Corporate America depends on openness - but will companies speak up for it?

I arrived in America in 1983, a graduate student headed for the cold north from a warm India, with a suitcase and the combination of ambition and unease. 

I liked the sunny optimism of the country as I stepped out of my plane in New York in the Fall of 1983. What I hadn't expected was how quickly it would claim me. An economics professor in New York, who was a close friend of my mother, used to introduce me as ‘an American who was accidentally born in India.’ 

I am one of the many kinds of people the American idea was supposed to be for — the immigrant who came for an education and is enchanted and thinks well of the country, and, as in my case, years later, makes it his home. 

This year's semiquincentennial has arrived with the usual pieties about freedom and founders. But it is a different America than the one Jefferson or Hamilton imagined, and a different one, frankly, than the one I found in 1983.  “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin had said, when asked what kind of a government the new nation would have. That idea is being tested today. And American business — the institution that shapes daily life more than most of what Congress does — has largely gone quiet, and not even celebrated the anniversary with fanfare.

A short reckoning with the past

The American corporation was built on the belief that light regulation would unleash innovations no guild-bound European economy could match. It worked spectacularly, and yet, that same permissiveness financed slavery, America’s original and gravest human rights catastrophe, to end which it needed a bloody civil war. The lesson of 250 years is not subtle: “fewer rules” quietly decides who bears the cost of growth, and it is usually the people already vulnerable. The Depression forced Roosevelt’s New Deal onto a business class that had refused those guardrails voluntarily; the 2008 financial crisis ended with banks bailed out and homeowners left to absorb the loss. Business rarely reforms itself in anticipation of a catastrophe. It believed it was answerable to owners, not to the country, and it continues to revert to its instinct the moment memory fades.

Alongside that record sits a better one. General Motors helped popularise the Sullivan Principles that pushed against apartheid in South Africa; the advocate John Kamm built a career persuading Chinese officials and Western firms to free political prisoners and allow workers to organize; American companies were often quicker than American law on women’s rights, LGBT inclusion, and diversity, whether from conviction or from reading the market correctly. 

But the deeper story of American business at 250 is not a ledger of triumph and failure. It is what is happening to the ground business stands on.

The ground is moving

For most of my adult life, whatever else was wrong with America, it was a reasonably reliable anchor for something larger: a rules-based international order, built and enforced imperfectly but sincerely, in which contracts held, courts functioned, and allies could plan on tomorrow looking roughly like today. 

This is now changing. 

The current administration has walked out of the Paris Climate Accords, torn up settled trade arrangements with Canada and Mexico, imposed tariffs that are scrambling supply chains, and moved against ESG investing and corporate diversity programmes with the kind of force usually reserved for actual emergencies. 

What’s troubling is the relative silence and timidity of American business in response. Companies that built fortunes and reputations on the predictability of the postwar order have, for the most part, gone along, calculated the risk of speaking up as higher than the risk of staying quiet, and hoped the storm passes before the damage reaches them. 

An honourable list of few have not: Costco and Apple shareholders rejected proposals to gut their diversity programmes by margins above 97 percent; a coalition of three dozen companies helped fund recovery for Minneapolis’s battered small businesses; the AI company Anthropic refused Pentagon demands for unrestricted access to its models for domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, and won in court when the government tried to punish it for saying no. But these are exceptions, not a movement. 

A handful of technology firms, meanwhile, now hold more concentrated power over commerce and information than Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex’ ever worried about, and some lobby actively against the rights-protective standards on supply chains, on AI, on data, that Europe and others are still willing to set. 

Tariff-driven reshoring is pushing some firms toward murkier, less accountable suppliers, not more transparent ones. 

And the information environment in which all this unfolds has shifted underfoot too: for the first time, Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report finds, social media and video platforms have overtaken television and news organisations’ own websites as the primary way people get their news worldwide — which means the corporate role in what people believe is no longer a side issue.

What business owes the ground it stands on

Here is what I think too few executives have said out loud. The conditions that make a business worth building include a functioning judiciary, a predictable regulatory state, a citizenry that trusts institutions, an immigration system that still lets in the next accidental American like me—the ambitious, the persecuted, but with a willingness to contribute— are not a backdrop. They are the actual infrastructure of long-term profit, more durable than any tax cut or deregulatory favour a given administration might offer this quarter. General Motors’ head Charlie Wilson was misquoted when he said at a Congressional hearing that what’s good for his company is good for America. He actually said what’s good for America is good for his firm and vice versa. His real point, buried under seventy years of misquotation, was that there is no clean separation between what is good for a company and what is good for the country it operates in. That was true when he said it in 1953. It is true now, and it cuts against the boardrooms currently betting that they can keep the tax cuts and the tariffs and the deregulation while outsourcing the cost of democratic erosion to everyone else.

David Brooks has written about America’s recurring cycles of “rupture and repair” — the idea that the country tears something down before it can rebuild it stronger, and that repair depends on a critical mass of people, across every institution, willing to say plainly what is happening and why it matters. I don’t know if business will be part of that chorus this time. I know it was largely silent through the last year of it, and silence is also a choice, with its own consequences attached. I am still, by choice and by paperwork, an American: accidentally born elsewhere, honorably naturalised, and unwilling to let either half of that lapse quietly. The corporations that share this country with me built their fortunes here on the strength of exactly the openness now under strain. At 250, the least they owe it is a voice.