America's phantom political left, darling of corporate "progressives"
In America, the battle between left and right, as it is known to newspaper readers and television news viewers, has an insular character that is little recognized by most people drawn into it:
What the right hates about the left and what it wants is what "progressive" elites in corporate America want. It is their concerns that are reflected in most policies that appeal to left-of-center political forces with clout in the Democratic Party. Consider:
The corporate left wants speech codes and safe spaces in its offices. As Biden said in one of the 2020 presidential debates, it wants to make sure that minority group members do not "have their feelings hurt." It is concerned with recognition, not redistribution. It is very concerned with identity politics.
The corporate left also wants "E.S.G. — or environmental, social and governance — investing to turn corporations into agents of progressive change," as discussed in a New York Times article yesterday on investor Warren Buffett, resisting some such changes that are popular with some executives of other companies.
The corporate left worries a lot about global warming. It sees this problem as a challenge to solve within a capitalist framework. Just as environmentalists want people to recycle things (that became public policy in many places, including New York City where I live). Just as animal rights activists want movies to be made without harming animals, and might expect you to not eat meat.
Just as it sees racial, gender, sexuality, and other minority issues as both the essence of social inequality and injustice (not usually class or poverty). And it seeks to address them with liberal policies of tolerance and inclusion.
Everything that Florida Governor de Santis is against and has drawn so much attention, pro and contra, for, is part of corporate liberal political thinking.
Corporate liberalism drives the Democratic Party, and is highly dependent on elite universities and their law schools. Business and corporate conservatism drives the Republican Party based on different ideas of what makes for good business, and different ideas of how enterprises and other social bodies should be organized and run.
The political division in this country is of course mainly between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
If the left opposes capitalism or its more extreme and untrammeled forms, and if it is also anti-authoritarian, then the political left is very weakly represented in American politics, and corporate liberalism doesn't include it at all. If the left favors the poor, the corporate liberalism of the Democratic Party is only marginally and slightly, and sometimes rhetorically, concerned about them. Yes, corporate and Democratic Party liberalism appeals to members of certain minority groups, especially Blacks. It appeals to blacks because many are poor, though not so much as poor. Meaning, it appeals to them as wanting to become middle class, because its policies are for the middle class, even if it has rhetoric to appeal to the poor. The Republican Party conservatives also appeal to segments of the lower middle class, also on racial and other identity grounds, though of course targeting different identities.
The right systematically confuses the left and the liberal center in order to disdain both. The liberal center pretends to be the real left to get their votes, while the right likes to paint the center as the left to both disavow the left's existence and discredit the liberal center's hopes.
The liberal center wants the votes of people on the left, without giving them much, except symbolic things. Those symbolic goods matter much to corporate liberals. They are good for business. They give as little to the poor and lower middle class as "glass ceiling" feminism gives to ordinary women.