But even the weak grasp of capitalist democracy is too strong for, well, capitalists. “Capital,” Fraser wrote, “tries to have it both ways.” On one hand, “it freeloads off of public power, availing itself of the legal regimes, repressive forces, infrastructures, and regulatory agencies that are indispensable to accumulation.” On the other, “the thirst for profit periodically tempts some fractions of the capitalist class to rebel against public power, to bad-mouth it as inferior to markets, and to scheme to weaken it. In such cases, when short-term interests trump long-term survival, capital once again threatens to destroy the very political conditions of its own possibility.”
We can see this phenomenon during key junctures in American history. The Great Depression saw some sections of the business and corporate class contemplate dictatorial rule in an effort to save capitalism from a “socialist” or “communistic” New Deal. There was, in the view of Franklin Roosevelt, “an impulse among a good many ‘strong’ men, men used to having their way, mostly industrialists who directed affairs without being questioned, a feeling that democracy had run its course and that the totalitarians had grasped the necessities of the time.”
Examples abound, as well, when we turn our eyes abroad.
Among the strongest supporters of the American-backed military overthrow in 1973 of Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, were conservative business leaders who feared Allende’s program of nationalization and egalitarian redistribution. What followed, in the next decade of Chilean politics, was a crash course in neoliberal governance that placed economic life beyond the reach of popular institutions.
That some capitalists will turn on democracy, or at least show indifference to its fate, when it seems that democracy might impede the accumulation of wealth is useful context for recent developments in the 2024 presidential election.
According to Sam Sutton, writing in Politico, several Wall Street executives and Silicon Valley venture capitalists who backed Donald Trump and then spurned him after the Jan. 6 insurrection have now returned to the fold, with open arms and open wallets. They are, he writes, “looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.”
