Sarah Haan writes that to understand American authoritarianism, it is less useful to analyze the strategies of elected dictators worldwide than to examine how business leaders in the United States have fled business democracy.
Six weeks after President Donald Trump’s second term, experts sound the alarm of democracy. Trump quickly followed his inauguration with an attack on the bureaucratic state, threats to the rule of law and the invitation of rich business leaders, in particular Elon Musk, to redo the government according to their interests. Two political scientists, Steven Levitsky from Harvard and Lucan Way from the University of Toronto, have drawn very deserved attention since a thoughtful room In Foreign affairs This is looking for elected officials from dictators from around the world for clues to what Americans can expect after a democratic breakup. They argue that Trump’s return to the White House will bring “a non -fascist dictatorship or one party competitive authoritarianism—A system in which the parties compete for the elections, but the abuse of power of the outgoing president inclines the rules of the game against the opposition. »»
From the first line of corporate capitalism, however, this assessment seems to be missing something important: public and private governance converges rapidly. The game book of our current anti-democratic turning point in American policy comes from corporate governance, not from authoritarian governments in distant places such as Hungary and Turkey. “Competitive authoritarianism” has another name in the United States
This is called “corporate democracy”. This is the way all American companies are governed.
Business leaders do not inherit their positions or seize them by force brute. They are elected to them by processes that involve the formal characteristics of political democracy: voting rights, expressive rights and elections administration. Business elections so often occur that business leaders are almost always in an electoral cycle or prepare one. However, who would say that companies are recognizedly democratic? The democratic characteristics of American corporate governance are dormant in a system that mainly produces electoral victories for those who are already at the helm of society. Tilted is therefore the playground which, in most corporate elections, no one cares about running against holders. Why run when you have no chance of winning? Massively, societies have the form but not the substance of democracy.
This is the model that Trump and his supporters want to transfer to our policy. Instead of “competitive authoritarianism”, we must recognize this as “corporate Authoritarianism.
The aim of corporate authoritarianism is to strengthen a small group at the top of a high -value company, where they can benefit from wealth and power and little practical responsibility. To get there, corporate authoritarianism uses real elections which, although technically faked, are so biased that they are practically the test of opponents. Directors general and Musk may never be used in the public service, but they have spent years perfecting a particular set of anti-democratic skills.
Levitsky and Way’s work attracts the behavior of elected dictators from around the world to predict the future path of American authoritarianism. In truth, there is a direct business analog for practically all the strategies they cite as communes to political dictators. Like the autocratic governments elected armaments the departments of justice and tax agencies and use prosecution to continue their detractors, business leaders also do so.
Years ago, General Motors went after a criticismRalph Nader, so aggressively that he was publicly apologized. More recently, BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world and supporter of Climate Solutionswas a target of the fossil fuels industry. Last year, Exxon Mobil continued Two of his own investors Simply for asking a shareholder vote on a climate -related issue. We must not confuse them as public relations move; These are anti-democratic strategies designed to intimidate detractors and influence the result of business elections. And they are probably more familiar and inspiring to prevail than anything Recep Erdoğan does in Türkiye.
In short, if we are looking for a roadmap for the authoritarianism of the 21st century, we must examine the toolbox of strategies that corporate autocrats have developed for the reproduction of democracy in their own organizations.
One of the signal ideas behind companies’ authoritarianism is the “passivity of shareholders”. The idea is that voting in companies lacks value and, as it also imposes costs, rational investors will voluntarily give up their voting power. In corporate governance, the arguments in favor of the passivity of shareholders are generally dressed in mathematics and formulated in terms of economic efficiency. The authoritarian of the company promotes a culture in which passivity is celebrated as virtuous and intelligent, and the descending decision -making occurs naturally because Voters rationally chosen it.
As business leaders enter the government, we must expect them to push passive citizenship in politics. A Trump affiliate who is currently doing this is Curtis Yarvin, the self -proclaimed political theorist, who recently told A New York Times Journalist that he does not bother to vote in political elections because the vote is not important.
Another decision of the authoritarian signal of companies is to use granular control of the elections administration to make the task difficult and unpleasant. Historically, this was an essential strategy for business leaders, as they can often vote for voters who stay at home thanks to a proxy vote. You cannot vote by proxy during a political election (still), but the authorities of companies are likely to have fewer scruples to remove electoral participation than regular elected officials.
In American policy, the elections are decentralized in thousands of independent jurisdictions, which protect them from autocratic control. The elections to companies, on the other hand, are centralized and funded, planned and exploited by the current group of leadership of the company. This allowed business leaders to develop a whole range of voting removal techniques, such as the requirement of tickets or pre-registration to vote (in addition to the identification of voters); Move business elections in obscure places that are difficult to reach; hold elections in tiny places; Prohibiting shareholders who are also employees of the company to vote in person; And announce the results of the elections before all the votes were expressed. Recently, members of the Congress expressed their concern The fact that Trump looked for greater control over American postal service because he wants to control the delivery and return of postal bulletins. It is an important overview.
The fact is that corporate law has always tolerated a good amount of manipulation during business elections; He insulated business leaders of responsibility with Very complex legal doctrines and a large corporate law bar. When business leaders assume political leadership, we must expect them to devote considerable resources to render the elections unpleasant and heavy, and to build a faithful law service which exercises legal complexity as a sword.
The unequal voting rules, in which the votes of certain actors count more than others, also call on the autocrats of companies. We have an official commitment to a person in politics in politics, of course, even if it only dates from the 1960s, but the electoral college system, used to elect the president, is not so constrained. As part of the electoral college, the vote of a Wyoming citizen has more than someone’s vote in California, which explains why a candidate can win the popular vote while losing the presidency.
The first laws on companies sometimes reduced The voting power of major shareholders, which equalized the rules of the game between investors of different economic classes. This has changed when the investment community settled in a single vote, accepting more InEquality in exchange for a rule which has helped to facilitate the growth of the stock markets. But even it was short -lived. At the end of the 20th century, societies like Google reviving an unequal vote. This time, however, the actions of rich investors carry more Votes that Ordinary Investors’ shares. The “double class” or “multi-class” stock structures are common today and, in certain companies, are crucial to centralize the power of companies in small groups. Mark Zuckerberg is Meta’s de facto decision maker, although he has less than 14% of his actions, because his actions each bear 10 votes, while ordinary shares have only one vote.
When the leaders of technological companies enter politics, we must expect them to explore greater inequality in the vote and exploit existing inequalities. Political experts were caught when Elon Musk used lotteries to bring the Americans in the Swing States to be registered to vote before the 2024 elections. They should have expected a business autocrat to be differences in voting power or experiment with the purchase of voting. The purchase of voting is not in itself Illegal during business elections, where tight races can involve creative exchange forms.
The history of democracy of American companies also suggests potential sources of democratic resilience. After two centuries of efforts from business leaders to kill the democratic characteristics of corporate governance, the heart rate of democracy is still there. What explains that?
Beyond the strong cultural commitment that Americans feel for democracy, there is a history of individual investors resulting from business leaders. The elections to companies provide a place for militant shareholders to face and question the managers of a company in front of an audience. This practice is an important mechanism of responsibility and an expressive outlet for dissent. In addition, free markets require the free flow of precise information on the performance of the company. Market players reject disinformation and securities markets do not tolerate the deceptive declarations of business leaders. The securities regulators pursue them as fraud and investors are looking for profits by exchanging on the truth. If we take a lesson in the persistence of business democracy, we must take the truth more seriously and seek means to demand it from political leaders as robust as we do with public leaders.
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