Scrutinizing the “ideological warfare” a business community mouthpiece says drove Corporate America into the arms of a fascist.
This article was originally published on the Revolving Door Project Substack.
Caitlin Legacki lobbed an attack our way in the notorious Wall Street Journal editorial pages late last month, the same section that published 126 pieces complaining about Lina Khan during her tenure at the Federal Trade Commission. What an honor! Legacki, a senior fellow at Third Way and former advisor to Biden Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, claimed that “Democrats have alienated the business community through years of ideological warfare disguised as governance.” She argued that corporate-friendly Biden officials “faced attacks from groups like the Revolving Door Project,” leading Big Business to ally itself with Trump, as he is “better than the alternative.”
In our letter to the editor the Journal published in response, we posed Legacki a simple question: how could the public be expected to trust Big Business as good-faith participants in democracy when, by Legacki’s own admission, they were easily pushed into siding with an aspiring dictator? If losing on some but hardly most appointments is enough to turn ostensible rule of law abiding entities into the arms of would be fascist authoritarians… were those entities ever, well, actually law-respecting, let alone abiding? Legacki in turn responded by accusing us of prioritizing anti-corporate haranguing over undefined policies to help the middle class – your classic “rising tide lifts all boats” shtick.
We’re deeply skeptical of billionaires wielding innocuous rhetoric crafted by their well compensated former Democratic staffers. We don’t think the party of the people should try to win elections in order to hand over government to more amiable members of the very elite business class that we know runs MAGA executive branches (and their Supreme Court Six Subsidiary). Still, I think it’s important to further dig into what Legacki describes as “ideological warfare disguised as governance.”
By our count, the Biden administration did carry out some actions which reined in corporations – in service of Americans’ labor and economic rights. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put millions back into the pockets of Americans by holding banks, credit card companies, and other financial services firms accountable for their infringements on consumers’ rights. The Department of Labor engaged in rulemaking to protect workers, preventing their misclassification as independent contractors, and checking managers’ control of tip pools. The Labor Department also removed limits on its ability to levy fines for tip violations. The result of their enforcement: DOL’s Wage and Hour Division issued a record-breaking $26 million in fines in 2023 and returned $212.3 million in back wages.
The Federal Trade Commission put forth rules to make canceling subscriptions easier, ban exploitative non-compete agreements that apply to an estimated 30 millions workers, and cracked down on fraudulent “Made in the USA” labels. What’s more, the agency pursued dozens of enforcement actions to protect fair and competitive markets, including filing a lawsuit alleging Amazon used anticompetitive practices to build and maintain an illegal monopoly while blocking illegal acquisitions by industry giants like Lockheed Martin, Nvidia, and Kroger.
The National Labor Relations Board protected workers targeted by their employers for labor organizing; the Board pursued injunctions against companies like Starbucks, Amazon, UPS and Dollar General for such violations.
Did corporations consider these enforcement actions, merely upholding laws already on the books, to be “ideological warfare”? Seemingly yes! As for Legacki, who was part of the Biden administration as this work was underway, where exactly does she think her colleagues went too far?
As powerful as these accomplishments were, and as much as they provide a blueprint for what an administration serious about putting people over corporations can do, the fact remains that at the top of the executive branch – that is, the White House – the Biden administration was by and large a corporate-friendly administration. Take Biden’s second chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, who reversed the strong enforcement path Ron Klain started the Biden administration down.
As my colleague Max Moran wrote at the time of his appointment, Zients came into the Biden administration owing “his entire public-policy career to his corporate worldview and connections.” His primary duty in the Obama White House – the experience that got him the Chief of Staff role – was serving as the designated go-between for the White House and corporate C-Suites nationwide. As anyone could have predicted, Zients’ tenure as chief of staff was defined by his friendliness with Big Business: In 2024, Axios reported that in White House meetings, Zients “often relay[ed] concerns from the business community.” That’s the skill that got him the job in the first place!
There were many other pro-corporate personnel choices we criticized that nonetheless were instrumental in shaping Biden’s corporate-friendly legacy: his renomination of Jay Powell as Fed Chair “despite his years of betraying labor unions, environmental groups and frontline communities, and the middle class;” Merrick Garland and his chief of staff Lisa Monaco and their sluggish response to white-collar crime (including Trump’s crimes; if only Biden had appointed a more zealous Attorney General!); as well as lower-profile administration officials who offset the corporate crackdown happening elsewhere in the Biden administration.
Take Louisa Terrell, a White House director and former Facebook lobbyist who oversaw Biden’s legislative priorities, including bills that would have cemented the anti-Big Tech legacy Biden publicly seemed to want. Under her watch, one antitrust funding bill did eventually pass – but the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would have implemented bigger picture reforms for online platforms, never did. A well-placed former Facebook exec was a heavy, heavy counterweight to the Big Tech trust-busters.
These appointments personify the corporate influence critique that underpins much of our organizational work: People who owe their consideration for top jobs to their years advocating for corporate agendas fundamentally cannot wear metaphorical blinders while working in government. The conflicts stemming from their friends and interests from before (and potentially after) government service are too great – and that’s the good-faith bias-oriented case, that assumes these individuals don’t understand their primary obligation as preventing enforcement against their past-and-future employers. Too often, corporate executives’ policy experiences are touted as ‘understanding the industry’ when their experiences in fact create ethical hang-ups when they enter government.
To be clear, that dynamic is not the same as a person who joins the government with technical expertise derived from private sector work, like knowledge of IT data structures, or pharmaceutical research, or engineering. The government needs people with technical skills – but their hiring should be based on those skills, not their experience wielding political influence. It’s not hard to draw a distinction. The sorts of revolvers we’re talking about generally have resumes showing no hard job skills besides a talent for persuading elites – they’re corporate counsels, lobbyists, or academic economists kept on retainer by big firms. Or they’re financiers with lobbyists on retainer by the dozen. They’re not people who had to master a real-world science or craft. (And they’re also not willing to engage in apprenticeships – they think senior roles in finance or Big Tech qualify them for senior policymaking jobs like Treasury Secretary, rather than joining the civil service and proving their worth in the public sector.)
Biden, aided by the many corporate revolvers he hired into his administration, flinched on the populist legacy Legacki now ascribes to him. In that sense, corporations got what they wanted – and Kamala Harris’s campaign was a microcosm of that reversal, as she abandoned strong callouts of corporate landlords and price gouging in favor of toothless Wall Street-approved policies.
Is this the ‘alienation’ that compelled Corporate America to rush into the arms of a fascist?
In her follow-up response to us, Legacki shifted the blame for Big Business’s betrayal from Democrats who see the value of populist ideas, to our organization’s supposed preference for “anticorporate hostilities” over efficacy “in helping the American people.” We do advocate for “a middle ground of regulation and engagement” – but the middle ground isn’t Democrats further capitulating to corporations demands in hopes of appeasing their open scorn for democracy. The middle ground looks like the strong pro-worker, pro-consumer policies enacted by Biden-era consumer protection, antitrust, and labor agencies. (Lest anyone forget, the actual left position would be state ownership of many key economic sectors, which may sometimes be desirable, but wasn’t imminent under a moderate like Biden.)
Four years of rebuilding such policies was not enough after decades of Republican and Democratic administrations allowed corporations to capture government entities through means like the revolving door, registered lobbying, shadow lobbying and campaign donations in order to erode enforcement power and weaken regulatory guardrails.
Despite the populist segments within the Biden administration, the weakened enforcement regime has now given in easily to Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. As we and others have been documenting, Trump’s attacks on the administrative state have resulted in enforcement against corporations dropping to zero. Trump is seeking to demolish the regulatory burdens that corporations have long opposed.
In other words, there’s no longer any practical room for Democratic administrative policy to be friendlier to Big Business than Trump. By definition, enforcing some rules is more hostile than enforcing no rules. For Democrats to be competitive with Trump on corporate appeasement, as Legacki advocates, they need to essentially abandon the idea that federal law even applies to any corporate entity above, say, $100 million in profits. That’s where the opposition is.
We think that’s bad politics and bad policy. If Trump’s fascism isn’t morally revolting enough for you (and if it isn’t, you should seriously reassess your priorities), when your opponent is unpopular and utterly unwilling to compromise, it’s good to draw a sharp contrast with them. It’s a populist era and Big Business is growing ever more unpopular. The most effective means of helping the American people is for the government to actually defend their labor rights, their ability to have healthy communities and environments, and share in the prosperity they help to build.
If that alienates some rich people, some corporate executives, and their friends and beneficiaries, that’s a price we think is worth paying. Friendship with those who prioritize access and brown-nosing over the rule of law are not worth having.