Many Americans have a vision of the GOP as a party of country club elites, funded by big-money donors, paying lip service to conservative social issues in order to pry working-class voters away from their own economic interests -- all the while delivering on the Chamber of Commerce’s agenda. While that may have been a fairly accurate portrayal as recently as 2008, it was also true that those same big money donors hedged their bets by giving almost as generously to Democrats. But with the advent of liberal, politically-activist billionaires from the tech, venture capital and media sectors, that perception of big-money influence no longer holds true.

While today’s leftists rage against the corrosive effects of big money in politics, the reality is the Democrats are now the party of the monied interests. What has changed is the new big-money donors are no longer hedging their bets, but have gone all in for the Dems. Whether the new donor class are true believers in the Democrats social agenda, or just redeploying their lip-service tactics in pursuit of ever greater crony capitalism, is about to be tested.

Today’s Democrats are awash in cash from Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Hollywood. Leftist billionaires like George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos not only max out Democrat party and candidate donations but fund a massive interlocking network of political action committees and “progressive” non-profits to promote leftist causes. Some of these Democrat billionaires -- Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and Howard Schultz -- are even eyeing a challenge to Trump themselves.

In Karin McQuillan’s excellent article in American Greatness, “It’s Time to Get Real About Our Enemies,” she notes:

 Today, the American Left is empowered with unprecedented funding. Soros is only one among a number of radical billionaires, from the Green promoter Tom Steyer, to the Pritzkers of Chicago (Hyatt Hotel heirs), who launched Obama’s U.S. Senate run. One of the Pritzkers is transsexual and a Democrat mega-donor. ActBlue raised well over $1 billion dollars for Democrats in 2018.

Conservative groups aren’t even playing the same game. The Koch brothers don’t make the list of top 50 “heavy hitters’”political donors in the country, compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics—only two out of the top 20 give to Republicans. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin in their book The New Leviathan, count 122 leftist foundations worth $104 billion. Conservative political groups? Eighty-six in the whole country, worth a measly $10 billion.

The sad irony is that just as the working classes, championed by Donald Trump and Tea Party conservatives, finally stormed the barricades and freed the GOP from the grip of the economic elites, the monied interests headed for the door to work their formula on the other side of the isle.

What middle-class Republicans learned about the monied donors is they really couldn’t care less about those annoying social issues like abortion on demand, same-sex marriage, or “affirmative action” -- except, that is, as useful tools to win votes for their bought and paid for candidates. What the big donors really care about is the bottom line on the next quarterly report. Far from delivering on their conservative agenda, what the Republican base got instead for our votes were disastrous trade agreements that sent good-paying jobs overseas, open borders to drive down the wages for the jobs that couldn’t be offshored and endless wars in the Middle East.   

One thing’s for sure though, you don’t become a billionaire without putting the accumulation of wealth -- far, far past your ability to spend it -- above all else. As the big-money donors have thrown in with the Democrats, you have to wonder if they’ve noticed that the most important social issue to those voters is, well... socialism.

A full year before the first primary debates, Democrat presidential frontrunners are busy outbidding each other on confiscatory wealth taxes to fund a smorgasbord of socialist programs like universal guaranteed income, housing as a right, free college tuition, and government healthcare for all -- including illegal aliens. A millennial generation of congressional Democrats, led by Democrat-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are pushing to raise taxes on the rich as high as 70% and more.

Do the billionaires really care so much about signaling their social justice virtue in their boardrooms and at cocktail parties that they’re willing to trade the party of social and fiscal conservatives for a party of Marxists? Is it so important to them that the Resistance media say nice things about them -- and never ever, ever call them a xenophobe or racist? Do they think that they’ll be able to play bait and switch with the Democrat voters like they did with Republicans?

The Republican base was eventually able to wrest control of their party from the big money donors and begin implementing a socially conservative, America First agenda. Are the billionaires willing to risk that the Democrat’s base will be able to do the same and deliver on their anti-capitalist, Democratic-Socialist agenda?

While that might be poetic justice for the foolish billionaires, it would also be the end of America as our founders intended.

The author hosts Right Now with Jim Daws, a webcast on news, politics and culture from and American nationalist perspective -  https://twitter.com/RightNowJimDaws