Most people don’t know this, because the relative positions of our political parties reversed during the Civil Rights era. For most of our history, business has been on the progressive side of politics.
There are reasons. In the late 19th century, land grant policies that opened the West were considered progressive. In the early 20th century, regulatory regimes kept input prices low for manufacturers and were progressive. During the middle of the 20th century, spending that kept demand high was progressive.
It was only in the second half of the last century that business became politically conservative. That’s because resource industries don’t need people. The gating factor to growth is land. Control the land and you control the oil, the minerals, the agriculture, the market. The only people you need are cops and soldiers to enforce your control over the land. The dominant political players of the Nixon era were oilmen, or resource oligarchs like the Koch Brothers.
These people are still active, but resources are no longer the gating factor to growth. In a technology era brains are the gating factor. The more trained, financially supported, truly empowered minds you have, the more you can create change through the Cloud. There’s no limit to growth except brainpower. We can substitute for resources, from oil to lithium. We can change the nature of living matter through GMOs and editing DNA. We can go to the planets. We can save this planet.
The only way we will save this planet is through technology. Don’t let any environmental activist fool you on this point. The business of saving the planet must be business or the planet won’t be saved.
This is slowly changing our political path. Trumpism is accelerating the change, by attacking the tech businesses that are leading our growth. Tech executives are becoming Democratic. Their employees are more-so. There are exceptions. There always are. But the economic imperatives of today mean we need to support the creation, and the use, of as much brainpower as we can possibly develop.
That means we need better, more efficient education. It means labor deserves a bigger piece of the growing pie. Stimulating demand, whether for private or for social goods, is imperative to fight the deflation at the heart of Moore’s Law.
Progressives aren’t happy about this. They see business as conservative. Business isn’t conservative. It’s not liberal, either. Business is for business, for the specific business of a CEO, and for the general idea of growth. Growth is progress. Progress is at the heart of the word progressive.
There’s a complex dance going on right now, between business activists who have found themselves thrown into the Democratic coalition, and progressive activists who have dominated it for a generation. But make no mistake. Business is the swing vote in our politics, the pivot point on which the results depend.
This is the political change happening under our feet.
