” In other words, the securities regulator will be monitoring so-called, “Greenwashing,” the practice whereby companies make only performative claims of ESG activities to enhance stock values. That seems like reasonable and prudent regulation, rather like monitoring companies’ financials to protect investors seeking out ESG companies.
Some fear, though, that it may happen that ESG “monitoring” to ensure ESG claims are supported could, instead, morph into enforcing coercive ESG standards for all corporations. Robert Shillman, now-retired founder and chairman of industrial sensor company Cognex, was quoted in the Financial Times a few years ago as saying that, while he was happy the government was not yet imposing ESG reporting, “unfortunately, that is not the case for large, institutional fund managers,” of the type that I have described above.
Billionaires should not deign to assert some prerogative to impose their personal values on the rest of us, and particularly in areas that do not have some intimate nexus to their businesses. Nor should we allow progressive academics or politicians to bully company shareholders and fund managers to impose their agendas on publicly traded corporations because those agendas can easily affect our everyday way of life. When we let them do so, we surrender Franklin’s treasured republic piecemeal.
