Persuasion

They’re the party of government. They should start acting like it.

This month’s election was not just a defeat for the Democrats. It was the end of the Democratic Party as we know it. The one conclusion that everybody seems to share in common is that the Democrats, to reconstitute themselves, need to make some bold moves. But almost nobody has any idea what those bold moves are.

The main reason that the Democrats have been unwilling to flag corporate giveaways as their core issue is that the party is hopelessly indebted to corporations as their donor base. But the 2024 election demonstrated the limitations of money in elections. The Democrats outspent Republicans by $460 million in the presidential race and it got them nothing. A coherent message is well worth a sacrifice of funding.

For my money, a better approach is to be found in the writing of people like Michael Lind, a journalist and writer at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sohrab Ahmari, editor-in-chief of the online magazine Compact. One of their key points is that other countries—as America did at the height of its prosperity—have “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations are answerable to wage boards, labor, and elements of society: to “stakeholders” broadly construed. In the late 1970s, however, the Anglo-American world made a radical departure to “shareholder capitalism,” in which shareholder value—or the very dubious morality of “shareholder ethics”—became the sole economic determinant. It always was questionable as an economic theory and, as Jack Welch, one of the architects of shareholder value, later put it, “Strictly speaking, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world.”