The Republican Party has long been associated with big business and corporate interests, while the Democrats have long been seen as the party of the working class. At least that’s the perception. But it’s something of a myth. Both parties are bourgeois, expected in a country as capitalist as the United States. However, it’s the Republican Party that’s the party of the working class, small business, traditional agricultural, energy, and manufacturing sectors, and forward-looking entrepreneurs and innovators. The Democrats are the party of oligarchic power and technocratic elites.
As I have documented in past essays on this platform, the Republican Party was founded with the above identified coalition at its core. The political realignment we’re seeing—where working-class voters increasingly support Republicans and corporate donors shift toward Democrats—is a return to the Republican Party as originally constituted, while the globalist ambitions of Democrats remains consistent, now explicit. The shift can be traced back at least to around 2016, apparent with Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence serving as a major inflection point. At the heart of this transformation is the return of populist-nationalism, which emphasizes democratic-republican governance and classical liberal principles.
Trump’s 2016 campaign broke with traditional Republican orthodoxy in several ways. Rather than emphasizing free trade, Trump leaned into economic nationalism, protectionism, and a populist tone that resonated with working-class voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest—not just white voters, but black and brown workers, too. Trump spoke directly to those left behind by deindustrialization and globalization (off-shoring manufacturing and mass immigration), offering a sharp contrast to the multiculturalist, technocratic, and urban-centric cosmopolitan messaging that defines the Democratic Party. Republicans have become the party of the masses, whereas Democrats have become the party of elites.
The facts are clear: corporate and high-income donors—especially from sectors like entertainment, finance, and established technology firms—found a more globalist friendly and socially progressive partner in the Democratic Party, which fully embraces climate initiatives (population control strategies), identity politics (strategies dividing the proletariat along lines of ethnicity, gender, race, and religion), and (corporate-captured) regulatory command in ways that appeal to large, urban-based multinational and transnationalist corporations and professional-managerial strata.
This shift is apparent not only in political and policy orientation, but in campaign finance trends. Where the oligarchy puts their money is a powerful indicator of political alignment. By 2020, Democrats were raising more money than Republicans from Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Republicans still retain support from traditional industries—such as agriculture, fossil fuels, and manufacturing—but the bulk of individual corporate donations favor Democrats, especially from the top tiers of the finance and tech worlds.
The new alignment (if the Democrats, the party of slavery Jim Crow, and positive discrimination, ever were the party of labor) is only deepening over time. During the 2024 election cycle, Democrats received significant financial support from the finance and big corporate power—much more than did the Republicans. Democratic-aligned dark money groups spent nearly double the amount spent by their Republican counterparts. Harris’ campaign, along with affiliated Democratic entities, raised approximately 2.9 billion dollars during the 2024 election cycle, compared to the Republicans’ 1.8 billion dollars.
This financial shift mirrors changes in the party’s base of support. Polling and election data from 2024 show an alignment between the Republicans and the working class, particularly among voters without a college degree—those voters whose interests progressives have long claimed to champion. Gallup polling finds that nearly half of Republicans identify as working or lower class. Trump won 56 percent of non-college-educated voters. Working-class voters trust Republicans more on issues like economic growth, entrepreneurship, immigration, and public safety. This realignment is also evident among entrepreneurs and small business owners. In contrast, fewer Democrats self-identify working class—only around a third. This reflects the party’s appeal to college-educated, urban professionals (although, even here, college-educated white men are split in party loyalty).
Whatever it was in the past, here’s the reality of today’s America: While the populist and working-class appeal of the Republican Party have grown stronger since 2016, the Democratic Party has increasingly become the political home of the credential class and the preferred partner of transnational corporations. To be sure, the realignment isn’t absolute—there are still significant overlaps and exceptions, again expected in the most capitalist country in the world—but the broader trend has held over multiple election cycles and is deepening. The Democratic Party is the party of the oligarchy. The oligarchy embraces the Democratic Party because the Party embraces free trade.
As I noted in a recent essay on this platform, in an 1848 speech to the Democratic Association in Brussels, Karl Marx took a stance in favor of free trade—not because he supported capitalist economics, but because he believed free trade would accelerate capitalism’s internal contradictions and hasten its downfall. Marx argued that protectionism served to preserve capitalist economic structures relatively advantageous to the working class and slow the inevitable progression of capitalist contradiction. In contrast, free trade, by unleashing global competition between working classes across the planet and undermining traditional industries and social relations, deepens inequality and (if one’s eyes are open) exposes the exploitative nature of the capitalist system.
For Marx, the destructive dynamism of free trade is a necessary stage in the development of capitalism. Thus, Marx was an accelerationist, advocating for what we might call “crisis capitalism”: the more capitalism expands and destabilizes societies globally, the sooner the conditions emerge for its revolutionary overthrow. In this sense, Marx saw free trade as a catalyst for historical progress (as he understood it)—not toward a stronger market economy, but toward a post-capitalist world reorganized along communist principles.
Ironically, this is the path Democrats and big corporations and financiers who support them, have chosen. Thus, in a way, when conservatives describe Democrats as “Marxist,” while not literally true (Democrats are the party of the corporate oligarchy), are not off the mark, since the ends Democrats seek increase the possibility that something that at least looks like communism will replace capitalism: the reduction of the proletarian to serfdom, managed by a global administrative apparatus run by a technocratic elite and its army of bureaucrats.
freedom and reason 