Harrop: Healthy democracy in best interest of corporations

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had a warning for American business: “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.” The sector’s complaints centered around Republicans’ going state to state to undermine free and fair elections.

And so, are companies outraged? Damn straight they are. They have good reason, and it’s not because their chief executives are “woke” or the left pressured them. It’s because a healthy democracy is in their corporate interests.

The Trump-led push to overturn the 2020 election results, Rebecca Henderson writes in Harvard Business Review, “is a threat not only to democracy, but to the long-term health of the economy and to the strength of American business.” Similar attacks wrecked democracies in Europe in the 1930s, and South America in the 1960s and 1970s, with dire economic repercussions.

American businesses, Henderson adds, “assumed that someone else would ensure that democracy, the rule of law, and the kind of robust, respectful discourse that keeps societies healthy would simply survive.”

Now they have to take up that burden.

Top executives at hundreds of companies — including giants such as Amazon, Google and BlackRock — joined to oppose voting restrictions. CEOs remain widely trusted by the American public, and the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 92 percent of employees want their companies to speak out on the issues. Amazon alone employs more than 800,000 Americans.