The Companies Are in Charge Now

Is Larry Fink the president of the world? What if your model is that democratic political governance has just stopped working — not because you disagree with the particular policies that particular elected governments are carrying out, but because you have started to notice that elected governments in large developed nations are increasingly unable to carry out any policies at all? What if, meanwhile, corporations are actually good at doing stuff? Corporations, after all, are built to do stuff: They are hierarchical organizations with clear lines of authority that have to report on their accomplishments every three months. Democratic governments are built to be deliberative, with checks and balances to prevent rash unilateral action by any one person, but in some cases the effect of those safeguards is to prevent anything at all from happening.

Obviously corporations are built to do different things from the things that democratic governments are built to deliberate. Corporations don’t wage war, though they do manufacture weapons; they don’t enforce a monopoly on violence, though they do run prisons; they don’t enact legislation, though they do help write legislation for understaffed and inexpert governments to enact; they don’t command patriotic allegiance or symbolically represent a community of people who identify primarily with the corporation, but they sure try. (What is Facebook Inc. up to, if not that? Or The We Company, for that matter?)