https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/08/deep_state_plutocrats_have_nowhere_to_hide.html
The worst mistake the Deep State ever made was to turn conservatives against Big Business. Traditionally, fighting corporate power was the purview of the political left. Conservatives have generally backed “free markets” because they despise socialism’s predilection for choosing economic winners and losers. Conservative voters have long seen government regulation as more of a threat than Wall Street wheeling and dealing.
This makes sense. American conservatives largely embrace the principles of the Founding Fathers’ laissez-faire liberalism, and many share policy preferences that overlap with today’s self-described libertarians. For conservatives, the left’s “politics of envy” is unappealing. The left’s desire to redistribute private property within some sort of Marxist system is seen as a dangerous impulse toward legalized theft. The left’s love for collectivism over individual freedom is regarded as insidious. Voters who support limited government do not tend to care how Sam Walton became a millionaire. They are much more likely to applaud individual success as the product of hard work and innovation.
Times are changing, though. Over the last forty years, middle-class Americans who put their faith in “free markets” have gotten smacked upside the head by corporate interests time and again. The savings and loan scandal, pension scams, derivatives-juiced market crashes, the housing collapse, the offshoring of good jobs, tech bubbles, predatory lending, reverse mortgages, and countless other corporate schemes have left working-class Americans in dire straits. All of these various gut punches have produced a kind of “awakening” among “live free or die” Americans: “free markets” are an illusion, and the economic game is rigged.