How America’s Craven Plutocrats Busted the Myth of the Business Hero
The business hero is the enduring myth of American society. It’s not new, of course: In the 1970s and 1980s Lee Iacocca was everywhere; certainly Onassis and others had their admirers. Jack Welch lived long enough to play a role in his own self-parody. Still, in this age of yore, it wasn’t automatically presumed that the interests of the business class and those of the country always aligned. “Greed is good,” still played as a villain’s aphorism.
Some people have forgotten that the robber barons were the bad guys of history. We were suspicious of the megarich because they were often unscrupulous and mistreated workers. Before he became a philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie was a union-buster who hired the Pinkertons to break the backs of labor. Yes, he helped expand the railroads and was probably the nation’s biggest promoter of steel—a technology that would indeed take us into the future. Yet no one saw him as beyond reproach. When the dam at the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club that he belonged to (along with Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and many other notable members of the aristocracy) burst due to poor upkeep, causing the Johnstown Flood and 2,209 deaths, the elites at the club were rightfully blamed.
The same can’t be said of the dams we’ve seen collapse more recently. Nowadays, when our ubiquitous social media apps cause political violence in places like India and Myanmar, and can very credibly be linked to a host of social maladies, such as teen anxiety, depression, and negative self-perceptions, Mark Zuckerberg sees his stock go up. The bug is the feature, the selling point; the mayhem is the system working as designed. Now as a new flood—one of hatred and fascism—threatens to wipe away our institutions and very morality, our oligarchs shrug and deflect blame. Of the top 10 richest men in America, not one of them has publicly endorsed Kamala Harris or been willing to condemn Donald Trump. These supposed business heroes are mostly business cowards, the first to stoop to obey.
