Progressive rhetoric increasingly equates the business model of Wall Street with fraud, particularly as national elections draw near. The demonization of Wall Street is a common activity of the progressive left, a tactic designed to convince followers that the time has come to tame the id of big business. Indeed, it is difficult to recall a more dramatic crescendo of anti-corporate invectives from progressives in recent history. In Wall Street and Progressivism, we argue that this kind of wholesale dismissal and condemnation of the private sector produces real casualties. We first observe that this rhetoric is, quite remarkably, disconnected from serious reforms to ensure corporate accountability. Proposed legislation is very long on rhetoric though equally short on theoretical and empirical support. This is true in spite of a history of progressivism that embraced legislative reforms that are grounded in science and evidence.
More important, creating a mirage of a progressive political effort not only fails, but displaces genuine efforts to pass reforms. Demonization is not just unhelpful, but likely harmful as it encourages us to think of all capitalistic endeavors as intrinsically or unchangeably evil. With reference to the progressive movement of the 20th century, we argue that this kind of sentiment is in fact anti-progressive—where the complete elimination of sectors like Wall Street is both undesirable and pragmatically impossible, demonization displaces real progressive reforms, those that countenance the possibility that corporate actors can, indeed, become better or even good.