liberal corporatism
I’m trying to understand “liberal corporatism.” Bear with me a bit as I try to work it out in writing.
Thesis: everybody is better off when powerful segments of society avoid conflict and work together for mutual benefit. But this sort of cooperation can only take place in a high-trust, high-information environment. This sort of high-trust, high-information environment requires personal contact, so cannot be extended beyond a few hundred people at most; thus, the decisions that count are inevitably only going to be made by the members of a tiny elite. The role of corporate executives in this elite is to defend the conditions for the success of the sectors of enterprise they represent. The role of politicians in this elite is to assure that the interests of major voting blocs are not ignored. These roles require expert knowledge and experience that only elite insiders can reliably have. It also requires compromise and mutual accommodation, and that in turn requires that the politicians have extensive contacts among the corporate elite – freelancers like Bernie and Tsipras, however attuned to popular sentiment, cannot do the job because they are not trusted by the corporate side. By contrast, insiders like Bush, for all their contacts and experience or knowledge, may be too remote from popular sentiment and the vote to effectively do the job of the politician. The trick is to find the right balance of popular acclaim and insider influence. In that context, the power of the corporations may be useful to progressive causes – consider their role in the establishment of gay marriage and the recent movement against the confederate battle flag. After all, profits and popular sentiment need not disagree: both, in different ways, express and produce information about the preferences of key sections of the population. The problem is one of balance and coordination, and that is work for powerful insiders.
Antithesis: The key point is that the members of the elite, corporate executives and politicians trust and are trusted by one another; but in order to succeed they must be trusted by the population as a whole, and to do that they (politicians especially) must act in a trustworthy way. Trust based on lies will not last long. But the politicians then have a conflict: can they be trustworthy both to their corporate counterparts and to the voters they “represent?” The corporate executives, in turn, are not concerned with the “success of the sectors of enterprise they represent” but with wealth that they personally can pocket. This does not even benefit long-term shareholders: thus instead of paying dividends the corporate elite use profits to buy back shares, benefiting executives with stock options and short-term speculators instead of buy-and-hold shareholders; or they hold piles of cash until the time is right to steal it. As Joe Stiglitz points out, markets may fail to support efficiency in the economy. These “market failures” occur because somebody profits from them. Correcting “market failures” is a legitimate function of government but the corporate elite who profit from them will oppose these corrective measures. As conservatives point out, many of these “market failures” are created by government – but, again, this is a consequence of a government bought and paid for by the corporate elite, as, again, Joe Stiglitz alerts us. In the cases of gay marriage and the confederate battle flag, a shift in popular sentiment was supported by the corporate elite precisely because profits were not at issue, but when corporate profits are at stake, popular support becomes impractical “demagogy.” Thus, the influence of money on politics only increases as long as the corporate/political elite continue in charge.
Synthesis: The antithesis describes tendencies that do exist within any elite governance, that is, within any real governance. However, the elite is not a monolith. As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, “democracy” is a system of political competition for position in the political elite, and in this competition, some, the “liberals” in American terms, will compete for votes by their commitment to regulate business, reform and eliminate market failures, and shift the tax burden away from the population in general and toward the wealthy. Others, the “conservatives,” compete by their friendliness to business interests, that is, to the profits of the corporate elite. If the majority vote according to their real interests, the liberals will prevail and act as a counterweight against the tendencies described in the antithesis.
Antithesis to the Synthesis: Just to the extent that the liberal side is “in the interest of the majority,” it is in the interest of the wealthy to divide the majority, creating the cauldron of conflict that elite rule supposedly avoids; this has sometimes gone to the extent of genocide. As for the supposed knowledge and experience of the elite, they have as a matter of empirical fact been wrong again and again, and this is really no mystery: in elite circles “truth” is no less negotiable than “money” and “what insiders know” is what it is in the interest of the wealthy for them to believe. In short, it is ideology, not “truth.” Thus, just to the extent that they rely on one another for information, the elite are cut off from the evidence and increasingly incompetent. And while it is true that successful governance is based on trust, the most important trust is the trust that the governed have for the government – and, empirically, the corporate elite has increasingly lost that trust. Increasing incompetence of the insiders and their loss of the trust of the governed is what has, in the past, often led to violent revolutions. All in all, the facts do not support either the Thesis or the Synthesis.
Second-Stage Synthesis: I’m going to leave this blank. At some point, action takes the place of words.
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I believe you understand corporatism, liberal or conservative. 
