A post at the Daily Wire asks the question, “Remember When The Left Hated Big Business?”
Of course the left loves big business now. They haven’t changed their minds about capitalism. The Democratic Party is now openly and explicitly socialist. It’s even going full Communist, with growing calls to abolish the Second Amendment and to ignore the First Amendment, and with laws against “hate speech”.
It’s not that they’ve changed their minds. But the left now controls most of big business. Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google are hard left companies. They want socialism and even Communism for the rest of the country — just not for themselves. But that’s nothing new. Ayn Rand used the term “the aristocracy of pull” to describe life under a totalitarian, including Communist, regime. Under any dictatorship, those with connections to the rulers are excused from the irrational, unjust laws and rules to which everyone else must submit. They can label it “progressive”, but it’s nothing new.
Today’s left-wing, socialist-supporting, uncompromisingly Democratic corporations — Facebook, Twitter, Google, Starbucks, Netflix, all of them — can be utilized to attain the power, control and support that totalitarian-minded people on the left so crave. These companies are useful tools, or high-powered henchmen, who can help impose all the things leftists want to impose on the population, including but not limited to socialized medicine, government ownership of most private property and income, banishing gun ownership and outlawing “hate talk”, i.e. any talk leftists do not like.
The Daily Wire article [12-6-18] states:
Remember the days when the Left used to hate big business? Those days are long gone, with companies like Apple, Google and Facebook working in concert to further left-wing causes. Why did this happen? Andrew Klavan breaks it all down on Wednesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”
“The Left used to understand that corporations are power centers, and therefore prone to abuse their power,” said Klavan. “The Left used to be all about this! Not so long ago, remember, when the occupy movement was dumping litter all over the streets of America, they were sitting there going ‘the evil corporations!’ We used to laugh at them because they were on their iPhones, using Google and sending text messages. All these things they were using came from corporations.”
Despite the overwhelming dominance of leftist ideas in today’s culture, academia, media and big business world, certain objective facts cannot be altered. One fact is that you need money and property to advance whatever you wish to advance. You can’t outlaw property and profit if these things are required to generate the wealth to control people’s lives. So the next best thing — from a leftist point-of-view — is to mentally and morally beat the people who create the wealth into doing your bidding. And that’s precisely what the left has done. They have accomplished what no Marxist revolution aimed at taking over the government in America could have ever done: Taken over business and culture. The rest will follow.
Government and big business have largely become one in America. That’s all the left needs to guilt, prod and legislatively coerce all of us into doing what leftists and socialists feel entitled to force us to do. Yes, President Donald Trump has made that harder, for now, but the reality is still there, and what happens when there’s no longer a President Donald Trump? The issue is deeper than politics or government. It’s culture. They dominate education through public schools and have effectively outlawed non-leftist thought on most college campuses.
But business matters just as much, if not more, in America.
Leftists have figured out that in America, most people are defined by the corporate world which — through all it accomplishes in the pursuit of profit — justifiably dominates most of our lives. Without the achievements of big business, where would we all be? We’d be perishing or stagnating like in a third world country. Leftists and socialists have used the capitalist system they despise to turn corporate America and business enterprise against us. That’s their great strength. But there’s a lethal contradiction on the part of leftists too. They need the pursuit of profit and enterprise in order to attain and maintain the power they so crave. Donald Trump came out of the corporate world, and he’s no friend of leftism. He’s a reminder of their fatal contradiction and glaring weakness. It’s one reason they’re so enraged at the sight of him. He’s a reminder that they’re the ugliest hypocrites imaginable. In loving their material comforts and the fruits of for-profit progress, they contradict the moral smugness generated by a claimed hatred of these things. No contradiction like that is sustainable in an individual, nor in a movement.
Only a principled and unyielding defense for liberty, private property, unfettered capitalism and individual rights will save us from the leftists. But leftists are an absolutely intolerant and uncompromising bunch. They are ruthless and inhumane, more than most of us realize, and we will all find out if they ever attain the full power they want to have. They exploit any and all signs of weakness or contradiction they can find. In their evil and irrationality, they can be damn smart. That’s why they have won so many of the battles over the decades without fully winning the war. The ideological and political takeover of corporate America is their biggest victory yet. We’ll know they have won the war once the First and Second Amendments — the last men standing in the Bill of Rights — are gone. At that point, liberty-loving people are truly and fully underground, and it won’t be pretty.
Corporate America is on their side, it seems. That will have to change if we’re to survive as even a semi-free country.
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