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SEPTEMBER

**15, 2020**

Meyerson on TAP

A Rorschach Test for Establishment Liberalism

Here's one good way to assess the state of establishment liberalism:
Compare the

**New York Times**' 1619 Project to its special section-"Greed Is
Good. Except When It's Bad
"-which
ran last Sunday on the 50th anniversary of Milton Friedman's epochal

**Times**essay "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its
Profits."

Both projects endeavored to move the nation's discourse in a
progressive direction, but they differed in revealing ways. The 1619
Project, which sought to reframe our understanding of the nation's
history by putting our legacy of race-based slavery at the center of the
American experience, posed a major challenge to the nation's sense of
its own identity and by so doing advanced the cause of reparations,
though it was short on specific proposals. It engendered considerable
criticism, including by longtime liberal historians who thought it
overstated its case by misstating the relative weight of aspects of
American history. These dissents weren't part of the Project, however;
the articles that the

**Times**ran under the 1619 rubric all shared the Project's basic
perspective.

The

**Times**' retrospective on Friedman-Plus-50 was largely an account of
the disastrous effect that Friedman's writing-of which his

**Times**essay was the prime culprit-and beliefs have had on
America's well-being in the subsequent half-century. The lead essay by
Kurt Andersen documented how the "shareholder über alles" practices of
the CEOs, bankers, and major investors whom Friedman was addressing have
undone America's once-thriving middle class. Most of the brief
comments that the section also contained echoed Andersen's critique:
Among the commentators were

**Prospect**founder Robert Reich, union leader Sara Nelson, and
economists Joseph Stiglitz, Thea Lee, and Josh Bivens, who variously
pointed out the need for demonetizing our politics, regulating
corporations more adequately, and bolstering such countervailing
institutions as unions.

But other commentators sang from different hymnals. Some-corporate or
investment leaders including Salesforce's Marc Benioff, Starbucks's
Howard Schultz, and BlackRock's Larry Fink-echoed the sentiments of
the 2019 Business Roundtable that corporations can and should pay more
heed to stakeholders and social needs. None of them, however, called for
or even referenced the countervailing institutions or regulatory changes
that are needed to produce real change in corporate and investment
practices; all implied that such changes should trickle down from
enlightened management. (I can't think of any such changes that
actually have, however, from the corporations whose CEOs signed the
Roundtable's declaration.) Other commentators-Home Depot's Ken
Langone, and various Hoover Institution and Republican
economists-basically affirmed the soundness of Friedman's essay.

Which is to say, the

**Times**is more cautious or more fearful about appearing fully onboard
for a remaking of American capitalism than it is about appearing fully
onboard for a reassessment of American racism as the central fact of our
national narrative. Put those two together and you have a pretty fair
assessment of where establishment liberalism-even establishment
left-liberalism-is just now.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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