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Why Big Business Won't Abandon the Tea Party[/h]
Could the ratio change if “the establishment” wanted it to? Of course—but that’s assuming that big financial interests are naturally set against the Tea Party. They are not. They helped create the Tea Party. In the aggregate, if you leave aside the contractors who might benefit from earmarks (RIP), they’re better off when Tea Partiers run the House.
The Tea Party, after all, is not wholly set against the GOP’s business class. It’s just the latest populist movement funded and fueled by the Big Business. The “
anti-tax clubs” of the 1920s, which moved the Republican Congress to drop income tax rates, were literally organized by the allies of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. The (mostly incompetent) opponents of the New Deal, like the Liberty League and the National Organization of Manufacturers, coalesced when conservative donors realized
they, the captains of industry, weren’t compelling advocates. “The capitalist system can be destroyed more effectively by having men of means defend it then by importing a million Reds from Moscow to attack it,” said one Texas businessman who backed the Liberty League, according to
Invisible Hands author Kim Phillips-Fein.
None of this means that the Tea Party is “astro-turf.” Every successful political movement needs wealthy backers. And when you put aside the shutdown, the Tea Party members who now run the House are producing much more for the financial industry, for small business organizations, than Democrats would if they took back the House. No one’s looking to primary the average Class of 2010 Republican because he’s trying to repeal Dodd-Frank or challenge EPA rules or prevent any changes in tax law that would anger the donors