Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Corporate leaders including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration, in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, January 20, 2025.
You probably know the old joke about the three greatest lies: One size fits all, the check is in the mail—and I won’t embarrass myself by repeating the third one.
But the greatest lie of all is that democracy and capitalism are natural complements. Both, supposedly, thrive on free inquiry, free markets, and the rule of law.
Milton Friedman argued that capitalism and freedom were two sides of the same coin. More recently, the Harvard economist Rebecca Henderson wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “The free market is one of the great achievements of the human race. It has been a driver of innovation, opportunity, and wealth around the world. But free markets need free political systems to succeed.”
Well, think again.
In the past weeks, we’ve seen a near-total capitulation of capitalists to incipient dictatorship. And the oligarchy that coexists so amicably with Trump is far from Henderson’s “free market.” A series of cartels is more like it. Big business likes that just fine.
In the corporate cave-in to Trump, the stampede to dump DEI is only part of the story. The wall of shame includes Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Toyota, Apple’s Tim Cook, and OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who all donated $1 million to the Trump inauguration—a pure personal slush fund. All told, Trump raised more than $200 million from corporate America.
In December, Disney paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against its subsidiary ABC News. In January, Facebook parent Meta settled Trump’s claims with a $22 million payment plus $3 million in legal fees. Google Maps even changed the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America.
Some media such as the Associated Press, which Trump barred from White House press briefings, are fighting back and letting the chips fall, but precious few non-media corporations are resisting Trump as a matter of democratic principle.
Long before Trump, American capitalists were undermining democracy by substituting money for votes and trying to destroy the most powerful expression of worker voice: trade unionism. If we have to rely on capitalists to defend democracy, God help us. Indeed, the road back to democracy requires containing both Trumpism and predatory capitalism.
THE GREAT PROPHETIC SCHOLAR of how capitalist excess destroyed democracy was Karl Polanyi. In his masterwork, The Great Transformation, written in 1944, Polanyi explained how the dystopian endeavor to turn all of human society into markets created socially unbearable displacement and insecurity, and drove citizens into the arms of fascists.
“Fear would grip the people, and leadership would be thrust upon those who offered an easy way out at whatever ultimate price,” Polanyi wrote. “The time was ripe for the fascist solution.”
Once fascists took power, big business made its peace and was pleased that the restoration of order included crushing free trade unions and created a better business climate. Mussolini referred to his new order as a corporate state.
In Chile, the dictator Augusto Pinochet deregulated the economy with the help of American free-market advisers known as Los Chicago Boys. They helped him privatize Chile’s social security system. There is no record of the Boys objecting to Pinochet’s human rights atrocities.
Even before Hitler came to power in 1933, major German corporations were contributing to the Nazi Party. Two of the largest donors were Krupp and the conglomerate IG Farben, which made everything from A to Z—Bayer Aspirin to the Zyklon B used in gas chambers. On February 20, 1933, Hitler met with 25 of German’s leading industrialists, promised to destroy free unions, sought additional financial support for the Nazi Party, and told them that “private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.”
German industry thrived on Hitler’s rearmament. For every Oskar Schindler, the industrialist and Nazi Party member who took grave risks to save 1,200 Jews who worked as forced laborers in his factories, there were thousands of German businesses that got along with the Nazis just fine. Many American companies with German subsidiaries, including IBM, had close alliances with Hitler.
THERE IS ONE ANOMALY IN THIS STORY. As Polanyi explained, big business supported Hitler and Mussolini because they promised respite from repeated crises and a restoration of order under fascist auspices.
But Trump promises disorder.
If you are trying to stage a coup and become dictator, a certain amount of disorder is part of the transition until you consolidate power. But Trump, uniquely among history’s fascists, seems to crave disorder for its own sake.
So far, that has not scared off big business, which is too fearful of Trump’s vindictiveness to push back. But if the disorder becomes severe enough, some businesses may have second thoughts.
Even so, that doesn’t make corporate America, or capitalism in general, an ally of democracy. No matter what the Supreme Court says, corporations are not citizens. The struggle for democracy needs to be fought and won by the people.
