W riting recently in the Wall Street Journal , Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute declared that free- marketeers have taken social conservatives for granted. “The free-market coalition is in urgent need of repair. If enough conservatives join progressives in seeing free trade as a threat to their values, America could end up with protectionist policies for the foreseeable future,” he noted. I share his embrace of the free market. But I am sympathetic to right-leaning concerns about corporate America. While I think free market supporters should not cheer on “creative destruction” when local businesses collapse due to free trade, I think they do have a case to sell social conservatives on the benefits of free market creative destruction. The chief problem, from my vantage point as someone active in evangelical circles and the social conservative movement, centers less on worries about job loss and more on progressives using corporations to censor and punish conservatives. Banks, technology companies, and other major corporations seem complicit in censoring conservatives, Christians, gun manufacturers, and other groups progressives hate. Conservatives routinely see, for example, Twitter use its power to punish conservatives in ways it never uses its power against progressives.
Conservatives see banks refusing to do business with gun manufacturers and
intuitively understand banks should be free to do business with whichever companies they choose, and they also understand banks are doing this because of progressive concerns and would never bend so easily for conservatives. Should banks that refuse to do business with lawful enterprises be given protections by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation? Conservatives see Fortune 500 companies threaten states such as Georgia and Texas for advancing religious liberty legislation and protections for faith-based adoption agencies. Corporations have free speech rights, too, but when they reliably advance left-wing causes, even in conservative states, it is not hard to understand why conservatives might no longer be faithfully attached to a free market that benefits those companies. If corporations are going to reliably side with the left, they can hardly expect conservatives to defend the system that enriches these corporations into powerhouses that can use their influence to steer social policy leftward.
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March 2020
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