HERE COMES SOME MORE "PARTY OF THE WORKING CLASS" BULLSHIT

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal attempted (again!) to persuade us that the Republican Party has really broken up with the plutocracy:

Once considered natural political allies, the Republican Party and big business are drifting apart. One sign of their estrangement: GOP lawmakers are weaning themselves off money from corporate political-action committees.

Republicans are now less dependent on corporate and industry PACs than at any time in the past three decades, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis based on data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Instead, they are turning to smaller donations from millions of individuals who tend to be wary of big-businesses priorities such as free trade.

Does this report have any data to back up the assertion that the "millions of individuals" who are giving Republicans smaller donations are, in fact, "wary of big-businesses priorities"? Nope. This is simply asserted without evidence.

There are numbers to back up the claim that corporate giving to Republicans is down:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has lived through the cycle....

More than 40% of the money given to his re-election campaign [in 2016] came from business PACs....

By 2022 ... the corporate-money pipeline was dwindling, accounting for less than 3% of his campaign funds.

What the Journal won't tell you is that the percentage of his campaign cash that came from large-dollar individual donations increased, from 16.92% in the 2016 cycle to 35.83% in the 2022 cycle.

If the GOP is wary of business at all, it's not because the party is suddenly championing the economic interests of the powerless against the powerful. It's because of "wokeness."

Conservatives say the fault for the breakup lies with CEOs who increasingly meddle in politics by taking progressive stances on divisive social issues....

These days, McCarthy is using his position to castigate Wall Street for taking progressive political stands....

The Republican Party’s “shifting sentiment away from corporate America is a result of their increasing activism that alienates Republicans and their constituents,” said Matt Sparks, an adviser to McCarthy and his former deputy chief of staff....

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the GOP-run state house banned the state from doing business with BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and several other banks after accusing them of boycotting investments in the oil industry in favor of renewable-fuel companies. In January, Texas banned Citigroup from the state’s municipal-bond business after the state attorney general said the bank discriminates against gun manufacturers.

You get the picture.

There's a claim that Republicans are becoming liberalism-curious:

Some [Republicans] are taking up causes once associated with old-school Democrats, advancing bills that give more power to the federal government to raise wages for blue-collar workers and lower drug costs for consumers.

But this report from The New Republic makes clear that the 2023 Republican Party is the same old Republican Party:

... the Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) just released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party seeks to, you guessed it, cut Social Security and Medicare....

The proposed budget would effectively make cuts to Social Security by increasing the retirement age for future retirees. The document seeks to assure people that there would only be “modest adjustments” but does not list what Republicans think the new retirement age should be.

On Medicare, Republicans propose requiring disabled Americans to wait longer before getting benefits and turning Medicare into a “premium support” system, a long-floated Republican idea that essentially turns the government program into a voucher scheme. Such a scheme would remove the guarantee for seniors to have affordable access to Medicare.

Republicans also call for “pro-growth tax reform” (read: cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations); “work requirements” (imposing more requirements on poor people trying to attain social services); and “regulatory reforms that increase economic growth” (encouraging the sort of deregulation that welcomes crashing financial institutions, corporate-poisoned rivers, and more than 1,000 train derailments a year).

As far as taxes go, the party wants to make permanent the individual provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill, which gave a roughly $49,000 annual tax cut to the top 1 percent and only $500 to those in the bottom 60 percent. In doing so, they’d add nearly $2.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The party also wants to eliminate the estate tax, which only impacts those who inherit assets worth at least $13 million.

It's like Paul Ryan never left.

Attacks on corporate "wokeism" are no more a sign of an overall GOP disillusionment with Big Business than Vladimir Putin's attacks on certain oligarchs are a sign that he's anti-business. If you're in business and you cross Putin, he'll have you poisoned or jailed, but he's fine with businessmen who don't challenge him, and he's categorically in favor of business. The same is true for Republicans. They want to score victories in the War on Woke because anti-wokeism appeals to voters, unlike their real agenda. But they're still corporatists at heart -- if "heart" is the right word.