Are Republicans and big business headed for a breakup?

The alliance between big business and the Republican Party, one of the oldest in U.S. politics, is unusually frayed these days. The question is whether there will be a complete unraveling.

There is ample evidence of a strained relationship. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the current chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, introduced his "Rescue America" policy plan earlier this year with the accusation that "most corporate boardrooms" are now controlled by the "militant left." Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, a potential member of House Republican leadership in the next session of Congress, recently said that Republicans are "so much healthier now that we've divorced ourselves from corporate America."

It once seemed like good business sense for major companies to avoid public entanglement in political conflicts. But corporate leaders have faced increasing incentives to align themselves with left-of-center positions on issues of social diversity and representation, while opposing Republican approaches to election management and vote-counting.

The list of conservative grievances is growing quickly. While Republicans have long complained of unfair treatment by major media and entertainment conglomerates, they have now extended this attack to include leading technology companies such as Google and Facebook. Corporate endorsements of diversity initiatives, the Black Lives Matter movement, legalized abortion and transgender rights have provoked the charge that big business is infected by rampant "woke leftism."

Executive-branch appointees pursued deregulation and opposed labor-union interests just as energetically in the Donald Trump administration as they did during previous Republican presidencies, while an ambitious tax cut enacted represented Trump's main policy achievement in office.

Republican politicians have found a sympathetic popular audience for their attacks on "wokeness" in the executive suites. Despite claims to the contrary, it's not a divorce—it's just a strained marriage.

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