As the current administration in Washington continues to run roughshod over the constitution, congress and the courts, it’s worthwhile asking how it is that America’s autocrats learned to behave the way they do. The answer is stunningly obvious: America’s workplace.
In their wisdom, our founding fathers focused great attention on the power of government and its limitations, but they did not address the power of private enterprise, what we today call business. As an extension of personal liberty, private enterprise essentially enjoys the privileges of personhood, and as the Supreme Court decided, America’s corporations, as now-retired Senator Mitt Romney famously said, “Are people.”
Accordingly, the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision declared that financial contributions to political campaigns are an expression of free speech, and government cannot constrain them any more than it can constrain the free speech of individuals. Elon Musk’s $270 million dollar contribution to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is the direct outgrowth of that court decision. However, the lessons given to autocrats do not begin and end with money.
America’s corporations and businesses are models of non-democracy, and it is within the world of business that lessons of autocracy are taught. No constitution limits the rights of “the boss” and his subordinates. The boss is a dictator, having more in common with a king than anyone democratically elected. The lessons taught in that atmosphere are simple: “Do as I say, or you’re fired.” It doesn’t get more autocratic than that.
The union movement was the working class response to business dictators, and its establishment was not without difficulty. Union organizers were regularly targeted – with threats, beatings, arrests, and intimidation – and it took decades for unions to gain legitimate legal status. Even today, workers must go to extraordinary lengths to unionize, and often risk being blackballed, fired and harassed. Autocrats don’t like being challenged and will go to great lengths to punish those viewed as threats to their authority and power.
Workplace protections, civil rights laws, labor courts and the like are ways in which the dictatorial power of the “the boss” suffers some constraints, and even those are under constant challenge by autocrats. Donald Trump learned how to treat others at his autocratic father’s knee, and he learned his lessons well. As the unchallengeable “king” of his real estate development company, his sense of powerful entitlement is that granted by the business world in general, and he is anything but alone in his attitude.
There are, of course, business leaders who believe treating employees fairly and with respect is the right way to lead, but overall the leadership ethic in business is that the boss is king, and his word is the law. Elon Musk learned that lesson, and Jamie Dimon, and Steve Jobs, and…well, the list goes on and on. It’s no surprise that the way such leaders wish to lead government is by fiat and command. They have never had to bend to democratic will and are not about to start now.
Despotic behavior is the stuff of revolutions, and in earlier times ordinary working people would seize the levers of power and try to do things differently. Power however, once gained, is hard to give up, and history is filled with examples of the power of corruption.
If our founding fathers knew all this, perhaps they would have regulated business conduct in the constitution. As it is, it breeds autocrats.
