Paul Sakuma/AP Photo
Here’s one good way to assess the state of establishment liberalism: Compare The New York Times’ 1619 Project to its special section—“Greed Is Good. Except When It’s Bad”—which ran last Sunday on the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s epochal Times essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”
Both projects endeavored to move the nation’s discourse in a progressive direction, but they differed in revealing ways. The 1619 Project, which sought to reframe our understanding of the nation’s history by putting our legacy of race-based slavery at the center of the American experience, posed a major challenge to the nation’s sense of its own identity and by so doing advanced the cause of reparations, though it was short on specific proposals. It engendered considerable criticism, including by longtime liberal historians who thought it overstated its case by misstating the relative weight of aspects of American history. These dissents weren’t part of the Project, however; the articles that the Times ran under the 1619 rubric all shared the Project’s basic perspective.
The Times’ retrospective on Friedman-Plus-50 was largely an account of the disastrous effect that Friedman’s writing—of which his Times essay was the prime culprit—and beliefs have had on America’s well-being in the subsequent half-century. The lead essay by Kurt Andersen documented how the “shareholder über alles” practices of the CEOs, bankers, and major investors whom Friedman was addressing have undone America’s once-thriving middle class. Most of the brief comments that the section also contained echoed Andersen’s critique: Among the commentators were Prospect founder Robert Reich, union leader Sara Nelson, and economists Joseph Stiglitz, Thea Lee, and Josh Bivens, who variously pointed out the need for demonetizing our politics, regulating corporations more adequately, and bolstering such countervailing institutions as unions.
But other commentators sang from different hymnals. Some—corporate or investment leaders including Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Starbucks’s Howard Schultz, and BlackRock’s Larry Fink—echoed the sentiments of the 2019 Business Roundtable that corporations can and should pay more heed to stakeholders and social needs. None of them, however, called for or even referenced the countervailing institutions or regulatory changes that are needed to produce real change in corporate and investment practices; all implied that such changes should trickle down from enlightened management. (I can’t think of any such changes that actually have, however, from the corporations whose CEOs signed the Roundtable’s declaration.) Other commentators—Home Depot’s Ken Langone, and various Hoover Institution and Republican economists—basically affirmed the soundness of Friedman’s essay.
Which is to say, the Times is more cautious or more fearful about appearing fully onboard for a remaking of American capitalism than it is about appearing fully onboard for a reassessment of American racism as the central fact of our national narrative. Put those two together and you have a pretty fair assessment of where establishment liberalism—even establishment left-liberalism—is just now.
