ICYMI: Shameful Opportunists - Why Big Business Backs Fascists
ICYMI: Shameful Opportunists - Why Big Business Backs Fascists
Originally published December 7, 2022, Jason Stanley explains why big business supports authoritarians and why that’s bad business
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I was just speaking with my friend Dmitrii Kovegin as we plan Bette’s Tuesday Happy Hour for this week — Warnings from Soviet Russia — and he asked me a very sensible question: where are the billionaires and business leaders supporting pro-democracy efforts? Why are the pro-democracy activists scrimping by and the propagandists so well-financed?
For one thing, it’s clear that Big Business has memory holed the coup. We are already seeing the Money Men who turned their back on Trump after J6 returning, suckling up to his corrupt bosom for the promise of renewed tax breaks.
But as Jason Stanley explained to RadPod last year, Big Business may back fascism, but fascism doesn’t back Big Business. Just ask the pasta company that Putin nationalized last week.
So for new members and as a refresher for veteran members, here is Jason Stanley with an explainer on Bad Business.
Shameful Opportunists - Why Big Business Backs Fascists
Imagine my surprise all those years ago when I was investigating Trump funder Robert Mercer’s myriad ties to Russia, and I learned his hedge fund profited from Trump’s immigration policies. Renaissance Technologies purchased millions of dollars worth of shares in immigrant detention centers, and watched their stock prices soar.
I recall how I wrongly assumed when Trump was installed in 2016 with the help of the Russian military that business leaders who had criticized him on the campaign trail would exert effort ousting him.
I was such a sweet, naive kid back then.
They all lined up to kiss the ring, while we gals marched in the streets.
When I interviewed Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, with the RadPod team a few weeks ago, Stanley laid it out in brass tacks:
“When fascism wins it does so by co-opting the business elite,” he said. “Fascism allies with the business elite against the cultural and intellectual elite.
“You appeal to the billionaire class by saying, ‘We’re gonna cut your taxes. We’re gonna make sure regulations don’t apply to you. We’re gonna take care of the labor movement so you don’t need to worry about that.’ That’s why big business got behind the Nazis.”
Hitler claimed trade unions “hinder efficiency in business and in the life of the whole nation.” But the true point is ensuring stark economic inequality.
Stanley said it’s important to explain to the business elite that fascism isn’t good for them.
“It’s not a good business environment, because it’s just about the loyalists. Are you sure you’re not going to have a business that the leader and his party are going to covet? In a country like Hungary, if Orban’s friends want your property, the courts will start going after you. It’s obviously much worse in Russia.”
The author of Catch-22, Joseph Heller, wrote: “It was almost no trick at all..to turn vice into virtue, slander into truth..arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, sadism into justice..It merely required no character.”
I often think of those words as I investigate the times in which we live. In Catch-22, Heller illustrates the greed of war, and I worried how long it would take for Trump to drop bombs on Americans and call it patriotism. I got my answer on January 6, 2021.
In the film version of Catch-22, a “shameful opportunist” explains his ideology: “I was a Fascist when Mussolini was on top. Now that he has been deposed, I am anti-Fascist. When the Germans were here, I was fanatically pro-German. Now I'm pro-America! You'll find no more loyal partisan..than myself.”
I learned from Democracy In Chains author Nancy MacLean that far-right extremists are trying to “save” capitalism from democracy.
It needs to be the other way around. We need democracy to save us from far-right extremists, and we need business leaders to be called out for supporting a party of insurrectionists.
They’re not going to like fascism either.
—Heidi Siegmund Cuda, December 7, 2022, BetteDangerous.com
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More reporting from Jason Stanley here:
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I was glad to see you talk about Nancy MacLean‘s remarkable book “Democracy in Chains.” It’s rather dense reading—she is a scholar. But I found that I couldn’t put it down. So much of American politics that I could not make sense of suddenly made sense. It was a great follow-up to Jane Mayer’s groundbreaking work “Dark Money,” which is a must-read in my opinion, for every American.