Democrats: Capitalism isn't the problem and we have no solution

Once again, liberals are displacing blame from capitalism onto an incoherent "corporate" scapegoat.

This year’s Democratic platform devotes an entire section to “Corporate Greed”:

Today, corporate consolidation is allowing companies to keep raking in historic profits, while continuing to raise prices for working families. In the two decades before President Biden came to office, three-quarters of American industries grew more concentrated. As the President often says, capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation.

I hate to spoil the wishful thinking of leftists who desperately want Democrats to sign on to radical politics, but as much as this sounds like a critique of capitalism, it’s not. In fact it is precisely because this sounds so much like a critique of capitalism that it is so dangerous. Democrats voice all of the familiar concerns about consolidation, profiteering, monopoly, and exploitation — but only so that, at the very last moment, they can insist that this bundle of problems isn’t capitalism.

Instead, we learn that something called “corporate greed” is keeping us from True Capitalism. What confuses me about this argument is that True Capitalism is supposed to be attainable. That’s why all of the savvy high-info results-getters in the Democratic Party prefer chasing after it over trying to achieve socialism. But if True Capitalism is attainable, and corporate greed is what’s keeping us from getting there, then it follows that Democrats should be able to get rid of corporate greed.

What is their plan for doing this? The platform gives us a handful of band-aids to patch some of the consequences of corporate greed — junk fees, high shipping costs, and bank failures — but they don’t even begin to take on the problem itself.

If Democrats want to plead that the problem they’ve identified with our economy is in fact unsolvable then we can have a sane conversation about giving up on the impossible dream of True Capitalism. In that case, I would recommend pursuing socialism, which many of us insist is not impossible, and which actually has a specific plan for addressing our problems.

But if Democrats want to insist that we can get to True Capitalism by ridding America of corporate greed, they should tell us their plan for doing so. Maybe Kamala Harris can hold a series of fireside chats with Americans and beg us to stop being so greedy. Then in a press conference the next day the White House can explain that what she actually meant to condemn was corporate greed, apologies if any greedy capitalists took offense.