For those who thought—or hoped—that Big Tech had consolidated a corporate coalition behind the Democratic Party, reconciling profitable exploitation and liberal principle, Trump’s second inauguration must have come as a blow. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan (Meta) sat beside Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google) and Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX). After years of summons to stem the flow of fake news, the moguls looked relieved at the change of management. Zuckerberg, who had led his companies’ drive to deplatform Trump after 6 January 2021, appeared in a five-minute-long confessional video with big hair and a gold chain to announce that it was time to return to ‘our roots around free expression’. And this time, they all showed up at PayPal billionaire and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s gala on the eve of the inaugural ball.
Paul Heideman’s history of the Republican Party sets out to explain how the commanding heights of American business ended up as supplicants to a party increasingly out of their control. Rogue Elephant opens with a historical contrast: in the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy was ostracized by Eisenhower’s gop under pressure from business, whereas seventy years later, an equivalent attempt to cast out Trump in the wake of his challenge to the 2020 election results came to nothing. Two patterns, Heideman argues, brought the Republican Party to this pass: the weakening of political parties and the disorganization of American business. The former made the party open to internal challenges and fracture, while the latter encouraged corporations and special interest groups to prioritize short-term, industry-specific gains rather than political unity. Both processes form part of a longer pattern of exceptional development. Although the United States pioneered what Rogue Elephant calls the ‘first mass electoral parties in world history’, these formations were designed less to articulate coherent national programmes than to muffle sectionalism in a divided federal republic; unlike other capitalist democracies, meanwhile, the country never produced a centralized employers’ association, in part due to the comparative weakness of labour.
Heideman tracks the trajectory of the Republican Party through two main vectors, ideological coherence and institutional strength, though he adds that many of the same patterns were adopted by or apply to the Democrats as well. In the Progressive Era, the Republicans were dominant—having successfully beaten back the populist upsurge of William Jennings Bryan—but the party provided little in the way of ideological differentiation from the Democrats. ‘In practice’, Heideman writes, ‘both parties stood for the exclusion of workers’ interests.’ Woodrow Wilson, then a professor of political science, worried that their indistinct and overlapping platforms denied voters a meaningful alternative, diminishing democracy itself. A pair of reforms, introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century to combat ‘spoils system’ corruption, durably changed the way that parties worked. The first installed unelected civil servants—who kept their jobs through periods of political change—in roles that had previously been given to political appointees. The second and more significant of the two introduced direct primaries, which by 1917 were mandatory in most states. Although intended to curb the excesses of machine politics in what were effectively ‘one-party’ fiefdoms, such measures also ‘made the American polity far less participatory and reduced the role of parties within it’, the book argues, while intensifying the ‘incoherence’ of their platforms. Over the same period, labour and business began to gain traction in their organizing efforts in tandem. Anti-union agitation drove the first burst in membership of the National Association of Manufacturers (nam), established in 1895. The Chamber of Commerce was founded soon thereafter. Business, however, struggled to achieve unity, given the realities of inter-firm competition. ‘We are a fragmentary body’, nam officials admitted in the interwar years. ‘We have officers but we lack numbers.’ A dissenter faulted the Chamber as a club in good times and a ‘potent centre of reaction’ in changing ones, but in neither role able to furnish real help.
Under the New Deal, with the labour movement brought into alliance with fdr’s Democrats, the parties cohered more clearly along class lines. For the first time since the antebellum era, a recognizable divide between reform and reaction took shape. Roosevelt endorsed collective bargaining in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, helping to spur a massive strike wave. Heideman cites John Lewis, the United Mine Workers president, who declared ‘We are convinced that there has been no legal instrument comparable with it since President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation’. From the 1930s to the 1960s, however, this alignment remained a work in progress, Rogue Elephant argues, as the Democrats yoked trade unions and Northern liberals to the Jim Crow South’s ruling stratum, cementing the Republicans as the party of ‘big business and native-born workers’. ‘Polarizers’ in each camp sought to resolve these tensions and by the mid-1960s, amid civil-rights upheaval, conservatives and liberals were largely sorted into opposing parties, producing for the first time an ‘ideologically cohesive party system’. In Heideman’s view, the achievement was double-edged. The very reforms that completed partisan sorting—the generalization of primaries and erosion of the seniority principle in allocating committee chairmanships—further weakened party organizations, which an emerging ‘service’ model reduced to professional campaign auxiliaries, confined to furnishing funds and technical support. The advent of television and associated costs compounded the trend, as did campaign-finance reforms, authorizing Political Action Committees (pacs) to channel donations directly to candidates while capping party contributions.
If the 1960s, which saw the culmination of labour movement strength in winning favourable regulations, were a turbulent period for business, the following decade marked a decisive shift in the balance of class forces. In response to mounting unfair labour practice complaints, growing construction costs and high inflation in a generally downbeat economic climate, the Labor Law Reform Group (llrg) began to draw previously indifferent firms into a more coordinated anti-union stance. Rogue Elephant recounts how chief executives such as us Steel’s Roger Blough snapped into action, first forming the Construction Users’ Anti-Inflation Roundtable and then, with the llrg, the Business Roundtable—whose goal, according to one member Heideman cites, was ‘catholic’ and dedicated to the ‘survival of the free enterprise system’. Unlike earlier employers’ bodies, the Roundtable aimed to act not for particular sectors but for business as a whole. The Chamber of Commerce, too, managed to pull itself together under the leadership of Richard Lesher, quadrupling its membership and augmenting its political footprint through a pac.
At the time, Heideman argues, business interests were willing to accept policies that would negatively impact their bottom line. Backing the Volcker Shock despite its severe short-term costs, leading firms endorsed the recessionary cure in a display of collective capitalist resolve. He quotes a Business Roundtable report which ‘argued forthrightly that a recession was a price worth paying for combating inflation’. Under Reagan, they got their reward. The corporate tax rate was more than halved and labour decisively sidelined. These tasks accomplished, however, business could not stay together. With ‘their immediate foes defeated’, Heideman writes, ‘business soon found it could not maintain the unity it had found in the heat of battle’. Distributive conflicts resurfaced within the corporate camp, as supply-side zealots clashed with more cautious fiscal conservatives over tax rates and deficit reduction; one adviser likened big business to ‘pigs feeding at the trough’, scrambling for perks from a friendly administration. The discipline forged in the 1970s ebbed, giving way to increasingly parochial forms of advocacy.
By the 1990s, bodies such as the Roundtable and the Chamber shifted their business model. ‘Rather than attempting to forge a consensus among a diverse group of companies, the Chamber would offer its resources to the highest bidder’, Heideman writes. This structure would allow the health insurance industry to ‘pledg[e] support for reform efforts in public, all the while funding the Chamber’s scorched-earth campaign against a public option or any meaningful regulations’. One insurance lobby group gave the organization $85 million to undermine regulation. While the laundering of tens of millions of dollars through dark money groups is now a common feature of American politics, this was a remarkable amount of money at the time. Representatives of capital stopped presenting themselves as custodians of general employer interests and instead took up narrower causes—executive compensation, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, insurance—and the lucrative provision of reputation-management services, indispensable in an age of celebrity ceos. The re-sectoralization of big business, Rogue Elephant argues, had a determining effect on the Republican Party’s trajectory. For Heideman, Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich was the pivotal figure in solidifying this transformation.