Mitch McConnell is an absolute treat. You may hate him (and you should) but you have to respect him. The path for McConnell to become the most powerful American politician in recent history (non-presidents bracket) was illuminated by his recognition of one simple yet powerful truth.
None of this shit matters.
Hypocrisy, comity, bipartisanship, fiscal responsibility -- no one cares about any of it. McConnell’s weaponization of this ontological fact of American politics has been the most important political innovation of the past decade plus. It’s now completely acceptable for a politician to directly contradict themselves, blatantly lie, pursue nakedly anti-democratic policy -- if those things are done in the service of building or maintaining power for their party. Republicans have been the primary beneficiaries of this development, but Democrats are learning too. We went from “believe women'' to “that crazy broad is just looking for a payday” as far as Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo are concerned. Trump is a venal liar, but the guy who claimed he was arrested in South Africa for supporting Mandela is an honest guy who wants to restore our national soul.
I like to think that somewhere in the secluded freshwater pond McConnell calls home, he noticed that the Democratic party was beginning to embrace the strategy of just saying bullshit with a straight face. He stood up on his hind legs, shook the bacteria-laden pond residue from his neck paunch and declared to all of the other forest creatures: “They think they can play my own game better than me, I’ll show them!”
He put on his ill-fitting human-suit, threw his ill-fitting Brooks Brothers suit on top of that and called a press conference where he discussed the mounting corporate opposition to a new Georgia GOP voting law that would seriously hamper the ability of poor people and Black people to vote. Especially those who would vote for the Democratic party. Here is the money quote:
“I found it completely discouraging to find a bunch of corporate CEOs getting in the middle of politics ... My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.”
If you can’t respect the nerve it takes to denounce corporate involvement in political matters while also being the single largest recipient of campaign donations from CEOs and pushing legislation literally written by corporations, then I must question your ability to enjoy life. Shame is just something McConnell has his servants use to wipe the back sweat from his shell. For McConnell, hypocrisy is just a Greek word that means, “Who gon check me, boo?”
I know it doesn’t really need to be said, but just for context, here are McConnell’s words while celebrating the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections:
“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process ... the Constitution protects their right to express themselves about political candidates and issues up until Election Day"
This fucking guy…
Plenty of people will write about McConnell’s spectacular hypocrisy, but as we’ve already covered, it doesn’t matter. The Republicans will suffer no political price for their newfound antagonism to corporate interests. The only thing their base asks of them is that they make Democrats mad. There’s not much use is talking about Republican hypocrisy anymore, if there ever was. Thanks for that, Mitch!
But there is something interesting about Republicans lashing out at their big wet corporate daddies. More than interesting, it may be important.
It’s cliché to say that our two parties are the same. They are not the same. This country is, and always has been, more stable and more humane under Democratic leadership. That being said, this means that the country is more stable and more humane under Democrats than when it is run by Republicans--which is a very low bar. But not being the same doesn’t mean that the parties don’t share the same goal: completing the evolution of liberal democratic society into a neo-feudal hellhole, where the majority of citizens exist to produce wealth for a minority of elites.
The differences lie in the details. The Democrats want their dystopian future to be run by a multiracial group of credentialed technocrats. The experts. They want strict rules so that eventually the country can be governed by algorithms. They want to do the bare minimum to keep the ship afloat, while shunting off as much responsibility for the public good as they can onto a cadre of unelected billionaires who think they can end world hunger through futures trading. The Republicans believe the ruling class should maintain a sort of aesthetic consistency. They have convinced themselves that the best way to maintain American capitalism is for people with money to have even more money and be allowed to do whatever they want. They want strict hierarchies, in which everyone knows their place and is fully aware it’s their own fault for being in that place.
Since the material endpoints of both Republican and Democratic politics are mostly indistinguishable, the parties differentiate themselves through culture and rhetoric. Since politics is no longer a means of affecting material change, consumption is now the only way for people to express their political values and personal virtue. Social conservatives eat at Chick-Fil A, progressive liberals buy organic meats at Whole Foods. People who value facts watch MSNBC, people who revere patriotism watch Fox news. Hippies buy rolled foam mattresses from podcasts, Real Americans™ buy Black Rifle Coffee from crypto white nationalists. And so on.
Because consumption is now synonymous with political virtue, people demand that the brands and products they consume also publicly align with their values. Corporations now have to pick a side, and the country is generally much more socially liberal than it was in the halcyon days of movement conservatism. In the marketplace of ideas, wokeness is the smart stock to buy. Liberals are living the dream of Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher.
Reactionary conservative consumption might be enough to keep a company like My Pillow afloat, but for larger firms like Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Home Depot, and the MLB, the ability to grow exponentially and increase market share is dependent on how their brand is managed. Coke is based in Atlanta. If they were to remain silent on Georgia’s racist voting law, it might affect their relationship with their biggest brand ambassador, Lebron James. Same with Nike and the MLB, who use the popularity of professional athletes of color to market their products. The owner of Home Depot also owns the Atlanta Falcons of the NFL. As popular athletes elect to use their public profiles to platform social justice issues, the companies that make massive profits from their labor have found it necessary for their bottom line to follow suit.
I guess we should talk a bit about Georgia's voting bill. It’s racist. There, we talked about it.
In all seriousness, the bill is a direct response to the success of local activists and organizers who did yeoman's work in getting the vote out and turning the state blue in the last election. Republicans have been lying the problem of widespread Democratic voter fraud into existence for decades now, and this is the fruit of their labor. We should be clear: When they say voter fraud, especially in a state like Georgia, they mean that Black people are voting and they don’t like that. The bill restricts methods of voting that allow Black people from rural areas to vote, as well as making it unnecessarily difficult for people in majority Black and Democratic urban areas to get into a polling place or drop off an absentee ballot. In the event that restricting voter access isn’t enough to depress the Black and Democratic vote, the bill gives the GOP controlled state legislature the ability to supersede and dismiss local poll officials when they turn in results that Republicans don’t like.
The purpose of this bill is to help Republicans win elections by suppressing the turnout of people who would most likely vote for the Democrat. This is how they’ve been able to exercise power in government as a minority party that constantly loses the popular vote in elections. When Republicans get power they use it almost exclusively in three ways: to change laws and rules to help them maintain power, to punish their ideological and cultural enemies in order to excite their reactionary base, and to benefit their corporate sponsors. The last of these makes up the bulk of the Republican legislative agenda. So the question becomes, why are these corporations coming out so strongly against a bill that will keep the protectors of their financial interests in power?
The answer is that they know the same thing Mitch McConnell knows: None of this shit matters.
Whether Republicans are in control of Georgia or Democrats are, large corporations feel fairly confident that they’ll be looked after. The social capital that comes from appearing woke and concerned about the interests of Black voters is worth more to them than the marginal policy advantages of having Republicans retain power. But their money is certainly not where their mouth is. For Coca-Cola, 2020 was the first time since 2008 that their political action committee spent more money on Democratic candidates for federal office than Republicans. Around 13% more to be precise. They actually still donated more money to Republican-affiliated PACs than Democratic ones, including giving $10,000 to the One Georgia PAC, which is affiliated with David Perdue. You might remember Perdue for losing his senate re-election campaign to sentient popsicle stick John Ossoff and then co-authoring a letter with fellow loser and malfunctioning robot Kelly Loeffler alleging widespread voter fraud and urging the Georgia Secretary of State to step down for letting Democrats win.
Delta also gave 10 grand to Perdue, and Home Depot gave $15,000 each to both Perdue and Loeffler. Major League Baseball gave $5,000 to our testudine friend Mitch McConnell. One has to wonder how, in 2020, these corporations had no idea that helping Republicans win elections would result in those Republicans trying to restrict voting access for minorities. Especially when they have a long and storied history of saying and doing just that.
We aren’t here to talk about hypocrisy though. Hypocrisy is dead as a useful rhetorical weapon. The interesting thing is what a public break between large corporations and Republicans means for the political landscape going forward. Corporations have dutifully supported both parties because it’s in their best interests, but what they expect in return from each party is slightly different. From Republicans they expect rampant deregulation and tax cuts that help their bottom line. From Democrats they expect modest deregulation in some areas, maybe some tax increases, and subsidies in the form of public/private partnerships; they are willing to take it on the chin somewhat for the sake of stability. Basically, Republicans break everything in the interests of making the rich richer, and Democrats put it all back together again so we can do the same thing in four years. But lately, as the Republican party has become more explicitly reliant on stoking white nationalist resentment and dog whistling extreme right-wing conspiracy theories to rile up their voters, they have become a market liability for companies looking for the quarterly bump that comes with conservative economic policy.
When these corporations support Democrats, it is almost exclusively centrist, third way, establishment types. The kind of Democrats who will say the right things about marginalized communities, or at the very least stay quiet, while at the same time standing in the way of workers’ rights and social programs that could relieve some of the precarity that forces workers to accept poverty wages and unsafe conditions under a neo-feudal corporate structure. If the Republicans can’t pull themselves out of the deep end of radical laissez-faire capitalism and white nationalism (and I really can't see them doing that) then maybe these corporations will decide to abandon the Republican party altogether. Not financially of course but maybe rhetorically. And this may just be what Mitch McConnell is counting on.
See, while it may be heartening to some liberals that big companies with enormous power are supporting voting rights--and by default, the Democratic party--it must be said that these corporations have not really done anything to stop this assault on democracy from happening. The bill will likely become law, unless legal challenges by activists are successful. The Republicans have put themselves in a position to steal future elections. But what’s even more interesting, is that this is all playing out in a way that confirms the beliefs of the reactionary Republican base. If you aren’t an ardent follower of the right-wing echo chamber, you may not be aware that anti-corporate sentiments have been brewing for quite some time now. A very significant part of Trump’s appeal for white working class voters was his vocal denouncement of NAFTA, a Clinton-era trade bill that helped huge companies and resulted in catastrophic de-industrialization and job loss. Tucker Carlson has been neatly introducing anti-corporate talking points into his overall white nationalist agenda. Faux-populism on the right has even fooled some leftists into believing a red-brown alliance might be possible.
What we may be witnessing here is a brilliant, terrifying pivot by the Republican party. McConnell and his demon horde are attempting to shift from being a rhetorically pro-corporate party to being a rhetorically pro-worker party. Only in their construction, pro-worker means pro-white workers and vilifying large firms as being beholden to a destructive social justice agenda.
Democrats have been laser-focused on winning back the Reagan Democrats for some time now. It’s one reason why they have been so cozy with corporate interests despite trying to market themselves as the champions of the little guy. Obama was the perfect candidate for this project. He could make corporations and affluent suburban types comfortable while energizing the progressive base with vague gestures to progressive policy and providing representational bonafides. As a result of this decades-long project, Democrats all but lost the working class, whose material interests were ignored in favor of cultural virtue signaling. People stopped caring about the electoral process, intuiting that both parties were playing the same game. With Trump, the Republicans realized they could activate a reactionary base by positioning themselves as antagonistic to the wealthy corporate elites so enamored with Obama and Hillary. They were able to frame social justice efforts as the diabolical machinations of a global cabal of wealthy demon-worshipers. For a party that had been having real trouble with the popular vote, this proved to be an effective strategy. In 2020, Trump got the second highest number of votes in a presidential election ever, only surpassed by Joe Biden. Without Trump’s spectacular mishandling of the pandemic, he might have easily beaten the Democratic standard bearer.
While Mitch McConnell is not afraid to display heroic amounts of hypocrisy, he never does so without a reason. What he was able to accomplish with the judiciary is the stuff of political legend. So when you are wondering why McConnell would pull such a stark 180 on the topic of corporations in politics, remember that his first and only goal is to keep Republicans in power no matter what. Synthesizing populist anti-corporate/elite attitudes with racist and reactionary white nationalism may just be his next big plan to rebuild and expand the base. It’s also the same tactic that fascists used to gain power in the 30’s and 40’s.
So maybe some of this shit actually does matter.
Solidarity forever.
On Mitch McConnell and Our Big Wet Corporate Daddies:
well, again, my head is turned. this is quite an argument. i see what you're saying, that's the heartache of it, noting how many working/middle class white voters were willing to leave the democrats for trump's promise of a nation for white people, purporting to support workers in the face of corporate overlords is a perfect way to sucker them in. to weld white nationalism with workers vs bosses, two "they" enemies are so much better than one.
Mitch McConnel cares about himself first... He became power-hungry under the last administration and never wants that power to end... He laughs at those who really need the government to step up to help those less fortunate... He knows most folks are powerless to stop him... Money is his game and he knows who to go to to get it... So many politicians whether Democrats or Republicans feel the same way... They neglect minorities because I believe they know racism will help maintain their status quo ... Americans of all nationalities should wise up and see they are being manipulated by the government and its politicians because we are allowing lies, misinformation, and bigotry to happen ... They speak of voter fraud because minorities voted and they can't have that... They want to continue to ignore them and hold them down... Loved this piece because again you are asking us as the reader to think for ourselves and come up with our own conclusions, by educating us on the realities of who politicians really are, no matter what the party affiliation is... Never too old to learn... Yes, this shit does matter, so where do we go from here? SOLIDARITY FOREVER!!