Brad Littlejohn is right, in one sense. Writing for World, Littlejohn, the founder and president of the Davenant Institute, correctly describes the Right’s emerging antagonism to private property as “a curious realignment.” But he’s wrong in his implication that this is a good thing.
Littlejohn writes that, on a host of culture-war issues, including Big Tech censorship, workplace ‘DEI’ training, and vaccine mandates, “the right has ranged itself in protest against corporations it once enthusiastically supported.” The fact that conservatives and corporations find themselves at loggerheads in the culture war should be completely immaterial to the former’s principled defense of the rights of the latter, however.
I, like Littlejohn and civil libertarians, loathe censorship and share his antipathy for DEI training and discomfort with invasive medical requirements. But the examples of private tyranny cited by Littlejohn are often the product of government action. That’s true of DEI compliance (thanks to federal oversight), of Big Tech censorship (thanks to government pressure), and of vaccine mandates (thanks to federal mandates). A principled conservative response to these abuses involves limiting the exercise of government power, not expanding it. In the case of vaccine mandates, it was the Supreme Court that struck down the Biden administration’s attempt, through OSHA, to mandate vaccination for all firms with 100 or more employees. Adrian Vermeule, an ally of Sohrab Ahmari, whose book Tyranny, Inc. Littlejohn cites, supported this OSHA action.
When corporations privately, i.e., absent tacit or explicit state compulsion, choose to behave in ways employees and consumers dislike, the appropriate response is, likewise, a private one. The recent Bud Light controversy is a case in point: Many conservatives took umbrage with transgender social-media influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s ad campaign. The resulting boycott lowered Bud Light’s sales, stock-price, and led to the end of Mulvaney’s formal association with the brand (along with layoffs of hundreds of corporate employees, as reported by ABC) — no state power required!
Despite Littlejohn’s assertion to the contrary, the line between competition and coercion is a blurry one. Case in point: To make his argument, Littlejohn must conflate the state-granted mercantilist monopoly of the British East India Company that governed India with its soldiers with free-market capitalism. Not only are the two not interchangeable; they are mutually exclusive. The main actor that blurs the line here is the state, by implicating itself in private affairs.
Littlejohn is completely right to recognize as an achievement the state’s imposition of “some measure of order” on market relations, but he’s wrong in what this measure consists of. This achievement is not ensuring “equal bargaining power” or preventing firms “from becoming too coercive,” but demanding that no individual or incorporated persons force or defraud others, within or outside the market. The government does this and does so effectively for the same reason that no individual nor private firm can: The state possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It is this difference in kind — not in degree — which disproves the thesis shared by Littlejohn and Ahmari that tyranny “can actually present itself in extremely imbalanced power relationship.”
For a man who declares that the solution lies not in some Marxist utopia, Littlejohn perseverates an awful lot on nebulously defined “power imbalances.” In fact, he suggests that, in addressing such imbalances, “conservatives might find themselves marching side-by-side with groups they once considered political foes, but who share their concern to prevent corporate tyrants from running roughshod over the American way of life.” But allying with those who have always wanted to expand state power would be no victory. Conservatives must not find ourselves allied with Leftists in their subordination of private property and free enterprise to state coercion; i.e., actual force.