The fallacy of free enterprise leadership

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When Donald Trump leaves the White House next month to resume his true calling as a seedy blowhard celebrity, there’s good reason to hope that a hoary piece of American social mythology departs with him: the notion that successful business leaders are uniquely suited to assume political power on the basis of their private sector résumés. American culture has long revered the notion of the heroic businessman as something of a Swiss Army knife for the country’s wide array of social problems—delivering no-nonsense bromides of self-improvement and savvy delayed gratification for any occasion, from the conquest of trade imbalances and slumping labor markets to foreign policy wisdom and space exploration. But as New Republic contributor Kyle Edward Williams notes, modern business titans had failed to seize the ultimate power of the presidency until Trump’s election in 2016. (The one outlier case, former engineer and Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, proved to be well shy of an inspirational model for the strategic combination of business acumen and political clout, and might help explain why America took so long to succumb to the businessman-statesman myth in 2016.)

Of course, Trump is anything but a model businessman in his own right. When The New York Times reported on the president’s long-concealed tax returns in the fall, the numbers “revealed what many had already suspected,” Williams writes: “that beneath the veneer of confidence-man boosterism, his business empire was held together by massive debt and shady tax avoidance strategies.” Nevertheless, the brazenness of Trump’s pitch for leadership remained entirely in line with the reigning image of the omnicompetent businessman-statesman, a tradition that reached its apex with the mid-twentieth century’s alliance of political and corporate leaders. This record of strategic collaboration between government and business veered into dangerous territory as the Cold War mandate to celebrate private enterprise at all costs gradually overtook American politics at large, Williams observes:

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[T]he postwar cult of the business-statesman proposed something more radical: to hand over the principal functions of government to private sector standards of performance and to measure the success of government on something close to a rigid cost-benefit calculus. As Cold War–era business leaders styled themselves the true custodians of liberal democracy in the face of Soviet threats, they transformed concepts native to a democratic political tradition such as justice, equality, and citizenship into objects of professional problem-solving and efficient administration. Basic public goods like a well-rounded education or public transportation, recognizable to previous generations as critical components of functional democratic citizenship, were exhausted and transformed by the instrumentalizing ideology that astroturfed the “free market” ideal into a rolling managerial takeover of almost every major institution in American life. Now we’re left with a facsimile of a facsimile: STEM curricula and the New Jersey Transit Corporation. It’s this corporate enclosure of the public sphere that’s permitted a grifter with the flimsiest of business credentials like Trump to overpower the public imagination.

Under this new ideology, Williams notes, the two dominant strands of business mythology converged: the ideal of the heroic entrepreneur, dating back to Benjamin Franklin, and the modern image of the businessman as statesman-in-waiting. And in short order, a new breed of business hero emerged: the celebrity CEO. Figures like former Chrysler head Lee Iacocca and job-killing General Electric CEO Jack Welch rose to new heights of cultural prestige as a market-worshipping media complex elevated them into demigod status. And lurking in the shadows was Trump—the celebrated New York real-estate baron schooled in the bare-knuckle politics of right-wing belligerence by Joseph McCarthy’s former legal enforcer, Roy Cohn. When Trump stormed into maximum power in 2016, the resulting chaos and plutocratic squalor should have laid the heroic tradition of business leadership to rest once and for all in whatever now remains of American civic culture. Instead, as Williams notes, Trump came perilously close to reelection on the same basic pitch that made him an object of tabloid fascination in the first place:

Trump is by almost every conceivable category a failure as a professional business leader. He does not measure up to the standards of social responsibility laid out by advocates of business statesmanship nearly one hundred years ago. Neither is he an entrepreneur by any measure. But Trump’s failures as a businessman are rivaled by the failure of American business writ large to live up to its own stated ideals of professionalism, whether of the older business statesmanship variety or the new social entrepreneurial one. The American public perceives this better than many who are paid handsome sums for think-tank duty or op-ed composition. According to a recent survey released by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, nearly 70 percent of the public believes that leaders in American corporations, media, universities, and technology care little about the lives of most Americans. In ways that Trump’s critics have been unable to appreciate, his many failures in business and government make him uniquely qualified to serve as a representative of corporate America. After all, his tenure as head of the Trump Organization and the executive branch came at a moment when business, like government, has been downgraded to a simple series of transactional opportunities. Trump knew that his culture war theater and his racist fever dreams could be leveraged into a species of higher-minded personal branding—something parallel to what Lee Iacocca achieved in his own liberal-leaning moment of business celebrity. In a public sphere where democratic virtues have been overrun by wanton, impersonal notions of sacrifice to the market, Trump rightly intuited that a rhetorically powerful branding strategy can elevate even the most cynical displays of self-promotion into redemptive meaning. Hence his own always dubious business celebrity became cognate with the mantra of Making America Great Again.

In other words, while Trump may have done lasting damage to the myth of the businessman-statesman, the underlying conditions of civic decay that he exploited in his path to political power aren’t showing any signs of dissipating any time soon. And that means, in turn, that President-elect Joe Biden—a career public servant of nearly half a century’s standing—has yet more work to do in reclaiming the idea of democratic governance from the cynical clutches of the branding-for-hire complex now known as the Republican Party.

Programming note: In my own defiance of the dictates of modern business efficiency, this will be my last American Jitters dispatch for the year. Stay safe and sane through the final weeks of 2020, and I’ll look forward more than I can say to begin corresponding with you on non-Trump topics in the coming year.

—Chris Lehmann, editor

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