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The Reagan Coalition Doesn’t Exist
If you don’t read anything else today, check out this article in The New Yorker on Big Business and its crusading for social justice:
“When you think about the role that big corporations play in American life, fighting for social justice is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet many corporations are doing precisely that in the ongoing struggle over the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. This year, legislators in at least twenty-five states have proposed more than a hundred bills limiting L.G.B.T. rights, often under the guise of protecting religious freedom; North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi have passed laws that, in various ways, make anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination legal. In an effort to roll back these laws, and prevent new ones from being enacted, some of America’s biggest companies are pushing a progressive agenda in the conservative heartland.
Last month, executives at more than eighty companies—including Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Marriott—signed a public letter to the governor of North Carolina urging him to repeal the state’s new law. Lionsgate Studio is moving production of a new sitcom out of the state, Deutsche Bank cancelled plans to create new jobs there, and PayPal has cancelled plans for a global operations center. In Mississippi, G.E., Pepsi, Dow, and others attacked the law there as “bad for our employees and bad for business.” Disney said that it would stop making movies in Georgia, which has become a major venue for film production, if the governor signed the bill. Something similar happened last year in Indiana, after the state passed a religious-freedom law allowing businesses to discriminate against L.G.B.T. customers and employees. At least a dozen business conventions relocated.
A little corporate muscle flexing can work wonders, it turns out. Last month, Georgia’s governor vetoed its religious-freedom bill, implicitly acknowledging that the state could not afford to lose Disney’s business, and South Dakota’s governor, citing opposition from Citigroup and Wells Fargo, vetoed a law that would have required people to use the bathroom that corresponded to their biological sex at birth. Last year, Indiana and Arkansas amended their religious-freedom bills after a corporate backlash (led, in Arkansas, by Walmart). …”
The most dangerous myth in American politics is the widespread belief that there is such a thing as the “Reagan Coalition” that unites social conservatives, national security conservatives and fiscal conservatives in a “three-legged stool” that makes up the mainstream conservative movement.
In reality, there is no such coalition. The social conservatives vote for the “shares my values” candidates like Ted Cruz. They have given mainstream conservatives control of Congress, the Supreme Court, and unified control of nearly every Southern state government. They controlled the White House too under George W. Bush. This empowers mainstream conservatives to push through their pro-business economic agenda.
Big Business, however, operates in a coalition with the most radical SJW activists on the Left. Disney threatens to pull out of North Carolina. Coca-Cola threatens to abandon Georgia. Wal-Mart uses all its economic power to influence Arkansas. Alcoa sends threatening letters to the Tennessee legislature. When it comes to immigration, the US Chamber of Commerce uses all its power to push for amnesty for illegal aliens in concert with the Democrats.
Source: http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2016/04/19/the-reagan-coalition-doesnt-exist/
