For decades we argued about the fictitious "wall of separation between church and state," when we should have been building a higher and thicker wall of separation between corporations and state.
What was the point of all that "wall between church and state" stuff? In theory, it's about separating elections and government from not religious FAITH, but religious ORGANIZATIONS. You can't order individuals not to vote based on their deep personal religious convictions.
The fear was that religious organizations would exercise power over the elected government, imposing their beliefs on everyone. The image of medieval popes manipulating European kings was constantly invoked. We supposedly had to be on guard against Bible pages becoming law.
In truth, Islamic caliphates and sharia law would have been better and more current examples, but the Western Left in the 60s and 70s had absolutely no interest in turning a critical eye against non-European cultures, governments, or traditions.
And in even grimmer truth, we should have understood all along that corporate power harnessed to politics is a greater threat to liberty in the modern West than the political influence of religion. It's not even a close call, as woke corporations are eagerly demonstrating today.
Today's woke corporations are every bit of the threat yesterday's Left claimed organized religion could be. A few powerful members of the corporate clergy make political decisions, and their vast payroll congregations are immediately mobilized to implement them.
It's worse than yesterday's fantasies about popes imposing their ideology on secular government, because paid corporate employees implement political decisions that run against their personal beliefs, or have no influence over what the company does with the wealth they create.
And as we're seeing today, politicized corporations can bring huge amounts of compulsive force to bear against voters who resist their ideology. They don't give a damn about the rights of minorities in a democracy, or even if the majority strongly opposes their ideology.
With woke corporations, you obey their commands or you will be punished. No organized religion in the modern U.S. ever had comparable power to punish individual people for refusing to vote the way they demanded. None had the same level of dominance over media and even speech.
There you have one of the big problems with the fusion of corporate muscle and political power: there are no restraints, no safe havens, no way for individuals to escape punishment for refusing to obey. Corporate enforcers can act where the Constitution restrains the State.
All too often in modern America, we see rights that have become inalienable only in THEORY. In practice, corporate ideological enforcers can make it prohibitively expensive, or outright impossible, for you to actually exercise those rights.
When corporate muscle is combined with an aggressive political agenda under a party like the Democrats that is very comfortable with using totalitarian methods to achieve what it sees as virtuous ends, the result is a massive increase in the level of compulsion against citizens
Politicized religion can make all kinds of mistakes, but it was never a threat to liberty and democracy on the scale of woke corporations in the U.S. It never could have brought so much compulsive force to bear against individuals outside of our constitutional system.
The saddest thing about where we are today is that we KNEW the wall of separation between corporations and state was important. We knew the fusion of politics and industry - distinct but linked, with politicians in total control of privately owned capital - was dangerous.
We knew this because we had just fought and won a devastating world war against the system where totalitarian political parties use privately-owned capital as an instrument to achieve ideological ends and discipline their populations.
But my parents' generation, and mine, were tricked into seeing only the hideous superficial characteristics of that supposedly defeated system, not its true inner nature, not what really made it dangerous. And now it's back, and becoming the dominant ideology of the entire world.
Everything we could do to separate corporate power and money from the State would improve our republic and increase individual liberty. We should once again restrict compulsive force to elected officials who are restrained tightly by the Constitution. We should reduce corruption.
But you can't do that without taking the crucial step that our powerful entrenched system will never let us take: reducing the size of the State. You can only build walls of separation so high. They are useless when the State and its corporate partners tower far above them.
As long as the State is so huge, corporate power will gravitate to it, buying its influence and profiting from the public treasury. And as long as the State is so ambitious, it will desire corporate partners to help it circumvent the legal restrictions on its power. /end
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