SOHRAB AMARI: The GOP-corporate divorce is a blessing for the party’s future.
November’s election revealed that the class realignment of our two parties is solidifying. Democrats have increasingly emerged as the party of upscale suburbs, of Silicon Valley and Hollywood and Wall Street, of the owners of capital and the professionals who service them. The GOP, meanwhile, is trending toward a multiracial working-class party, preferred by those who generally make their living by toil. . . .
The corporate backlash will no doubt scare some Republican faux-populists into dropping even their rhetorical gestures toward the working class. The old guard awaits the wayward prodigal, to return to the comfortable fold of marginal tax cuts and useless foreign wars. Picture Paul Ryan’s wingtips stamped on the face of the American right — forever.
But that would be a monumental mistake, because as 2016 showed and 2020 confirmed, the votes simply aren’t there for that. The old agenda threatened to turn the GOP into a regional rump party (see 2008 and 2012). By contrast, the Trump GOP, warts and all, expanded its appeal to Hispanics and young black men in 2020 while consolidating the white working class.
Today’s Democrats sure don’t represent this multiracial working class. The party and its Big Tech and Big Media allies deliver mostly for the HR department — a k a you’re fired for saying the wrong thing. Mass student-loan forgiveness would end up transferring wealth from everyone else to the cognitive elite. Amazon’s Democratic-approved wokery masks appalling working conditions and union-busting.
Indeed.