Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., spoke at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, where he called for a “common good capitalism” that would get “wokeness out of the boardroom” and hold “companies accountable for pro-American goals, rather than left-wing social engineering, or globalist profiteering.”
A shorter version of his remarks has been published at The American Conservative.
In his talk, “We Need Corporate Patriotism to Defeat American Marxism,” Rubio marked the radical difference between Joe Biden the candidate, who campaigned as a blue-collar moderate, and Joe Biden the president.
Rubio said the latter serves “the agenda of about 8 percent of the country” who “believe America is a systemically racist country, with a shameful history and an oppressive free-enterprise capitalist economy.”
The ‘8 percent’ wields outsize power because it includes “the people who run our schools and universities, our tech companies and large corporations, our media, sports and the entertainment industry,” he said.
This radical, anti-American elite “consider themselves not citizens of America, but citizens of the world,” and employ Marxist tactics, said Rubio, to “divide the people against each other” and to “make everything political.”
Rubio’s solution is to “revive America’s corporate patriotism” which would “require that companies be subject . . . to legal liability when they [push] wasteful, anti-American nonsense,” and hold “companies accountable for pro-American goals.”
Rubio has been refining his notion of “common good capitalism” since August 2019, when he published an article in First Things arguing that “business profits have become increasingly estranged from production and employment” because “large, transnational corporations” use “our country’s resources to speculate on financial assets, including their own share prices.”
In November 2019, Rubio spoke at The Catholic University of American, and described Common Good Capitalism as “a system of free enterprise in which workers fulfill their obligation to work and enjoy the benefits of their work, and where businesses enjoy their right to make a profit and reinvest enough of those profits to create dignified work for Americans.”
