The right also fragments once its working-class adversary is tamed.

Evidence

All the same, deinstitutionalization has not left the right entirely untouched. This is evident in the rapid turnover at the top of the Tory Party, as well as in GOP leaders’ frustration at the lack of discipline on the part of fervent Trump supporters in the legislature. In January 2023, Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy needed no fewer than fifteen rounds of voting to be elected Speaker of the House; in an unprecedented motion, members of his own party voted to oust him from the position before the year was up. As Paul Heideman has written, the taming of labor removed the external constraints that once disciplined capitalists and motivated them to maintain unity and pursue a common agenda. Without a worthy adversary to concentrate the mind, internal fractures are likely to widen—between “woke” capital and the Koch brothers, DeSantis and Disneyland, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon—and the contemporary state can no longer fulfill its role as guarantor or Gesamtkapitalist. Given the “weakening of the parties since the 1970s, and the political disorganization of corporate America since the 1980s,” as the academic Cathie Jo Martin has argued, “it is much harder for US employers to think about their collective long-term interests.” Rather than a realignment—that is, a strategic shift of the working class toward the Republican Party, as some observers have suggested—we are instead witnessing dealignment, the relentless and accelerating dissolution of existing party affiliations. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 164

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘taming of labor’ disciplined capital’ claim connects directly to Frances Fox Piven’s and Wolfgang Streeck’s work on labor-capital power balances; also echoes the reader’s own ‘Sacrifice’ interest in how shared external threats produce internal cohesion.
• SHARE: The McCarthy 15-round Speaker vote as evidence of post-discipline GOP infighting is a crisp tidbit for anyone tracking party dealignment.