Class Cleavages

On January 10, 2021, four days after the January 6 attack at the Capitol, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley—four of the six largest banks in the United States—suspended contributions to the Republican Party. The next day, the Chamber of Commerce declared that politicians who had voted against certifying the election would no longer receive its financial support. “The president’s conduct last week was absolutely unacceptable and completely inexcusable,” said Thomas Donahue, the Chamber’s CEO: “By his words and actions, he has undermined our democratic institutions and ideals.” Over 123 Fortune 500 firms—collectively accounting for a quarter of American GDP—eventually did the same.¹

American capital’s boycott against the Republican Party, signifying new heights of estrangement between organized business and what it saw as a dangerously anti-system conservative movement, lasted less than two months. By March, the Chamber had reversed course. “We do not believe it is appropriate to judge members of Congress solely based on their votes on the electoral certification,” explained Ashlee Rich Stephenson, the Chamber’s senior political strategist. Citi and JPMorgan Chase resumed their donations to the GOP in June, once a bipartisan group of senators emerged to separate infrastructure spending from the administration’s proposals for a tax increase. In the 2022 primaries, Republican members of Congress who refused to certify the 2020 election still faced an average fundraising penalty of $100,000 from Fortune 500 PACs; this penalty dropped in the 2022 general election, and once again in the 2024 primaries.² Within two years, organized business’s opposition to the Republican Party had disintegrated.

Within the American business lobby, it seems there is no consensus about the direction of the country’s future. The large blocs of organized money that found Trump a threat to democratic institutions in 2021 evidently no longer do—similarly, proposals once thought bad for American capitalism, such as a twenty-percent universal tariff and mass deportations, are no longer outside the realm of possibility. As a result, today, the American business class’s record of partisanship could best be described as incoherent. What accounts for business’s inability to challenge the Republican Party? And are there any patterns in the chaos?

Trump and the capitalists

Trump will return to office in January with an agenda of weakening the dollar, taxing all imported goods, deporting millions of migrant workers, and limiting the Federal Reserve’s independence. If confirmed, the vocally pro-tariff billionaire Howard Lutnick will oversee American trade policy alongside Jamieson Greer, a Robert Lighthizer protégé and Trump’s choice for US Trade Representative. And though markets cheered Trump’s selection of the hedge fund manager Scott Bessent to lead the Treasury—derided by Elon Musk as the “business-as-usual choice”—even Bessent favors a vastly expanded tariff regime. Trump himself declared his intent to impose across-the-board tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China on day one, causing bond yields to sink the next day.³

At best, Trump is begrudgingly tolerated by much of American capital. While elite consensus has turned against free trade over the past decade, its preferred trade restrictions are in “targeted, strategic” form largely limited to China, whether supposedly underpriced goods “dumped” in American markets or transfer of cutting-edge technology, rather than the President-elect’s strategy of across-the-board tariffs. Trump’s victory has therefore prompted widespread concern among American employers, particularly in the retail, agricultural, food processing, and manufacturing sectors. Business leaders still largely prefer the Obama-era immigration regime, despite the Republican Party’s opposition to the Biden administration’s border security bill, and their lack of advocacy on the issue, ProPublica reports, is due to a widespread sense of impotence in the face of a radicalized Republican party. 

This isn’t new. The GOP has long embraced politics running directly counter to the American capitalist class’s policy preferences—such was the case during Republican obstruction of the Targeted Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008, the government shutdowns of 2013 and 2018–19, and the Tea Party’s crusade against the Export-Import Bank. 

But, in 2024, an unprecedented amount of capitalists themselves openly tolerated these anti-systemic politics. Jamie Dimon publicly struck a position of ambivalence on who should occupy the White House, even while reportedly favoring Kamala Harris. The venture capitalist Tim Draper issued a widely ridiculed endorsement of both candidates. Larry Fink, who described the January 6 insurrection as “an assault on our nation, our democracy, and the will of the American people,” bluntly declared that the election’s outcome “really doesn’t matter.” Other financiers outwardly supported Trump’s re-election campaign. The GOP’s campaign against American higher education lured the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who had demanded Trump’s immediate resignation after the January 6 insurrection, back to the Trump campaign. Similar grievances lured Steve Schwarzman and Ken Griffin, both of whom previously rejected Trump, back into Team Trump’s orbit. The ownership class failed to discipline not only Trump, but also itself.

Defensive unity

Business organization in the United States has historically occurred only in response to challenges by organized labor and agrarian movements. American business’s recent political incoherence vis-a-vis Trump should be understood as reflecting these groups’ diminished ability to agree on what their common challenges are today. 

The United States is unique among advanced capitalist countries in lacking a singular dominant national business organization. When these organizations appear, they are not organic phenomena emerging from within business itself: the first major representative organizations of American employers—the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce—were organized by William McKinley’s 1896 presidential campaign and the Taft administration, respectively. As the political scientist Cathie J. Martin argues, it is thus “much harder for US employers to think about their collective long-term interests than their counterparts elsewhere.” Given the fractious nature of American capital, “they are very good at saying no to regulations that offend their narrow self-interests, and very bad at saying yes to policies that further their long-term, collective concerns”—such as free trade and finance versus protection, the level of demand in the domestic market, or the degree of income inequality.⁴

The 1970s, like the 1890s, saw an exception to this tendency. As corporate profits declined amid the sustained full employment of the Vietnam War, American businesses raised prices to inflate margins and off-shored production to increasingly integrated global markets. This sparked an uptick in union activity, while Richard Nixon’s 1970 creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and his infamous 1971 price freeze, further aggrieved American corporate managers. The American ownership class thus began organizing with unprecedented coordination. 

In 1972, the Labor Law Study Committee and the Construction Users’ Anti-Inflation Roundtable—a lobbying organization dedicated to codifying union-busting strategies into law, and a group of corporate executives seeking to coordinate contractors’ resistance to union demands, respectively—merged to form the Business Roundtable. The Roundtable, Paul Heideman explains, was a “new kind of organization for American business.”⁵ Only the CEOs of the very largest American corporations were eligible for membership. Rather than directly endorsing candidates and hiring lobbyists, the Roundtable focused on building consensus within the capitalist class, put into action through its politically connected members’ personal interventions. The Roundtable, in this sense, was a project specifically dedicated to overcoming collective action problems among the capitalist class—choosing free trade over protection, the open shop over collective bargaining, and the strong dollar. 

The Chamber of Commerce also rose to meet the moment. In 1975, the Chamber hired Robert Lesher, a management consultant and lobbyist, as its first full-time president. As inflation soared above its postwar baseline, Lesher’s wildly successful recruitment campaign revitalized the Chamber. In 1976, the Chamber had barely 50,000 corporate members; by 1980, it grew to nearly 250,000. A formerly stagnant organization had become, in Kim Philips-Fein’s words, the incubator of “a social movement for capitalism.”⁶

The crucible of the seventies had forged a united voice for the once-fragmented American capitalist class. Unified in the Chamber and Roundtable, in Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s words, “Corporate leaders became advocates not just for the narrow interests of their firms also but for the shared interests of business as a whole.”⁷ At the beginning of the decade, the American business community—if there even was one to speak of—had mostly focused on piecemeal fights over labor law and consumer protection. But by 1980, American capitalists had marshaled the collective strength to engage not only in short-term policy fights but also outline a long-term vision for the governance of American capitalism: a vision involving the rollback of the New Deal order.

Ironically, Heideman argues, business mobilization’s very success produced the conditions for its downfall: the capitalist class had defeated its unifying enemy in organized labor, government regulation, and taxes. Profits appeared to be back on an upward trajectory, union density was in steep decline, and both parties had embraced variations of the Chamber and Roundtable’s neoliberalism of individual tax cuts, deregulation, and the strong dollar. The capacity for collective action forged in the years of crisis thus disintegrated. By 1985, Chamber membership had declined to 180,000. As Lawrence Kraus, a senior Chamber official, explained in 1987: “For the last six and a half years, you’ve had a President in the White House who said he’d veto anything anti-business. So why should business people bother to join?”⁸

By the 1990s, the Business Roundtable was in severe organizational decline. Its income dwindling, the group’s president urged members to triple their membership dues to maintain its political advocacy. Consequently, the Roundtable lost a third of its membership.⁹ In 1993, Vernon Loucks, Jr., the CEO of the pharmaceuticals giant Baxter, bemoaned the state of business organization:

While business may enjoy a measure of economic power, most businessmen don’t have true political power and don’t purport to understand it or use it. No change will come to our schools that isn’t approved in some form by our political processes. Yet put us in the political arena on a public policy question like education, and we in business are often totally in the dark.¹⁰

The Chamber survived the period, but only by abandoning its mission of uniting the business lobby across sectional divides. Instead, the Chamber entered the business of “selling deniability” to its members, a model first piloted by the tobacco industry. Fearing that open advocacy against health regulations would tarnish their brands, tobacco companies secretly donate to the Chamber, which would then advocate against the industry’s desired regulations. This business model spread to the auto, pharmaceutical, and insurance sectors, each directing tidal waves of cash to the Chamber in hopes of obscuring their unpopular political interventions.

Capitalist constituencies

Without a strong national organization to coordinate political action among capitalists, fissures within American capital’s partisanship today fall largely along sectional lines, with political interventions generally made in favor of a business’s narrow sectoral interests. In total, Trump raised $1.1 billion this cycle, sourcing 69 percent from large contributors; Harris raised $1.7 billion, 58 percent of which came from large contributors.

Trump’s primary base this cycle was, as ever, among traditional, “grittier” industries: manufacturing, energy, and logistics. Agribusiness—which benefits from low wages and loose chemical regulations—donated nearly $18 million to Trump, and only $4 million to Harris (as compiled in OpenSecrets data). Trump’s 20 percent universal tariff seems to have done little to deter the agricultural sector’s donations: in 2020, these donors gave Trump $16 million. The transportation sector gave nearly $97 million to Trump—nearly eighteen times the sum it gave to Harris. Likewise, the energy sector gave nearly six times as much to Trump ($31.1 million) as it did to Harris ($5.3 million). 

The Democratic donor base is primarily post-industrial, largely focused on finance and tech. From the technology sector, Trump raised only one-seventh of Harris’s total, sourced largely from electronics manufacturers. As of October, donors in the internet industry had made 82 percent of their political contributions to Democrats; in the software industry, 72 percent of donations were made in support of Democrats. Concerns over the consequences of a Trump presidency on US-China trade appear to have influenced tech’s support.¹¹

The Democrats received exceptional support from electronics manufacturers, perhaps owing to subsidies from the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act and to the party’s more explicit internationalism. Harris received $19.7 million in donations from the sector, nearly five times more than Trump’s collections. Even so, Biden’s subsidies to the renewable energy and electric vehicle sector appear to have won his party only minor monetary support: Harris received $6.9 million from the renewable energy and electric vehicle world, mainly from venture capitalists invested in the sector, to Trump’s $2.4 million. 

Absent from Harris’s donor base were the oil and gas industry, which gave $20.4 million to Trump, tobacco, which gave $8.6 million to Trump, and waste management, which gave $8.2 million to Trump. Absent from Trump’s donor base were education and media. Strikingly, Harris received over twice as many contributions from the defense industry as Trump. The financial elite were divided but leaned red: Trump raised $234.9 million from the sector to Harris’s $117 million. Finance nonetheless constituted Harris’s main base of business support, giving more to the Harris campaign than any other sector. Doug Henwood’s analysis finds that, of the identifiable large contributors to Harris’s Future Forward PAC, 27 percent made their money in finance—more than any other industry. This likely reflects finance’s increasing estrangement from the Republican Party, though this estrangement is not severe or total enough to have any disciplining force.¹²

Classwide disorder

Barring moments of systemic crisis, like the congressional battles around TARP in 2008 or CARES in 2020, the American business lobby is characterized by what is arguably a lack of classwide rationality. American business simply never recognized positive economic restructuring as the necessary corrective to the systemic crisis they had briefly diagnosed in early 2021. Between the options of increased corporate taxes and public expenditure or a second Trump term, most big donors in finance, energy, agribusiness, and transportation perceived the former as the greater threat to the society they rule. High-technology, internet, and a (nonetheless substantial) minority within finance disagreed, but failed to mount a winning campaign. 

Capital’s failed political interventions through the first Trump and Biden presidencies were therefore emblematic of its long-term inability to overcome collective action problems. Throughout the 2010s, the radicalizing Republican Party had come into escalating clashes with the business lobby—itself diminished in strength and the consensus it was capable of marshaling. Such was the case during the 2013 government shutdown, when the Tea Party wing of the GOP, demanding repeal of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), threatened to default on American debt. The Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable, and National Federation of Independent Business quickly condemned the GOP’s hostage-taking; the shutdown and its associated legislators were backed and funded by the Koch Brothers and allied capitalists, unified under the political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity (AFP). This equally powerful, diverse faction of capitalists favored all-out war on the Democratic Party, rather than the Chamber’s incrementalism—a sign of the multiplying divisions among Republican Party investors.

In the 2024 American election, of particular note was the vocal support of hedge fund, venture capital, and private equity executives for Trump. Unlike their counterparts in traditional sectors, hedge funds are not employers in any serious sense of the word: Ackman, whose net worth is over three times greater than that of Jamie Dimon, employs fewer than 100 people. As such, their executives—themselves significantly wealthier than their counterparts in traditional industries—have tremendous liberty to make political interventions.

These financiers are not uniformly aligned with the Republican Party. Venture capital made two-thirds of its contributions to the Democratic Party; hedge funds gave in the same proportion to Democrats; and private equity split its donations equally.¹³ Their political interventions, however, have a peculiar nature. They largely do not engage with organizations like the Chamber or Roundtable—nor do they attempt to build institutional infrastructure for their interventions like AFP or the now-defunct FreedomWorks. Instead, their political interventions take on a disorganized, individualized, and often erratic character: see, for instance, hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer’s 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, self-funded with $70 million of his own wealth. 

The phenomenon at play among finance’s support for Trump, then, is best understood not as a wholesale shift toward the Republican Party within the financial sector. Instead, it is symptomatic of the deep disorganization of the American capitalist class. The phenomenon within the hedge fund and private equity sectors is, above all, a lack of classwide organization. Without a national business organization to coordinate action among the business lobby—itself increasingly composed of spectacularly rich individuals with few stakeholders in their personal enterprises—individual capitalists are left largely to assess their interests alone. And without the perception among the ownership class of a credible threat to their way of life, there’s little need for such national organization to expand beyond its current sectoral and idiosyncratic short-term obsessions. American capitalists have thus not only lost the ability to discipline politicians, but also the ability to organize themselves. This is a measure of capital’s long-term success—business has largely lacked reason to organize as it did in the 1970s—but may soon prove problematic. The much-hoped-for business backlash to Trump simply never materialized during his first term, and there is little reason to expect it will during the second. When business leaders publicly bucked the Trump administration, they did so to avoid reputational damage from Trump’s most egregious antics rather than to shape specific matters of policy. Even their boldest attempt to rein in the Republican abandonment of Democratic commitments—the 2021 donor strike—lasted no more than a single year, and seems to have had no long-term consequences. Given these dynamics, the Republican Party’s radicalization will continue to be the defining feature of American politics.