When the first wave of Tea Party Republicans swept into Congress in the 2010 midterm elections, some of the most prescient observers pointed to the growing rift between the small and big business wings of the Republican Party and pondered its implications for the future of American capitalism. Writing for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the journalists Lisa Lerer and John McCormick observed that established trade associations such as the Business Roundtable were distancing themselves from Tea Party candidates, fearing that their willingness to sabotage the basic workings of government risked destabilizing the entire American economy. A group of leading corporations including General Electric, DuPont, Alcoa, and Duke Energy expressed their support for an emissions reduction bill in 2009, only to be faced with a barrage of invective from congressional Republicans accusing them of colluding with big government. Tea Party candidates saw big government and big business as acting in unison to suppress the freedoms of the small business owner. In the words of Dick Armey, chair of the Koch-funded organization FreedomWorks, “Big Business is sitting there on fat, pushy duffs looking for government to keep them in business.” Only “incompetent companies need bailouts. People who run corporations are basically taking care of themselves. They’re not very reliable people and they’re very comfortable with Big Government that greases the skids for them.”
This same cleavage between small and big business can be seen in Republicans’ current war against “woke capitalism”—the stakeholder-driven expression of political preferences on the part of large corporations—which Senator Ted Cruz recently described as a devil’s bargain between the “left and its big business allies.” In the same op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Cruz urged Republicans to abandon these “fair-weather” friends. True defenders of market freedom would be better off without corporate PAC money constraining their every move. “When the time comes that you need help with a tax break or a regulatory change, I hope the Democrats take your calls,” Cruz wrote, “because we may not.”
This style of business (or libertarian) conservatism has a long history on the American right, one that has been documented in detail by Kim Phillips-Fein. When the largest publicly listed corporations and their trade associations—chief among them the Business Council, progenitor of the Business Roundtable—made their peace with the New Deal state in the wake of the Second World War, small business conservatives remained aloof, convinced that big business was just as responsible as big government was for the growth of tax and regulatory burdens. The Business Roundtable continued to collaborate with both major parties even as it rebelled against the Fordist consensus in the 1970s. By contrast, small business conservatives have always rubbed shoulders with the nativist, theocratic, and white supremacist currents of the American far right. Their relationship to the Republican Party, mediated by such figures as Barry Goldwater and Newt Gingrich, takes the form of antiestablishment insurrection.