Few historical analogies exist for Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs. The investment bank Evercore estimates that the so-called “liberation day” announcement has raised the weighted average US tariff to 29% – its highest rate since 1900. To call it a generational action would be an understatement; my grandmother was born in 1939.
These tariffs, if they remain in place, will raise prices, eliminate jobs and shrink retirements. No one will pay for them more dearly than American workers. Yet a shock to capitalism inevitably raises the question of whether, and how, capitalists will respond. Faced with Trump’s tariffs, what will the US’s business class do?
Some commentators have hoped that, once the effects of Trump’s economic misrule become apparent, executives will finally turn on the Maga movement. But the answer, as during Trump’s previous tariff scares, is likely to disappoint. The Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, and International Dairy Foods Association have each issued strongly worded statements against Trump’s trade action. Others are likely forthcoming. But those words are unlikely to become meaningful action, for it is simply not in the business lobby’s nature to fight the Republican party.
Unlike much of the developed world, the US lacks a single, representative organization for big business. Barring extraordinary initiative by political actors, or moments of deep and protracted crisis, unified and cross-sectoral corporate lobbies rarely appear in American history. The National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce began as initiatives of presidents William McKinley and William Howard Taft, respectively; the Business Roundtable, founded through a merger of two union-busting business groups in 1972, stands as a rare business lobby organized by business itself.
If these organizations have a difficult time coming together, they have an even harder time sticking together. The roundtable and the chamber experienced their greatest momentum during the economic turbulence of the 1970s: at last, their managers were able to unite the otherwise fractious American business community under the banner of fighting organized labor and its New-Dealer allies within the Democratic party. But by the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, those enemies had been vanquished – and the chamber and roundtable hemorrhaged membership in turn.
Business organizations never regained the command of American capitalism they had won in the late 70s and early 80s. The Chamber of Commerce has maintained stature only by becoming, essentially, an all-purposes lobbying firm. Its primary function is to receive contributions from industries attempting to obscure their hand in pushing politically unpopular causes: tobacco seeking to shield itself from liability, the auto industry seeking to relax safety standards, the health insurance sector seeking to stall healthcare reform, etc.
Though the chamber and roundtable briefly stepped into more activist roles during the disruptions of the Tea Party, their success was, at best, mixed. At once, they found themselves dueling against the oil, gas and utilities sectors, each of whom fervently backed rightwing insurgents. By 2014, they had largely eliminated the Tea Party’s beachhead in Congress. Even so, they failed to repel the advance of Trump during the 2016 primaries; nor did they manage to sap the influence of the Freedom Caucus, today a kingmaking group among House Republicans.
Though business organizations managed to significantly shape Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, they notably failed to shape his administration’s 2018 trade war. Rather than mount a united front against Trump’s tariff regime, nearly 4,000 firms attempted to individually lobby the office of Robert Lighthizer for individual exemptions for their imports of interest. This, the political scientist Jack Zhang explains, had the ironic effect of overwhelming the United States trade representative’s office, and crowding out most lobbyists: few ultimately received exemptions, while the rest continued paying the cost of high tariffs.
That period’s patterns are telling: American business, given the weakness of its coordinating institutions, is essentially incapable of coordinating significant challenges to the Republican party’s governance. A previous generation of corporate leadership might have met a shock of Wednesday’s magnitude with a coordinated response felt at all levels of American society – whether through lobbying efforts in Washington or advertisements in local newspapers. But American business is too disunited to mount similar campaigns today. “The pursuit of individual self-interests,” as Zhang noted in 2020, “left none to defend the public goods associated with a free and open market between the US and China.”
That phenomenon is a persistent feature of the Trump era. The chamber’s boycott of campaign contributions to the Republican party after the January 6 insurrection lasted little more than two months. And the agricultural lobby, once a powerful pro-immigration voice on Capitol Hill, has all but abandoned its public advocacy for immigrants: organizing on the issue, where it exists, is done through quiet lobbying behind closed doors. If history is any guide, then, there will be no meaningful corporate break with the Republican party.
“We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’,” wrote the leftwing theorist Mike Davis shortly before his death in 2022. “Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon.”
Our moment, as Davis observed, is the apogee of a long-brewing structural crisis of American liberalism, where even the mechanisms that once aligned state policy with corporate interests have fundamentally broken down. Whether among executives, lobbyists or university trustees, an elite-led backlash to the Trump administration – on trade, immigration, the rule of law or anything else – is not forthcoming. Only an organized working class, then, can resist Trump.
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