There Are Two Scenes With Which The American Historian Paul Heideman Opens His New Book Published By Verso In November 2025 Titled “Rogue Elephant: How Republicans Went From The Party Of Business To The Party Of Chaos” Meaning “The Wild Elephant: How Republicans Went From The Party Of Business To The Party Of Chaos”, And They Are Two Scenes Separated By Seventy Years But They Seem As If They Are One Mirror. In The First Scene, Spring Of 1954, Senator Joseph McCarthy Sits Before Television Cameras In The Army-McCarthy Hearings, Arrogant, Threatening Generals Of World War II, And Blackmailing The State Establishment In The Name Of Fighting Communism, While In The Back Rooms Gather Men Wearing Elegant Gray Suits Whom The Public Does Not Know: The President Of Studebaker Company, And The President Of General Electric, And The President Of The Largest Textile Company In The Country. These Are Not Leftists Nor Liberals, But They Are The Heart Of The Institutional Elite Of American Capitalism, Members Of The Committee For Economic Development CED And The Business Council. They Have Decided That McCarthy Is No Longer Merely Annoying, But Has Become A Potential Fascist Danger, And They Pressured President Dwight Eisenhower, Who Was Himself Their Product, To Stop This Madness. And After Weeks Of Pressure And Telegrams And Meetings In Airports, The Senate Voted To Censure McCarthy By Sixty-Seven Votes To Twenty-Two, And The Man Ended Up Ostracized Dying Alone Two Years Later Addicted To Alcohol.
In The Second Scene, January Sixth 2021, Supporters Of Donald Trump Storm The Capitol Building To Prevent Certification Of Election Results He Lost. This Time Also The American Business World United As One Man. More Than 123 Companies From The Fortune 500 List Announce A Boycott Of Republicans Who Supported The Attempt To Overturn The Results, Companies Representing More Than A Quarter Of The American Gross Domestic Product. The American Chamber Of Commerce, And The Business Roundtable, And Even The National Association Of Manufacturers Which Called For Invoking The Twenty-Fifth Amendment To Remove Trump, All Condemn What Happened. Leaders Of Advisory Boards Resign En Masse After Trump Defended The Charlottesville Rally That Included Neo-Nazis, And Major Republican Donors Declare That Trump Is Ostracized. For A Moment History Seemed To Repeat Itself: The Capitalist Elite Will Discipline Its Party As It Disciplined McCarthy.
But What Happened After That Is What Makes Heideman’s Book Necessary. For Trump Did Not Fall. On The Contrary, His Grip On The Republican Party Became More Entrenched Year After Year. In 2024 He Won Almost All Primary Elections Without Even Bothering To Debate His Opponents, And The Republicans Who Declared Their Contempt For Him Turned Into Trembling Supplicants. The Largest Companies That Boycotted Him Returned To Court Him In The Final Days Of The Campaign, Then Lined Up To Offer Fealty After His Victory. The Question That Heideman Poses, A Question Simple In Its Formulation And Deep In Its Significance, Is: Why Did The Capitalist Elite Succeed In Curbing McCarthy In 1954 And Fail Miserably In Curbing Trump After 2020?
The Prevailing Answer In American Libraries During The Last Decade Was Cultural In Essence. They Said That The Base Of The Republican Party Transformed Because Of White Anger, Or Because Of Right-Wing Media, Or Because Of Ideas Of Conservative Thinkers, Or Because Of Deep-Rooted Racism That Exploded. Heideman, A Historian Specializing In American Studies From Rutgers University Newark, And A History Teacher In New York, And A Regular Writer In Magazines Like Jacobin And Dissent And In These Times, Rejects These Explanations Not Because They Are Completely Wrong, But Because They Put The Cart Before The Horse. For Him, One Cannot Understand The Transformation Of The Republican Party From The Disciplined Party Of Business That Represented The Interests Of Boards Of Directors Of Large Corporations To The Party Of Chaos That Threatens To Shut Down The Government And Default On Public Debt And Reject Election Results, Without Understanding Two Long-Ignored Structural Institutional Transformations: The First Is The Collapse Of The American Political Party As An Institution, And The Second Is The Disintegration And Fragmentation Of The American Business World As An Organized Political Force.
The Book Is Not An Electoral Narrative Nor A Biography Of Trump. It Is An Institutional History Of The Last Fifty Years. Heideman Starts From A Fact That Many Forget: American Parties Were Always Weaker Than European Parties. A Presidential Constitution, A Federal System, A System Of Separation Of Powers, All Factors That Made The American Party Not A Cohesive Programmatic Party But A Fragile Coalition Of Regional Elites. But From The New Deal Until The Civil Rights Movement, These Parties Began To Become More Ideological And More Cohesive, With The Expulsion Of Conservative Southerners From The Democratic Party And Their Entry Into The Republican Party, To Emerge For The First Time In American History A Ideologically Differentiated Party System: Conservatives In One Party, And Liberals In Another Party.
And In The Same Moment That Parties Became More Ideologically Cohesive, They Began To Become Weaker Organizationally. Here Lies His First Central Paradox. Reforms Of The Early Twentieth Century That Introduced Direct Primary Elections, Then Reforms Of The Sixties That Liberals And Democrats Imposed To Expand The Primary System To Include Presidential Nomination, Then The Huge Explosion In Campaign Costs Since The Seventies, And The Emergence Of A New Legal Framework For Campaign Finance That Gives The Candidate’s Special Committee Priority Over The Party Itself, Then The Supreme Court Decision In Citizens United Vs Federal Election Commission Which Legalized Super Political Action Committees Super PACs That Can Raise Unlimited Money Without Direct Coordination With Campaigns, All These Factors Created A New Environment In Which The Party Is Like A Service Company Providing Logistical Support To Candidates, Not A Device That Decides The Party’s Course And Disciplines Its Members.
In This Environment, The Party Leader Cannot Punish A Representative Like Marjorie Taylor Greene Even If She Embarrasses The Party And Fuels Internal Conflicts, Because She Simply Raises More Donations Than Him. Money No Longer Passes Through The Party, But Passes Beside It, Above It, And Below It. This Is The Second Chapter Of The Book Titled “The Exhausted Parties”, A Chapter That Reads As If It Is An Autopsy Of An Organizational Corpse That Died Slowly.
But The Weakness Of The Party Alone Does Not Explain Why The Party Turned Right And Why It Entered Into Conflict With Its Historical Financiers. And Here Comes The Second Institutional Transformation To Which Heideman Devotes The First Chapter “The Fragmented Elite”, A Chapter Amazing In Its Revelation Of A Forgotten History Of The American Business World. Unlike Europe, America Never Had A Single Employers’ Union Speaking On Behalf Of Capitalism As A Class. The Chamber Of Commerce And The National Association Of Manufacturers For Most Of The Twentieth Century Were Not Organizations Created By Businessmen Themselves, But Were Created By Activists In The Republican Party To Create A Link Between The Business World And The Party. They Were Party Tools More Than An Organic Expression Of Class Interests.
In The Seventies, Under The Pressure Of Stagflation And Labor Unrest And The Rise Of The Environmental And Consumer Movement, American Companies Organized Themselves As Never Before. The Business Roundtable Emerged As A Direct Representative Of Chief Executive Officers Of The Largest Companies, And The Chamber Of Commerce Transformed From A Networking Club Into A Fierce Political Pressure Machine Dedicated To Dismantling The Legacy Of The New Deal. This Unity Is What Enabled The Election Of Ronald Reagan In 1980 And Ending The Settlement With Liberalism. But Victory Was Fatal To Unity Itself. With A Friend In The White House Granting Them Everything They Want, Business Organizations Began To Wither, And Their Members Began To Ask: What Is The Benefit Of Paying Subscriptions If Reagan Gives Us Everything For Free? And Here Fragmentation Begins.
When Parties Weaken And Business Groups Fragment, A Vacuum Emerges Filled By What He Calls “Political Contractors” Or “Political Entrepreneurs” Who Possess An Independent Funding Base And Ability To Move The Popular Base Continuously To The Right, In An Endless Cycle Of Rebellion Against Leadership Then Transformation Of The Rebels Themselves Into New Leadership Soon Rebelled Against By A New Generation.
In The Heart Of The Book “The Wild Elephant” Lies A Question About Explaining Trump’s Rise. We Are Used To Asking Why The Republican Voter Changed, Why He Became More Angry, More Populist, More Ready To Believe Conspiracy Theory. Paul Heideman Flips The Question: What Happened To The Elite That Owned The Party? Why Did It Fall Silent? Why Did It Abandon? And Why When It Tried To Speak No One Listened To It?
The Answer He Provides In His First Chapter, Titled “The Fragmented Elite”, Is A Long-Term Historical Answer, Beginning A Century Before The Birth Of The Modern Republican Party. Heideman Recalls What Adam Smith Wrote In 1776 That “Masters Are Always And Everywhere In A Sort Of Tacit But Constant And Uniform Combination Not To Raise Wages Above Their Actual Rate”. Conspiracy Exists, But Its Organization Is Not Automatic. Capitalists As Marx Said Are “Brother Enemies”. Coca-Cola And Pepsi May Agree On Hating Unions, But They Compete On Store Shelves. Solving This Dilemma Needs An Organization.
In Europe, This Solution Was Found. In Sweden And Germany And Austria, Strong Central Employers’ Organizations Emerged, Participating With The State And Unions In Formulating Policies, And Imposing Class Discipline On Their Individual Companies: Do Not Outbid On Wages, Do Not Break From Consensus. But In America, As Heideman Argues Drawing On Political Scientist Cathy Jo Martin, This Never Happened. America Never Knew A Peak Organization Representing Capitalism As A Whole. And The Reason, In A Striking Paradox, Is That American Capitalism Was Too Strong.
When The Labor Movement Is Weak And The Socialist Party Is Marginal, Companies Do Not Feel The Need To Unite. What Happened In The Early Twentieth Century Reveals This Structure. The National Association Of Manufacturers NAM Was Founded In 1896 Not As A Class Movement, But As An Appendage Of The Republican Party In The McKinley Election Campaign. After Celebrations And Parades, The Gathering Dispersed And Its Membership Remained Only 1082 Members In A Country Containing 296 Thousand Manufacturing Companies According To The 1900 Census. Membership Numbers Did Not Begin To Rise Until The Association Changed Its Skin And Raised The Slogan Of Fiercely Combating Unions After The Wave Of Strikes Led By The American Federation Of Labor AFL Whose Membership Jumped From Half A Million To More Than Two Million Between 1897 And 1904. Capitalism Organizes When Workers Organize.
The Same Story With The American Chamber Of Commerce. Businessmen Did Not Create It, But Employees In The Department Of Commerce Created It Who Were Worried That American Companies Are Organizationally Backward Compared To Their European Competitors And Fear For Exports. In 1912 The Secretary Of Commerce Called For A Conference To Found The Chamber With President Taft As Keynote Speaker. And Even With Its Early Influence That Made Calvin Coolidge And Herbert Hoover Praise It, It Lacked A Cohesive Class Program. Historian Colin Gordon Describes It As “Seemingly Effective” In Hiding The Views Of The Elite Of Corporations And Banks As Views Of “The Business Community” As A Whole, But As A Tool For Organizing Or Representing Broader Interests “It Was Neither Effective Nor Interested”. Therefore It Collapsed Under The Pressure Of The Great Depression, When Its Members Split Between Supporters And Opponents Of The New Deal, And Large Companies Like The Association Of Automobile Manufacturers Began To Withdraw Publicly, And The Famous Filene Store Owner Wrote An Open Resignation Letter Saying That The Chamber “Is Not An Organization Of Business But An Organization Of Businessmen, Not Meeting To Study Business In A Practical Way, Nor Even To Know What Are The Needs Of Business In General, But To Promote The Private Views Of Some Prominent Figures”.
The Most Influential Organization In The Middle Of The Century, The Committee For Economic Development CED Founded In 1942, Seems At First Glance An Exception. Moderates From The Corporate World Who Were Dissatisfied With The Absolute Rejectionism Of The Chamber And The Association Founded It, And It Turned Into A Real Think Tank: It Played A Crucial Role In Passing The Bretton Woods Agreement, And Mobilized Support For The Marshall Project, And Supported National Security Council Memorandum 68 Which Founded Cold War Strategy, And Contributed To Reaching A Historic Agreement Between The Treasury Department And The Federal Reserve That Entrenched The Independence Of The Central Bank, An Agreement That Two Economists Describe As “More Than Any Single Event, Founded The Structure Of The Monetary Policy System For The Post-War Period”. But Heideman Picks Up A Fundamental Point: All These Successes Were An Expression Of A Minority Current Within The Business World, And It Was Constantly Attacked From The Right. The Wall Street Journal Accused The Committee At One Moment Of Being “Communist”, So It Was Forced To Issue A Statement Confirming Its Belief In The Free Enterprise System. As Historian Howell John Harris Summarizes, Its Colleagues “Conservatives And Reactionaries Were More Numerous And More Directly Influential Within The Business Community Itself”.
What Heideman Wants To Say Is That The Dominance Of The Business World In America After World War II, That Dominance That Made It Able To Exclude Organized Labor Movement From Policy Making, Is Itself What Fed Its Disintegration. Because It Was Not Forced To Unite To Face A Strong Opponent, It Did Not Build Institutions Of Collective Discipline. It Remained Fragmented, Sectoral, Selfish.
The Moment Of Rupture Came In The Late Sixties And Early Seventies. Three Shocks Hit Boards Of Directors At The Same Time: An Unprecedented Wave Of Regulatory Legislation, For Nixon Himself, The Republican President, Signed The Occupational Safety Law OSHA In 1969 And The Environmental Protection Law NEPA In 1970, And Consumer Protection Laws Looming On The Horizon, Then Rising Construction Costs, Then Economic Turmoil. And For The First Time In Decades, Capitalists Felt Besieged. So They Responded With An Unprecedented Class Mobilization Campaign. In The Seventies Only, The Number Of Corporate Political Action Committees Exploded, And Spending On Lobbying Groups Inflated, And The Business Roundtable Was Founded In 1972 As A Direct Organization Of Chief Executive Officers Of The Largest 200 Companies, Aiming To Coordinate The Response. And The Chamber Of Commerce Transformed Under Its New Leader Into An Ideological War Machine Dedicated To Dismantling The Legacy Of The New Deal.
This Temporary Unity Is What Brought Ronald Reagan To The White House In 1980. But Victory, As Often Happens In History, Was The Seed Of The Next Organizational Defeat. Heideman Explains This Dynamic: When You Have A Friend In The White House Granting You Huge Tax Cuts, And Deregulation, And Crushing Unions As Happened In The Air Traffic Controllers Strike, Why Pay Expensive Subscriptions To A Collective Organization? The Logic Of “Free Rider” Returned. Large Companies Discovered That Direct Individual Lobbying In Washington Is More Effective Than Collective Action. Emerging Technology Companies In Silicon Valley And Financial Wall Street Companies Did Not Feel That The Chamber Of Commerce Represents Their Interests. And The Business World Split Between Giant Transnational Companies Wanting Globalization And Free Trade, And Small And Medium Companies Wanting Protectionism And Immigration Control.
The Result Reached By The First Chapter, Which Paves For All That Will Come, Is That The American Business World Entered The Reagan Era United And Exited It More Fragmented Than Ever. And With This Fragmentation, It Lost The Ability To Exercise What Political Scientists Call “Class Discipline”. It Was No Longer Able To Punish A Party Wing Acting Recklessly, Because It Itself No Longer Knew What Is The Behavior Of Capitalism As A Class. In 1954, The Committee For Economic Development And Its Companions Could Lift The Telephone Receiver And Ask Eisenhower To Stop McCarthy, Because They Were Speaking With A Relatively Single Voice. In 2021, The Voice Of The Business World Was A Multiple And Contradictory Noise: Companies Boycotting, And Others Secretly Funding, And Billionaires Like Elon Musk Suddenly Deciding That Their Interest Lies In Empowering Chaos Itself, Rather Than Manufacturing It And Placing It At The Heart Of The State.
This Is The Ground On Which The Poisonous Grass Of Exhausted Parties Will Grow, And On It The Republican Party Transformed From An Institution Controlling Candidates To A Logistical Service Rented By Candidates, And How That Opened The Door To A New Type Of Political Entrepreneurs Who Do Not Need The Party Nor The Business World, But Need Only The Anger Of The Base And A Television Camera
If The First Chapter Of Paul Heideman’s Book Explains How The Business World Fragmented And Lost Its Ability To Impose Class Discipline, Then The Second Chapter “The Exhausted Parties” Explains How The Parties Themselves Lost Their Ability To Impose Party Discipline, And How These Two Paths Met To Create A Monster That No One Can Control.
Heideman Begins With A Correction. We Think That The Republican Party Was Always A Cohesive Ideological Party Led By Conservatives Who Believe In Free Market And Traditional Values. The Historical Truth Is Completely Opposite. The American Party Historically Was Weaker Than Its European Counterpart By Stages. A Presidential Constitution And Extreme Federalism And A System Of Separation Of Powers And Local Elections Make The Member Of Congress Depend On His Local Voters More Than His Dependence On His National Party Leadership. In The Thirties And Forties Of The Last Century, You Could Find A Southern Democrat Racist Who Supports Segregation And Votes Against Any Federal Intervention, And A Northern Republican Liberal Who Supports Unions And Supports Government Spending, And Both Sitting In The Wrong Party According To Today’s Standards. Parties Were A Geographical Mixture Not Ideological.
What Happened Between 1948 And 1972 Is What Political Scientists Call “Realignment”. Democrats Gradually Expelled Southerners After Harry Truman’s Support For Civil Rights, Then Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act In 1964, And Their Entry Into The Republican Party Through The Southern Strategy Started By Barry Goldwater Then Completed By Nixon. For The First Time We Had Two Intellectually Distinct Parties: Conservatives In One Place And Liberals In Another Place. This Was A Victory For Ideology But It Was A Defeat For Organization.
Because Ideological Realignment Coincided With A Counter-Revolution Against Party Organization Itself. At The Beginning Of The Twentieth Century, Progressives Imposed Direct Primary Elections To Break The Monopoly Of City Bosses On Parties. In 1968, After The Chaos Witnessed By The Democratic Party Conference In Chicago And Protests Against The Vietnam War, The McGovern-Fraser Committee Was Formed Which Transformed Presidential Nomination From A Deal Made By Party Leaders In Closed Rooms Into A Series Of Primary Elections In Which The Masses Participate. The Goal Was Democratic And Noble: Giving Power To The Ordinary Voter. But The Unintended Result Was Disarming The Party. The Party Could No Longer Say To A Populist Candidate “No, You Are Not Suitable”.
The Second Blow Came From Campaign Finance. After The Watergate Scandal, Congress Passed In 1974 The Federal Campaign Finance Law Which Placed Restrictions On Direct Donations To Parties, But The Supreme Court In Buckley Vs Valeo In 1976 Abolished Restrictions On Independent Spending. Political Action Committees PACs Emerged, Then Super Political Action Committees Super PACs After The Citizens United Decision In 2010. It Became Possible For A Single Billionaire Or A Single Company To Finance A Rebel Candidate Without Passing Through The Party. The Party’s Own Money Became Less Important. In The Seventies, More Than Half Of Congressional Campaign Funding Came From Parties. In The First Decade Of The Millennium, The Percentage Dropped To Less Than Ten Percent.
Heideman Adds A Third Factor Which Is Television And The New Media Environment. The Candidate No Longer Needs The Party To Reach Voters, But Needs A Camera And A Media Consultant. And Here A New Pattern Emerges: “The Political Entrepreneur” Political Entrepreneur, A Candidate Building His Personal Brand Away From The Party, Rather Against The Party, And Using The Anger Of The Base To Collect Small Money From The Internet, And Using The New Conservative Media To Become A Star.
And This Leads Us Directly To The Third Chapter “The Republican Revolution”, Which Is The Historical Heart Of The Book, Where Heideman Presents A Completely New Reading Of The Personality Of Newt Gingrich, The Man Whom He Considers The Real Engineer Of The Current Chaos, Not Donald Trump.
Gingrich Was Not Just Another Conservative. He Was A Doctoral Student In History, Failed To Obtain A Stable Academic Job, And Entered Politics Carrying A Theory: The Republican Party Loses Because It Tries To Be A Normal Party That Negotiates And Compromises. The Solution Is To Transform Politics Into A Comprehensive Cultural War, And Transform The House Of Representatives Which Was Dominated By Democrats For Forty Years Into An Ideological Battle Arena.
In The Early Eighties, Gingrich Was A Marginal Member In The House Of Representatives, Hated By His Moderate Republican Colleagues Because He Attacks Them More Than He Attacks Democrats. He Invented A New Tool: An Organization Grand Old Party Political Action Committee (GOPAC) Which Was Not A Traditional Political Action Committee For Fundraising, But Was A School For Training Republican Candidates In States On A New Discourse. He Sent Them Cassette Tapes And Word Lists: Use Words Like “Betrayal, Decay, Failure, Lie, Disease” To Describe Democrats, And Words Like “Freedom, Opportunity, Dream, Strength” To Describe Yourselves. He Was Building A Linguistic Army.
And More Importantly, He Exploited A Technical Vacuum: In 1979 The C-SPAN Network Began Broadcasting House Sessions Live, But The Hall Was Empty Most Of The Time. Gingrich And A Small Group Of Hardliners Would Stand In An Empty Hall And Deliver Fiery Speeches To The Camera Accusing Democrats Of Being Anti-American, While There Was Not A Single Democrat To Respond. When House Speaker Tip O’Neill Protested And Ordered The Camera To Film The Empty Hall To Expose Them, Gingrich Exploited That To Say That Democrats Suppress Freedom Of Expression. He Understood Before Everyone That Politics Was No Longer Negotiation In Back Rooms, But Performance Before The Camera.
But Gingrich’s Genius, As Heideman Clarifies, Was Not In Media Alone, But In Exploiting The Fragmentation Of The Business World And The Weakness Of The Party Together. At A Time When Big Business Leaders Like The Roundtable Still Wanted Settlements On Taxes And Trade, There Was A New Layer Of Small And Medium Businessmen, Independent Oil Companies, And Real Estate Development Companies, And Small Arms Companies, And Contractors In Suburbs, Who Did Not Feel That The Chamber Of Commerce Represents Them. These Were More Extreme, And More Ready To Finance Candidates Attacking The Entire Federal Government Not Just Its Regulations. GOPAC Was A Channel That Collected This New Money And Directed It Against The Leadership Of The Republican Party Itself.
When Gingrich Reached The Speakership Of The House In 1994 After The “Contract With America” That Ended Forty Years Of Democratic Dominance, It Seemed A Victory For The Party. But It Was In Truth The Beginning Of The Dismantling Of Party Power. Gingrich Ruled By Intimidating His Members, And Imposing Unprecedented Ideological Obedience, And Using Government Shutdown As A Weapon. Then The Weapon Turned Against Him. The Same Hardline Deputies Whom He Trained In Rebellion, Rebelled Against Him In 1998 After His Failure To Overthrow Clinton In The Monica Lewinsky Affair. Gingrich Resigned Defeated, But He Left A Fatal Legacy: He Proved That The Road To Power In The Republican Party Does Not Pass Through Pleasing The Party Leadership Or Pleasing The Big Donors In Wall Street, But Through Bypassing Them And Going Directly To The Angry Base Through Conservative Media.
From Here Heideman Draws A Direct Line To Our Era. Every Republican Leader After Gingrich Will Face The Same Fate: Reaches Leadership Through Rebellion, Then Discovers That There Are More Extreme Rebels Wanting To Overthrow Him. Dennis Hastert, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, All Fell By The Same Mechanism. The Party Became A Machine Producing Chaos Automatically, Because Its Structure Rewards Chaos.
That This Pattern Was No Longer Confined To Congress, But Moved Outside The Party Completely, With The Emergence Of The Tea Party Movement, Then Donald Trump, Where The Political Entrepreneur No Longer Needs Even Previous Membership In The Party, But Can Buy The Party Or Hijack It From Outside.
In The Traditional Narrative, It Seems That The Rise Of The Far Right In The Republican Party Was A Straight Line From Reagan To Gingrich To Trump. Paul Heideman Breaks This Straight Line In The Fourth And Fifth Chapters Of His Book, Which Are The Chapters Bearing Titles Summarizing The Republican Tragedy: “The Second Bush Years: Unity And Collapse” And “Politics Outside The Party”. Between Gingrich’s Revolution In 1994 And Trump’s Victory In 2016, There Was A Moment In Which The Institutional Elite Tried To Regain Control, And Succeeded Temporarily, Then Collapsed More Dramatically.
George W. Bush The Son, As Heideman Portrays Him, Was Not A Continuation Of Gingrich But Was An Attempt To Contain Him. When He Ran In 2000, The Slogan “Compassionate Conservatism” Was An Accurate Expression Of The Strategy Of The Big Business Class: We Need Huge Tax Cuts, And Deregulation, But We Also Need A Discourse That Softens The Severity Of The Cultural War That Gingrich Ignited And Frightened Swing Voters In Suburbs. Bush, With His Texan Drawl And Background As Son Of An Oil Investment Family, Was The Ideal Candidate For The Business Roundtable: Someone Who Understands The Interests Of Large Corporations But Can Speak The Language Of Evangelicals.
In The Beginning, The Formula Succeeded. He Passed Huge Tax Cuts In 2001 And 2003, The Largest Redistribution Of Wealth To The Top In Twenty Years, And The Business World Was Satisfied. Then Came September Eleventh. The War On Terror Gave Bush A Rare Opportunity To Reunite The Party And The Country Behind A Strong Presidency, And Gave The Chamber Of Commerce And The Roundtable A Reason To Rally Around The White House. Military Spending Exploded, And Reconstruction Contracts In Iraq And Afghanistan Flowed To Companies Linked To The Party, And Patriotism Became An Ideal Cover For Suppressing Any Regulatory Opposition.
But This Unity Was Fragile, Because It Was Built On Debt Not On Discipline. Heideman Explains How The Bush Administration Was The First Republican Administration To Adopt A Policy Of Deliberate Fiscal Deficit After The Chamber Of Commerce Itself Had Complained About Reagan’s Deficit In The Eighties. Tax Cuts, Two Expensive Wars, And Expansion Of The Medical Care Program For Seniors Medicare Part D Without Funding, All At The Same Time. The Result Was A Huge Deficit That Began To Annoy A Wing Of The Financial Business World Which Wants Long-Term Stability, But It Did Not Have A Tool To Stop It.
The Real Collapse Came From Outside Washington. Here Enters The Fifth Chapter, Which Is Perhaps The Most Exciting In The Book, Where Heideman Traces The Emergence Of “Politics Outside The Party”. The Central Idea Is That The Weakness Of The Party And Fragmentation Of Large Business Organizations Created A New Political Black Market. If The Roundtable And The Chamber Of Commerce Want A Settlement With Democrats On Immigration Or Trade Or Spending, There Are Other Organizations Ready To Finance Rebels.
Heideman Begins By Tracing A New Model Of Organizations That Emerged In The Nineties And Was Perfected By The Koch Brothers. Take The Organization “Citizens For A Sound Economy” (CSE) Founded With Money Of Charles And David Koch. Unlike The Chamber Of Commerce Which At Least Theoretically Tried To Build Consensus Among Its Members, CSE Was Selling Its Services To The Highest Bidder. A Tobacco Company Wants To Stop A Cigarette Tax? It Pays CSE And It Launches A Campaign In The Name Of “Freedom” And “Sound Economy”. An Oil Company Wants To Prevent Environmental Legislation? Same Thing. The Organization Does Not Represent A Class, But Rents Its Mobilization Capabilities.
This Model Which Heideman Calls “Advocacy As Reputation Laundering” Reputation Laundering, Was Soon Adopted By The Chamber Of Commerce Itself After Tom Donohue Took Its Presidency In The Late Nineties. Donohue, A Former Director Of The American Transportation Association And Organizer Of Astroturf Campaigns, Said It Frankly: “I Want To Give Them All Deniability”. A Simple Idea But Diabolical: Companies Do Not Want To Appear Financing A Campaign Against Expanding Health Insurance Because That Harms Its Brand, So It Pays Secretly To The Chamber, And The Chamber Launches The Dirty Campaign, And Companies Deny Its Relationship With It.
In 1998, Philip Morris Alone Pumped More Than 200 Thousand Dollars Into The Chamber To Stop A Cigarette Tax, Then Other Tobacco Companies Followed When They Saw That The Chamber Succeeded. After The Ford And Firestone Crisis In 2000 Around Defective Tires, General Motors And Toyota And Ford And Chrysler Paid More Than Half A Million Dollars To Remove The Criminal Liability Clause For Executive Directors From The Auto Safety Bill. Eleven Pharmaceutical Companies Paid More Than A Million Dollars Each For A Campaign Around Drug Pricing. But The Real Flood Came In 2009 And 2010, When The Health Insurance Group AHIP Donated More Than 85 Million Dollars To The Chamber, Which Constituted 42 Percent Of Its Budget, To Finance A Secret Campaign To Obstruct The Public Insurance Option Public Option In Obama’s Health Care Law, While The Same Insurance Companies Publicly Declared Their Support For Reform.
What Is The Relationship Of This To Trump? The Relationship Is Structural. When Large Business Organizations Transformed From Consensus-Building Organizations Into Service Companies Renting Themselves To Whoever Pays More, They Lost Any Moral Or Political Credibility To Tell Their Base “Stop, This Is Extremism”. They Themselves Were Secretly Financing Extremism. And At The Same Time, More Extreme Organizations Emerged That Do Not Need Large Companies At All: The National Federation Of Independent Business NFIB Which Claims To Represent Small Companies, But In Reality Is A Profit Company Selling Memberships, And Took A Hard Right-Wing Line More Than The Chamber Because It Competes With It On The Same Market. And The Club For Growth Founded By Stephen Moore And Conservative Economists, Which Transformed Into A Tool To Punish Any Republican Voting To Raise Taxes Or To Expand Spending, Through Financing A More Right-Wing Competitor For Him In Primary Elections.
Here The Two Stories Intersect: The Weakness Of The Party Which No Longer Controls Nominations, And The Fragmentation Of The Business World Which No Longer Controls Organizations, And The Birth Of A New Media Environment From Fox News And Conservative Radio. The Result Was The Tea Party Movement In 2009. Heideman Argues Strongly Against The Common Interpretation That The Tea Party Was A Spontaneous Popular Uprising Against Financial Bailout. It Was, In A Large Part, A Project Engineered By Political Contractors Outside The Party Using Real Anger Around The Financial Crisis And Directing It Not Against Wall Street Which Caused It, But Against The State Which Tried To Save The Economy, And Against Obama As A Symbol.
The Tea Party Was In Its Essence A Rebellion Against Bush’s Attempt To Unite The Party. Bush Tried To Make The Republican Party A Responsible Business Party Cutting Taxes But Preserving State Institutions. The Base That Gingrich Trained For Ten Years To Hate The State Itself, And Funded By Koch Networks And Club For Growth That Want To Destroy The State Not Just Reduce Its Taxes, Saw In Bush A Traitor. For This Reason, When The Economy Collapsed In 2008, Anger Did Not Go To The Left, But Went To The Far Right Inside The Republican Party.
And In This Climate, Donald Trump Emerged, Not As Outside Context, But As The Most Successful Political Entrepreneur In Exploiting The Vacuum. Trump Did Not Need The Chamber Of Commerce Nor The Party. He Possessed Two Things No One Possesses: Personal Wealth Allowing Him To Bypass Traditional Donors In The Beginning, And Television Fame Built Through The Program The Apprentice Making Him Known To The Base More Than Any Senator. And He Possessed An Animal Instinct To Understand That The Republican Party Had Become Empty Inside, Just A Shell That Can Be Occupied.
We Have Now Reached The Chapter That Gives The Book “The Wild Elephant” Its Subtitle And Its Dramatic Climax: “Hostile Takeover Of The Republican Party”. And Here Paul Heideman Abandons Calm Structural Analysis And Moves To Tense Electoral Narration Almost A Police Novel About A Party Kidnapping Crime.
On June Sixteenth 2015, Donald Trump Descended A Golden Escalator In Trump Tower To Announce His Candidacy For Presidency. That Day Everyone Mocked Him. Big Republican Donors Considered Him A Clown, And The American Chamber Of Commerce Ignored Him, And Party Leadership In Washington Was Betting On Jeb Bush, The Man Who Collected More Than 150 Million Dollars Before A Single Voter Cast His Vote, Or On Marco Rubio, Or Scott Walker. They Thought That The Old Rules Of The Game Still Apply: Who Collects Money From The Organized Business World, And Gains Party Support, And Wins Fox Network Support, Wins The Nomination.
But Heideman Clarifies That The Rules Of The Game Had Changed A Decade Before That, And Trump Is The Only One Who Read The Change. Open Primary Elections That Became Prevailing Since The Seventies Mean That Voters, Not Party Leaders, Choose The Candidate. And Citizens United Decision In 2010 Which Allowed Super PACs To Collect Unlimited Money Means That The Party Could No Longer Strangle A Rebel Through Cutting Funding. And Most Importantly, The Explosion Of Small Funding Via Internet Which Was First Perfected By Barack Obama Then Bernie Sanders, And Which The Right Also Perfected, Means That A Candidate Can Collect Millions Of Dollars From Small Donations Worth 27 Dollars Without Needing Approval Of A Single Company Board Of Directors.
Trump Was The Ideal Political Entrepreneur For This New Environment. Does Not Need The Party Because He Possesses Television Fame Preceding The Party, And Does Not Need The Business World Because He Presents Himself As A Billionaire Not To Be Bought, But Buys, And Does Not Need The Koch Network Because He Possesses Innate Ability To Transform Any Attack On Him Into Fuel For His Campaign. When Fox News Attacked Him In The First Debate, His Popularity Rose. When Wall Street Journal Mocked Him, He Collected More Donations. He Was Practicing What Gingrich Learned Thirty Years Before: Attack Leadership And Base Will Reward You.
Heideman Narrates In Detail How The Elite Tried To Stop Him And Failed. In February 2016, A Secret Meeting Was Held On Sea Island In Georgia Gathering Technology Leaders And Republican Money Tycoons And Party Leaders, Its Only Subject Was: How Do We Stop Trump? Memorandums Were Written, And Attack Ads With Hundreds Of Millions Via Super PACs Were Launched, But They Did Not Succeed Because They Were Addressing An Old Party Logic No Longer Existing. Trump Was Not Winning Despite His Little Spending, But Was Winning Because Of His Little Spending, Because That Was Proof That He Is Against The System.
Then Came The Moment That Heideman Considers The Truly Decisive Moment, Not 2016 But January Sixth 2021 And After. Here He Returns To The Scene With Which He Opened The Book. He Reminds Us That The Boycott Announced By Companies After Storming The Capitol Was The Largest In American History: 123 Companies From Fortune 500, A Quarter Of American Economy, Saying With One Voice That The Republican Party Crossed The Red Line. The National Association Of Manufacturers Which For Decades Was An Ally Of Republicans Demanding Removal Of A Republican President. For A Moment, It Seemed That The Lesson Of 1954 Will Repeat.
But What Happened After That Reveals The Depth Of Transformation That The Book Documented. Republicans Who Denied Election Results Did Not Surrender, Because They No Longer Depend On Donations Of Corporate Political Action Committees Corporate PACs. The Rise Of Small Donations, Which Doubled Hugely After 2016, Allowed An Angry Republican Voter In Arizona To Easily Compensate For Withdrawal Of Boeing Company. And At The Same Time, A New Category Of Extreme Right-Wing Billionaires Entered The Line, Not Existing In 1954. Richard And Elizabeth Uihlein, For Example, Were Modest Republican Donors In 2010, Then Became The Largest Individual Donors For Republicans In Elections Of 2021 And 2022, And Give Generously To Candidates Adopting Outright Conspiracy Theories About Elections.
Before This Reality, Companies Began To Split From The Boycott. Not Because They Were Convinced By Trump, But Because The Narrow Pragmatic Logic Of Individual Capitalism Triumphed Over The Collective Class Logic. As Heideman Explains, Corporate Political Donation Is Not Ideological In Its Essence, But Is An Investment In Access. If The Republican Representative Denying Elections Still Remains In Office, And The Company Needs The Vote Of This Representative On A Tax Law Or Regulation, Then Its Narrow Interest Requires Returning To Donate To Him, Even If That Contradicts The Interest Of The Capitalist Class As A Whole In Stability Of Democracy. Thus “The Business Army Gradually Abandoned The Battlefield” As Heideman Writes, After It Lost A First Strike.
And During All This, Trump Maintained His Grip. In 2021 He Strongly Pushed All Republican Candidates To Adopt Claims Of Election Fraud, Threatening To Support A Competitor In Primary Elections Against Anyone Who Refuses. His Argument Was Rude But Effective: Democrats Say That I Lie, Therefore Any Person Agreeing With Them Is In The Side Of Democrats. In A Party Whose Base Was Saturated For A Decade With Negative Partisanship, This Talk Found Listening Ears. At The State Level, Trump’s Support For Candidates Declaring Absolute Loyalty To Him Led To Control Of True Believers Over State Parties, Even If The Result Was Repeated Electoral Defeats In General Elections, And Even If New Local Party Presidents Like Christina Karamo In Michigan Do Not Even Know Campaign Finance Law And Enter The Party Into Debts.
Heideman Arrives At Year 2024, Where Trump Enters Elections And He Is The Undisputed Master Of The Republican Party, Despite His Rule Bringing Electoral Defeats To Republicans, And A Break With Their Historical Supporters In The Business World. Ron DeSantis Tried To Present Himself As “Trumpism Without Trump” But He Failed Because He Refused To Attack Trump Directly, So Why Would The Voter Choose The Imitation While The Original Exists? And Nikki Haley Tried To Present Herself As A Unification Candidate Gathering Between Party Establishment And Koch Network, Which Is Something That Was Unimaginable During The Republican Civil War In Early 2010, Especially That Haley Herself Ran In 2010 As A Tea Party Candidate With Support From The Same Network That The Chamber Of Commerce Opposes Which Said At That Time “We Prefer Non-Extreme Candidates”. But Haley’s Campaign, Despite Its Generous Funding From Big Donors, Did Not Arouse Enthusiasm Of The Base, And Won Only In New Hampshire And Washington DC, Then Koch Network Announced In February That It Will Stop Funding Her.
And Here Heideman Poses In The Conclusion Titled “All Parties Of Tomorrow” A Question Inevitable: If The Same Forces That Dismantled The Republican Party – Weakness Of Party And Fragmentation Of Business World – Exist Also In The Democratic Party, Then Why Did Democrats Not Descend To The Same Fate? Why Is There No Democratic Marjorie Taylor Greene, And Why Is There No Democratic Matt Gaetz?
The Answer He Provides Is: The Democratic Party, As He Argues, Was Built Around Interest Groups – Unions, Women’s Organizations, Black Rights Organizations, Environmental Organizations, LGBTQ Community Organizations – While The Republican Party Was Built Since The Seventies Around Ideology, Around What Is Called “The Three-Legged Stool” Of Conservatism: Free Market Economy, And Conservative Social Values, And Aggressive Militarism. In The Democratic Party, The Candidate Wins In Primary Elections Not Because He Is The Most Liberal, But Because He Is Most Able To Unite Interest Groups And Provide Tangible Benefits To Each Of Them. In The Republican Party, The Candidate Wins Because He Is The Most Conservative, The Most Extreme In Rejecting Compromise.
This Structure Makes The Liberal Political Entrepreneur Less Able To Succeed. Bernie Sanders Fought Two Anti-Establishment Presidential Campaigns In 2016 And 2020 And Increased The Momentum Of Resentment, But Even He, When He Lost, Supported The Winning Candidate And Called His Supporters To Vote For Him. There Is No Democrat Adopting The Same Contempt For Leadership That Trump Or Gaetz Shows. And The Reason Is Material: The Conservative Entrepreneur’s Primary Goal Is To Prevent The Party From Passing Democratic Legislation, That Is To Say “No”, And This Does Not Need Cooperation With Leadership, But Needs Disrupting It, And He Can Return To His District To Say “I Fought A Good Fight”. As For The Liberal Entrepreneur He Wants The Party To Pass Something – Health Insurance For All, A New Green Deal – And This Is Impossible Without Close Cooperation With Party Leadership. Therefore A Freedom Caucus Leftist Wanting To Overthrow The Speaker Of The House Democratic Cannot Exist.
But Heideman Does Not End With Reassurances. He Notices A Dangerous Transformation Happening Under The Surface: Wealthy Voters Are Shifting To The Democratic Party. A Study Of Chief Executive Officers Donations Between 2000 And 2017 Found That 57 Percent Of Them Were Giving Two Thirds Of Their Donations To Republicans, And Only 19 Percent To Democrats. But Studies Of The Last Decade Found A Reversal: Since 2020, Venture Capital Donors Donated 75 Percent Of Their Donations To Democrats, And Hedge Fund Donors 68 Percent, And Large Pharmaceutical Companies And Large Law Firms And The Three Major Consulting Companies McKinsey And Bain And Boston Consulting Donated 95 Percent To Democrats. As Wealthy Voters In General Are Shifting To Democrats, While Working Class Voting Has Become Divided Between The Two Parties.
One Might Think That This Will Make Democrats Abandon Redistribution, But The Opposite Happened: In The Era Of Joe Biden, Democrats Tried To Pass The Most Ambitious Redistribution Plan Since The Great Society. The Fact That The Plan Was Obstructed By Two Of The Most Conservative Members Of The Democratic Bloc Does Not Deny That The Rest Of The Party Supported It. On A Wide Range Of Economic Issues, From Taxes To Financial Regulation, High-Income Democrats Hold More Liberal Views Consistently Than Low-Income Democrats, Which Reflects That University Education Has Become A Driver Of Liberal Ideology.
Here Lies Heideman’s Final Warning. The Democratic Party Is In A Transitional State. The Structure Based On Interest Groups That Kept It Cohesive For Half A Century Weakens, With Increasing Liberalism Of Educated Voters And Election Of More Hardline Egalitarian Democrats In Districts Dominated By These Voters. Energies Of 2016 And 2020 That Sanders Campaigns Launched Did Not Dissipate, But Are In A State Of Dormancy Until 2024, And It Is Unlikely To Simply Dissipate. Democrats May Walk On The Path Of Polarization That Republicans Paved, But With A Time Lag.
As For Republicans, Heideman Concludes, They Are Also In A Transitional State, But Of Another Type. Trump Deeply Changed The Party, But His Innovation Was Not In Being More Reactionary Than Reagan And Bush, For Reagan And Bush Party Was A Party Of Racist Reaction And Imperial Bullying And Was Completely Comfortable Ignoring Law When It Suits It. Trump’s Real Innovation Is Personalist Rule Over The Party And Attempting To Exercise The Same Pattern On The American Government Itself. This Personalist Rule Put Into Question The Place Of Conservatism Itself In The New Republican Party. Since 2016, Loyalty To Trump, And Whatever He Claims To Believe In The Moment, Has Replaced Conservative Ideology As A Driving Force In Republican Party Politics. In 2020, The Party Did Not Even Bother To Write A Party Platform, The Platform Was Whatever Trump Says. In 2024, It Issued A Document It Called A Platform, But It Showed Barely Interest In A Political Vision More Than It Showed In 2020.
In This Sense, “The Wild Elephant” Is Not Just A Book About Trump, But Is A Book About The End Of Ideology As A Mechanism For Party Cohesion, And The Beginning Of Personal Loyalty As An Alternative. And It Is A Book That Succeeds In Providing A Material Institutional Explanation For What Seemed To Many As Unexplainable Cultural Madness. It Reminds Us That Parties Do Not Die Because Voters Are Angry, But Die Because The Institutions That Were Controlling This Anger – The Parties Themselves And The Class Organizations That Stood Behind Them – Had Died Long Before, Leaving The Arena To Political Entrepreneurs Selling Chaos As A Commodity, And Finding Who Buys It.
