There has been striking news out of Minnesota: major companies are urging the administration to pull back from its crackdown and de-escalate. On its surface, this is a relief. Real power—economic power—is being applied to ease a terrifying situation.
Anything that reduces violence and restores calm is welcome.
But it is worth pausing over what this moment reveals.
In a healthy society, the excesses of power are restrained first by government itself, by law, and by civic institutions—unions, churches, courts, and citizens acting through democratic means. Business, by design, is not meant to play this role. Corporations exist to maximize profit, reward executives, and create jobs. They are powerful, but they are not accountable in the way democratic institutions are meant to be.
So when corporate leaders become the most effective brake on state action, relief mixes with unease. Not because business intervened—but because it had to.
If government now responds primarily to market pressure rather than civic obligation, what exactly is it governing for? If citizens must rely on corporate leverage to restore restraint, what has happened to public authority itself?
To be clear: if this intervention helps, that is good. Lives matter more than theory. But the need for it signals something deeper. It suggests that democratic checks are weakening, and that power increasingly answers only to other power.
That should trouble us.
A society in which the marketplace must regularly step in to restrain the state is not one that has solved its problems. It is one that has postponed them—at the cost of legitimacy, citizenship, and trust.
We should welcome de-escalation wherever it comes from. But we should also ask, soberly and without comfort: why did it have to come this way at all?