Politicians generally don’t like looking silly. And yet a whole bunch of Republican politicians reacted to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank by raging about “woke” banking” in ways that made them appear ridiculous to anyone actually concerned about the danger to the banking system and the economy.
No doubt Republicans such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and House of Representatives Oversight Chair James Comer know that blaming SVB’s downfall on identity politics will play well in conservative media, a crucial audience. (We also shouldn’t discount the possibility that some Republican politicians believe the nonsense they’re saying, given the lack of policy expertise within the party.)
But talking about corporations’ imagined woke fixations also helps to paper over the real conflict within the party that the banking scare threatens to reignite.
Republicans are increasingly split between traditional conservatives who back deregulation of banks and other industries and populists who blame their frustrations on institutions of all kinds. Populist rhetoric, extolling ordinary folks and bashing corporate America, has been popular with a segment of the party for a while now. At the same time — and often from the very same politicians — an anti-regulation mantra continues to be the party’s standard answer to many questions about how to best run the economy.
The conflict reflects divergent underlying interests among different groups within the Republican coalition — on the one hand the small and large business interests that have lined up behind Republicans for more than a century, and on the other the white working-class voters who have shifted to the GOP, first in the South and then elsewhere, over the last several decades. Finding policies, or even slogans, that fit both groups isn’t easy, and the more policy concerns center on economics, the harder it becomes to reconcile the conflict.