The New Coalitions of the Democratic and Republican Parties (or how the 2020 election realigned American politics)
The 2020 election was gargantuan by every conceivable measure. It was the highest turnout election in a century. Joe Biden won with the largest number of votes ever cast, and Trump lost with the largest number of votes ever cast. Yeah that’s how gargantuan this election was. The total expenditures of the 2020 General Election were $14 Billion, more than double what it was in 2016 (which had been more than double what it was in 2012) and this isn’t including “free” media time and time spent by millions engaging in political discourse online and elsewhere.
In any political society, there are players and collective of players opting to either directly rule, or at least get a slice of the pie of political power (and by proxy, money). In Liberal, Democratic Republics, such as ours, the coalitions that form the bases of the two major political parties shift and turn with time in accordance to the will of these players and collective of players. Everyone else is just along for the ride…
But who are these players? and more importantly, why do they vote either Democratic or Republican? Here it’s important to denote that ideology is not synonymous with Party. The Republican Party was the original leftist, radical party that once called the institution of wage labor as “wage slavery”, where Lincoln and Marx had a very loose connection through Chicago newspapers where Marx would contribute, and where Lincoln would occasionally read. Likewise, the Democrats once included in their legendary New Deal coalition the racist, southern Dixiecrats. Wild to think that once upon a time KKK members voted overwhelmingly Democratic.
So what separates the Democratic and Republican Parties in 2021?
Here are some facts:
The Democratic Party has a majority of venture capitalists, multinational founders and other such entrepreneurs while the GOP has a majority of small business owners.
This represents a fundamental divide in cosmopolitanism vs regionalism.
One would imagine that the venture capitalists or multinationals would be supportive of the Republican Party because of the fiscal policy and economic platform offered by the Republican Party. But in actuality, Venture Capitalists/multinationals are deeply cosmopolitan and “globalist” in their economic interests and are thus allergic to the Republican Party’s new brand xenophobia— ie Venture Capitalists/multinationals benefit the most from having access to global markets, and from immigration.
Most of their workers, often in Information Technology, are immigrants from India, China, Nigeria, etc. Their consumer markets often include Latin Americans, Asians, Africans. They are fundamentally against any kind of nativism because it goes directly against their economic interests.
They want access to the planet, and more globalist integration (free movement of capital and labor) because that means access to large markets. The same is not true for small businesses, which do not benefit nearly as much from immigration or globalism. They instead benefit from stability in their local community. Consider a local restaurant owner in a small town in America: That business would not want immigrants bringing their entrepreneurial spirit because those immigrants would be competing directly with them. Instead such a business owner would want to cultivate a relationship with the local community so that his business retains stability, which is how small businesses survive. Small businesses do not survive through endless rounds of fundraising like Venture Capitalist startups do, or through access to global markets, they survive through stability and cultivation within a community that retains a given constitution.
That constitution is fundamentally tied to the demography of the community. It is difficult for small businesses to pivot because they lack the resources to, and so any wave of immigration that changes the constitution of their community will be a threat to their captured market. Especially if immigrants bring with them the aforementioned entrepreneurial spirit for creating new small businesses that directly compete with existing ones. Hence why even immigrant small business owners tend to support nativist policies: their relationship to the community they market to is fragile enough as it is, why would they support a dynamic process like immigration? It would go directly against the fact that their economic interests are directly tied to the stability of the constitution of their community.
This is not the same for Venture capitalist Startups which survive and thrive through growth and through a dynamic and endless access to foreigners(immigrant workers constitute about half of Information technology’s Professional-Managerial class) as well as the dynamism and progressivism that multinational market integration brings with it. Hence this explains why people like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates among other billionaires are Democratic Party supporters, but your typical restaurant owner is a Republican Party supporter. But this also explains why the domestically-focused giant corporate conglomerates remain Republican, such as the Walton Family, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers — all of whom have business in domestic retail, casinos, domestic oil production respectively. The divide in the capitalist class is defined in their economic by which the rest of the base ‘aligns’ with.
This is, in fact, what constitutes the central economic interests of the parties in question. Putting aside varying conversations about morals or ethics, the plain, rational self-interest of the division of the Capitalist Class is in full display. The players in the Democratic Party are Big Tech and Silicon Valley, as well as increasingly more Financial White Collar. The suburbanites who turned out for Biden, also belong the new liberal upper middle class. While the rural classes are now totally swamped by the GOP. Meanwhile, the urban working class, which is majority people of color, remains overwhelmingly Democratic.
This coalition within the party will come to head with the Progressives (the left-populist wing of the party) vs the Centrists in the party who gain support through their donor network. They will align on many cultural issues, including immigration, social and racial justice, feminism, LGBTQ+ etc, but will undeniably have problems reaching consensus on economic matters.
