Liberal Wall Street?

One thing that struck me about Craig Shirley's jeremiad in Conservative Battleline was his pairing of the hated "GOP elites" with "their master’s voice, corporate America." It's not the first time I've seen anti-Wall Street sentiment expressed in recent conservative denunciations of where the GOP is heading.

So then I read Dana Goldstein's piece at TAPPED about Fortune Magazine's glowing assessment of Hillary Clinton. Goldstein mentions a few of Hillary's Wall Street supporters -- people like John Mack of Morgan Stanley, Jeffrey Volk of Citigroup, and James D. Robinson III of American Express. And he cites this passage:

Clinton's GOP business supporters say they have other priorities [than tax issues]. Volk wants to see the federal budget balanced. Robinson wants health-care and education policies that will improve American's competitiveness. Hillary Clinton says simply, "It's important not to have a tax discussion separate from [deciding] what are our goals."

Goldstein also suggests that this may be part of a trend:

[Y]ounger corporate types really do have a different set of priorities. They may not be ready to support John Edwards, but they're increasingly calling themselves Democrats.

One can react to this kind of thing with all kinds of populist suspicion, but let's set that aside for the moment. Without wanting to read too much into this -- and it remains the case that the Republicans are the party of big business -- there's an ever-so-faint echo here of the 1950s, when upstart conservatives excoriated the decadent Republican elites, who along with their northeastern capitalist class generally, had come to an accomodation with labor and the social safety net.

Take the historical parallel for what you will.