Once the Party of Business, Republicans Have Gone Rogue
The Republicans have always been enemies of labor. Now, freed from the shackles of their business patrons, Paul Heideman argues in his new book, the GOP may be more dangerous than ever.
Why did America’s capitalist class fail when it tried to discipline the GOP after January 6? And what does this failure say about the political capacities of US capital? Paul Heideman’s new book, “Rogue Elephant,” attempts to answer these questions. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
In the days after January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an abortive attempt to prevent the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a number of corporate leaders stepped forward to announce that they were temporarily suspending their financial support for the Republican Party. Four years later, an A-list of America’s business elites crowded into the same building to take their front-row seats for Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
Such a portrait in contrasts poses some puzzling questions about Trump’s Republican Party and its relationship to America’s corporate elite. If America’s capitalist class tried to discipline the GOP in the aftermath of January 6, why did it fail? What does such an attempt imply about the nature of the GOP? And what does such a failure imply about the political capacities of US capital?
These questions are at the core of Paul Heideman’s new book, Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went from the Party of Business to the Party of Chaos. The book provides readers with an accessible account of Republican radicalization and the party’s increasingly strained relationship with America’s bourgeoisie.
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