In recent months, an array of CEOs and billionaires like Apple’s Tim Cook have spoken out against Donald Trump and emerged as surprisingly strong champions of an inclusive US society – at least when it comes to immigration, race and gender.



Since January, though, we’ve also seen a new level of rapaciousness by corporate interests in Washington DC that seem intent on extracting as much wealth as they can from wherever they can: consumers, investors, public lands, student borrowers, the tax code and even the war in Afghanistan.

Longtime watchers of the .01% won’t be surprised by this bifurcated picture. For over two decades, an ever more educated wealthy elite has trumpeted its belief in tolerance, diversity, and meritocracy – even as it’s also helped usher in record levels of inequality that have left many Americans feeling economically excluded and increasingly angry.

Trump’s retrograde presidency has revealed the profound contradictions at the top of the US income ladder. In the wake of the president’s various actions toward immigrants and inflammatory remarks on race, we’ve gotten glimpses of a wealthy class with a powerful social conscience and the potential to offer leadership on some of the most divisive social issues of the day, as well as other urgent matters like climate change.



Yet don’t expect an enlightened new establishment to command moral authority any time soon. That can’t happen until the wealthy and business leaders extend their vision of inclusiveness to the most important sphere of American life: the economy.

The coming battle over taxes offers an important test in this regard. Will the same CEOs and billionaires who’ve stood up against Trump’s travel ban and support of white supremacists also stand up against tax proposals that would make the rich richer while ballooning the deficit and leading, inevitably, to yet more cuts that hurt vulnerable communities?



That seems unlikely.

Corporate leaders have already been supportive of Trump’s sweeping push to gut regulations in ways that would tilt the rules governing the economy more in favor of business and the wealthy. Social inclusion may be a growing public mantra of the far upper class. But economic extraction remains among its core operating principles.

Clearly, though, these two goals stand at odds with one another. American society has historically made the greatest strides toward social inclusion when opportunity and prosperity are broadly shared.



In contrast, economic insecurity makes it easier to stir up anger toward minorities, women, and immigrants – as the rise of Trump has shown. While a who’s who of corporate leaders have lately spoken out against Trump’s divisive rhetoric, where was this business elite when earnings by the white working class went into a nosedive, creating an opening for a populist demagogue to rise by playing Americans off against each other by race and national origin?



Social inclusion is a public mantra of the upper class. But economic extraction remains a core operating principle

The answer is that many corporate and financial leaders were, and still are, a big part of the problem. These leaders have fostered the economic conditions that have thrown the values of tolerance and diversity on the defensive in America.



Business practices aimed at boosting shareholder value – like outsourcing, offshoring, automation, union-busting, predatory lending, and a range of anti-competitive abuses – have undermined the security of large swaths of the country. In turn, a flood of business dollars for campaign donations and lobbying over decades has helped thwart effective government responses to rising pain on Main Street.

America’s business class should be ashamed to now be posing as the great defenders of inclusive social ideals – given how they’ve put those ideals at risk to advance the bottom line. It’s good to see CEOs speaking up against a bigoted president. Now it’s time for some deeper introspection in executive suites.

History tells us that societies with extractive and self-serving upper classes tend to fall into decline – whereas societies with inclusive elites are more likely to thrive. With the rise of Trump, we’re seeing what an unraveling of the social fabric looks like after decades in which nearly all the nation’s income gains have flowed upwards to a tiny sliver of households.



Rarely has the American experiment – the notion of a country united by ideas rather than shared heritage – felt more fragile than it does right now. It’s an ugly picture of division and resentment, but a predictable one given the economic trauma inflicted on millions of people over recent decades.

The good news is that some CEOs and wealthy philanthropists already get the intrinsic connection between social and economic inclusion. There’s a growing array of initiatives under way – including some funded by top banks like JPMorgan Chase – that aim to expand opportunity by training low-income workers for better jobs, increasing access to credit in inner cities, revitalizing poor urban neighborhoods, and offering new pathways to college.



Meanwhile, quite a few millionaires and billionaires have made it clear that they don’t support tax cuts for themselves or a rollback of new rules regulating Wall Street. So far, though, these voices remain a minority within the far upper class.

Ironically, there was an earlier time in American life, in the years after the second world war, when US business leaders largely embraced the goal of economic inclusion even as they resisted greater social inclusion. What we need today is a wealthy class that, finally, comes to stand behind both of these all-important values.

