The Weekly Sift

Members of the donor class must accept Trump’s personality cult to maintain their own.

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Amazingly, on Wednesday somebody wrote an entire article about the presidential race that said hardly anything about Donald Trump. Even more remarkably, the article was an endorsement of Trump.

It’s true: Home Depot co-founder (and billionaire Jeb Bush donor) Bernie Marcus managed to endorse Trump without mentioning any particular thing he imagines President Trump will do, other than Make America Great Again and take the country in some unspecified “new direction”. No Mexican wall, no Muslim ban or database, no trade war with China, no deportation force rounding up 11 million people, no renegotiating the public debt, no ordering our military to commit war crimes, no nukes for Saudi Arabia. None of the positions Trump has made famous garner a single line.

OK then, maybe Marcus just dislikes Hillary Clinton. But why? That also is a little hard to get a handle on, because his denunciations of Clinton (or maybe President Obama; they’re interchangeable) are vague to the point of vanishing into rhetoric. Clinton will “push the [Supreme] court leftward for generations”, but no specific legal issue explains why Marcus believes that would be bad. Like Obama, Clinton is “hostile to free enterprise” in some unspecified way. Together, Clinton and Obama “have peddled a dangerous sentiment that government can provide for Americans better than the private sector.”

I’d be really interested to find a quote in which either Clinton or Obama actually expressed that sentiment, much less “peddled” it. (As No Democrat Ever said: “Damn this free enterprise system! Why can’t the government just own everything?”) I’ve listened to a lot of speeches from both of them, and I’ve never heard it. [1]

When otherwise intelligent people justify their actions and beliefs with vague claims that don’t stand up to scrutiny, I start to wonder what’s happening under the surface. Something about Clinton, Obama, and Democrats in general pisses Bernie Marcus off. What could it be?

Our main clue is the third major topic in Marcus’ article, one that he discusses at greater length and with more feeling than either Trump or Clinton: Home Depot, and (by inference) himself. In particular: all the wonderful opportunities that it/he has magnanimously provided for others. For example:

One young man started with us at 17 years of age, bringing carts in from the parking lot. Ultimately, he became a regional president. Imagine Americans vilifying this young man, who became a millionaire and earned every penny of it.

Indeed: imagine. You have to imagine, because in reality no one is vilifying Americans for getting ahead by working hard. If anyone were doing that, Marcus could quote them. But no one is, so he has to imagine.

He imagines a lot of other things too. What if the oppressive regulations of “Obama/Clinton-style government” had existed back in the 1970s when his wondrous Home Depot was getting started? Well, a (briefly) small business like his just couldn’t have happened under those conditions, because under Dodd-Frank, bankers would have required a solid balance sheet rather than basing their loan decisions on his “character and determination”. [2]

And Home Depot couldn’t have gone public under Sarbanes-Oxley because … I’m not sure why. IPOs continue to happen. Facebook went public. UnderArmour. Chipotle. But Home Depot wouldn’t have been able to figure it out for some reason.

And that would have been horrible for America because

the risks we took in the 1970s have resulted in millions of jobs – not just at The Home Depot, but at our suppliers, our vendors, and even our customers’ businesses.

This is where I think we start getting to the root of things, because by this point Marcus has left reality completely behind and vanished into self-glorifying mythology.

You see, Marcus may think of himself as a champion of small business and a job creator, but the reality is the exact opposite. Other than WalMart and maybe Amazon [3], I can’t think of any corporation that has destroyed more small businesses than Home Depot.

Whatever Marcus may imagine, Home Depot didn’t create the home-improvement retail market, it captured that market from other businesses that were already serving it.

Not so long ago, hardware stores and electrical supply shops and paint stores and lumber yards were just about all locally owned by businesspeople you could meet and talk to. If you were a tool-loving kind of guy [4] and could scrape some money together, you could start such a business and be your own boss. Now that’s a much dicier proposition — not because of Dodd-Frank or Sarbanes-Oxley or even ObamaCare, but mainly because of Home Depot (and its rival Lowes).

I haven’t done enough research to back this up with numbers, but looking at the merchandise and staff of my local Home Depot, I strongly suspect that (all together) those locally-owned stores of the 1970s employed more people, and probably stocked more American-made products. [5] Looking at the full picture, I’d guess that Home Depot isn’t a job creator at all, especially if we’re talking about American jobs. It’s more of a job destroyer.

So while you can argue that Home Depot captured its markets fair and square (because it provides a larger selection of products at a better price, or for some other reason), you can’t give it credit for millions of jobs, or any jobs at all.

Understanding the job-creator mythology and how divorced it is from reality puts us in a position to explain why Marcus (and so much of the donor class that supported Romney and Bush) has to come around to Trump eventually, even if all his policies and positions are too embarrassing to mention: Republicans have incorporated job-creator mythology into their larger myth of America, while Democrats have not. The reason Marcus and his compatriots think Democrats like Clinton or Obama (or me) are so hostile to “free enterprise” is that we don’t worship them the way they think they deserve to be worshiped.

Democrats readily acknowledge that billionaires like Marcus and corporations like Home Depot are currently King of the Hill. But they want to believe that they created the hill.

Republicans are happy to tell them that they did. Democrats, on the other hand, tell the story this way: Business in the United States has always been a game played under certain rules. Under the rules of the 1970s and the decades that followed, Home Depot succeeded and Marcus became a multi-billionaire. We don’t begrudge his success, or the success of his 17-year-old cart-pushing millionaire employee either (assuming that guy really exists). Marcus won the game and captured the prize, so congratulations to him.

But we’d like to shift the rules so that in the future the workplace becomes safer and less discriminatory, so that workers don’t have to go bankrupt if they or their children need serious medical care, and so that those cart-pushers who don’t rise to be regional presidents still make a wage that lets them feed their families without food stamps. With those amendments, we want the game to continue, and businesspeople to keep on winning or losing according to how well they play.

Maybe Marcus and his fellow Kings of the Hill would win the game under those rules too, or maybe not. But that doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s not the end of free enterprise. Conversely, restoring the rules of the 1970s or 1950s or 1850s won’t make America great again, whatever great and again mean in that context.

Understandably, though, Bernie Marcus and his friends are not going to come around to the Democratic point of view, no matter how reality-based it is. They see themselves as Gods of the Hill, and view our attempts to landscape the hill as sacrilege. I can only hope that their self-deifying religion is still a minority faith.

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[1] Preserving a role for the private sector is kind of the point of ObamaCare: How do you get healthcare to millions more Americans without the government taking over everything, by working through the existing insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and clinics? That’s what the conservative Heritage Foundation designed their proto-ObamaCare system to do, way back in 1989.

[2] They also couldn’t have considered his race. I wonder how many black businessmen were getting loans based on their “character and determination” back in the 1970s. I also wonder how much money the banking industry has lost over the years due to lenders making loans unjustified by financial principles. That was a major cause of the S&L crisis of the 1980s. To the extent that current law limits the discretion of federally-insured bankers, it happens for good reasons.

[3] One of my friends recently closed a local bookstore that had existed in the same location since the 1920s. I never heard him complain about government regulation, but Amazon seemed to be a much bigger problem. I suspect a lot of small businesspeople would tell a similar story.

[4] Yeah, you probably did have to be a guy. It was the 70s.

[5] You can argue that retailers sell Chinese products because that’s what’s available, but the big-box stores — especially Walmart — have been instrumental in pushing their suppliers to manufacture overseas.