A couple of days ago I poured cold water on the idea that tea partiers might join up with the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party to form some kind of populist anti-corporate coalition. “Every once in a while they’ll get themselves exercised over some trivial issue of ‘crony capitalism’ like reauthorizing the Export-Import bank,” I said, but the truth is that the tea partiers have no real devotion to anti-corporatism. They just want to cut taxes and slash welfare.
Over at National Review, Veronique de Rugy tries to make the case that ExIm is more important than I’m giving it credit for, but I’m not buying it. Sorry. It’s just a shiny object of the moment that’s both small and costs virtually nothing. On the other hand, I’m entirely willing to buy de Rugy’s suggestion that Democrats aren’t especially anti-corporate either:
Please. They talk the talk, but when it’s time to vote, they rarely walk the walk. In the end, not unlike a number of Republicans, Democrats rarely miss an opportunity to support big businesses. They support the Department of Energy’s 1705 loans, which mostly go to wealthy energy companies, and they never fail to join Republicans in saving other corporate energy subsidies; they support the reauthorization of OPIC, which mostly benefits large corporations; they support farm subsidies, which mostly benefit large agro-businesses at the expenses of small farms; they support Obamacare, which among other things amounts to a huge giveaway to the insurance industry; they support auto and bank bailouts; and for all their complaints about Wall Street, they managed to write a law, Dodd-Frank, that in some ways protects the big financial institutions that they claim to despise.
I’d quibble with some of this. Obamacare is indeed good for the insurance industry, but it’s not that good. And anyway, this is mostly due to the fact that the structure of American health care is historically dependent on private insurance, and it’s just not possible to completely overhaul that overnight. In this case, Democrats caved in to special interests as much because they had to as because they wanted to.
Still, it’s true that most Democrats are pretty cozy with corporate America. There’s a smallish anti-corporate wing of the party, but it rarely has much influence because (a) it’s usually outnumbered in the Democratic caucus and (b) there’s essentially no anti-corporate wing of the Republican Party to team up with. Being pro-corporate is one of the few bipartisan issues left in Congress. There are lots of fights over small stuff, but it’s mostly just window dressing that hides widespread agreement over the big stuff.
