Right on Wall Street

One could spend a lot of time and energy in the next few years (and I expect I will--maybe too much) writing about fractures within the Republican Party. The Tea Party vs. Karl Rove fight is getting a lot of attention right now, including this interesting piece by liberal writer Josh Marshall: "Battle Joined." Excerpt:

Are there really moderates in this fight? Marco Rubio because he’s the Hispanic point man on immigration? But wait, he was a Tea Partier last year? What happened? Karl Rove? The layer of the party behind Rove seems very thin and brittle. They have lots of money. So that makes them consequential. But the Tea Party isn’t the fringe of the GOP. It’s actually most of the party. And a little discussed aspect of the post-2008 crash period (combined with the rise of Obama but distinct from it) is the rise of hard right ideology within significant sectors of the business community — especially Wall Street which used to lean relatively Democratic. 

Me: That part about Wall Street is a good point, and I've written about the huge shift of Wall Street money to the right. But a countervailing trend, which I've also delved into a number of times, is the simultaneous rise of anti-Wall sentiment elsewhere on the right. All of which makes for a pretty dysfunctional conservative coalition.