The left is always saying that big business really runs this country. There may be some truth to this claim. The irony is that big business is supporting the left, at least on social and moral issues. When corporations from Apple to Walmart turned against Indiana’s religious freedom act to support the gay agenda, notice how Republican politicians fell in line.
Charles Lane says that the Indiana controversy may be the Gettysburg of the Culture Wars, the turning point, after which social conservatives will start retreating until they lose their political clout completely. He says that modern conservatism has depended on an alliance between pro-business free market advocates and social conservatives. But this alliance is unstable. He quotes a scholar who refers to “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” saying that free market economics ultimately destroys traditional values.
There was arguably a time when capitalism and moral traditionalism went together, when capitalism depended on the values of self-control, restraint, and deferred gratification, as may still apply to small business today. But today’s consumer capitalism depends on instant gratification, the satisfaction of all desires, and constant change. Our financial system won’t even pay interest on a savings account, but rather depends on having everything now and going in debt. This creates a cultural climate, so the argument goes, that will undermine traditional moral values. But is this correct? Would any other economic system be any better?
From Charles Lane, Will the GOP rethink its ‘traditional values’ high ground? – The Washington Post:
Indianapolis may go down in history as the Gettysburg of the culture wars, the place where forces flying the flags of modernism, diversity and individual rights outflanked the would-be upholders of traditional values, forced them into a tactical retreat — and maybe even set them on the road to long-term defeat.
Not since Pickett’s Charge has a group of Americans misjudged their strategic situation more completely than did Gov. Mike Pence and his fellow Republican backers of Indiana’s religious freedom restoration law. They thought they could define conscientious objection to same-sex marriage as the moral high ground, then seize it; they thought wrong.
Now, the bottom may be dropping out of Republican Party ideology. For decades, the two pillars of that ideology, in domestic policy, have been free-market economics and social traditionalism.
This made a certain amount of sense. Vigorous capitalist growth depends on savings and investment. To the extent they encouraged Americans to seek their ultimate reward in the afterlife, rather than pursue pleasure in the here and now, old-fashioned religiously based social and moral values promoted a pro-capitalist long-term perspective.
In many ways, though, the free market undermines traditional values. Growth depends on consumption, too, especially so in the postwar U.S. economy. Delayed gratification is bad for sales; a vast corporate marketing apparatus has grown up to discourage it, along with a vast consumer-finance industry.
Sociologist Daniel Bell identified these “cultural contradictions of capitalism” more than 40 years ago. “The breakup of the traditional bourgeois value system,” he wrote, “was brought about by the bourgeois economic system — by the free market, to be precise.”
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