The Trump-Vance administration can engineer a political transformation if they can provide concrete material benefits to working-class Americans, who have seen their standard and quality of living collapse. If so, Trump has an opportunity to consolidate a durable realignment of US politics and policymaking that could last for a generation. Even if the Trump-Vance administration does a barely competent job of delivering material benefits for the working class, that would be better than what the two factions of the legacy uni-party have done for the past 40 years.

It’s illustrative to ask if the US government promotes the common good of its citizens? Looking at health, education and housing, we can say no. It appears that the purpose of the US State is to enrich the owners of capital.

Americans increasingly recognize that our system is broken and understand that instead of a democratic republic, the US more closely resembles an oligarchy. The American working classes are weary from surviving an unnecessarily violent and unjust society. We live amid staggering class, race, and gender-based stratification and life and death stakes everyday. Concurrently, there is a growing conviction that the political and economic game was rigged for the benefit of distant elites; a sense that the middle-class had disappeared; and the absence of any institutions that might have provided help, including the Democratic Party. In the wake of Trump’s victory Bernie Sanders voiced a profound truth. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

It was hard to miss the broken landscape that lay open for Trump, but the establishments of both parties didn’t see it, and neither did most of the media, which had lost touch with the working class and their increasing anger.

For example, it’s now a popular idea that powerful people should just be shot in the street because the American system is too corrupt for justice to be carried out any other way. This isn’t a right-wing or left-wing view. In a new poll, more than two-thirds of respondents said they believed denials of coverage and profits in the health insurance industry were partially responsible for the killing of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, in early December. The affect of all the wealth redistribution upward over the last forty-plus years has been building slowly but surely and it shouldn’t be surprising that Americans applaud when a CEO is murdered by someone frustrated with corporate greed.

The food fight between MAGA and the tech bros over immigration is a symptom of the angst, and offers clues to the paradigm shift in political parties, where the Democrats have transformed from the party of workers to one that represents the professional/managerial/caste, while the Republicans tentatively articulate policies to aid workers. All of it constitutes a meta-political shift the likes of which haven’t been seen in the US since 1968.

Lambert, at Naked Capitalism, lays out the case.  “It struck me forcibly than many MAGA supporters were in fact very well versed in policy, history, and data, and deployed their knowledge effectively against Musk and his tech bros. For example, H-1B is not about importing workers who are “highly skilled” (a pervasive, unexamined, and dishonest, tech bro talking point). That’s why, for example, Trump brought Mar-a-Lago waiters into the country under H-1B. Rather, H-1B is about importing workers who are cheap and compliant, because management can hold the threat of visa removal over their heads. That means that other things being equal, management will always prefer H-1Bs over citizens (the power imbalance, as idpol types would say).”

Axios has a good timeline of the immigration controversy, in “Trump sides with Musk in H-1B fight“

The elephant in the room is financialization. Tech and finance are so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where Silicon Valley ends and private/equity (PE) begins. And it’s apparent, by the destruction of labor wrought by PE over the last 40 years, how they feel about American workers. The capital behind Silicon Valley has successfully driven down STEM wages for American workers since the earliest days of globalization. The purpose of H-1B is, after all, labor arbitrage: cheap, compliant labor. It isn’t really complicated. A class of workers with reduced rights will obviously be preferred by management and will reduce the bargaining power of American workers.

Furthermore, it’s quite apparent that the tech billionaires don’t care about Americans, or even believe in nation-states at all, while caring about Americans is the core premise of MAGA. The H-1B debate is simply this fundamental conflict boiling up for the first time.

As you can see with the H-1B controversy, the GOP is torn between the tech bros, who represent capital, and MAGA, which represents labor, for the direction of the party under Trump. It’s an amazing development, an outright rejection of neoliberal and individualist ideology replaced wholesale by defiant exhortations towards nationalism and collectivism, stoked even higher by the open contempt on display by the elites. The GOP is now riding the populist tiger, and the battle over H-1B visa’s will provide a useful predictor on whether or not Trumpism will provide material benefits to Americans, or if they will follow the familiar GOP script of tax cuts and billionaire fellatio.