Ten years ago, Democrats were insisting that wealthy business tycoons and Wall Street fat cats who didn’t “pay their fair share” were the single greatest threat to America.  “We are the 99 percent!” was soon to become the battle cry of millions of Obama voters who believed that big businesses were preying upon everyday Americans, and that they were too influential in shaping politics.

Last year, those same multi-billion-dollar corporations and their fat cat leadership were vital allies of the Democrats, central players in a “well-funded cabal” that was “working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change the rules and laws, steer media coverage and the flow of information” so that the Democratic nominee would win the election.  Those aren’t the words of a right-wing conspiracy theorist, as you may know, but the words of TIME magazine detailing “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.”

What changed in those ten years?  When did the Democrats go from loathing big corporations to loving them, and when did big corporations go from being loathed by Democrats to carrying their water and undermining the political will of everyday Americans to curry their favor?  After all, if it were the will of everyday Americans to elect a Democratic president in 2020, why would a “well-funded cabal” be needed to “change the rules and laws” or manipulate the “flow of information” to achieve that outcome?

I remember the precise moment where it had become obvious that Obama was betraying his constituents on this issue.  Barack Obama, tasked with tearing down the structural power of big business billionaires, spent 2011 demonizing Bank of America and its leadership for their greedy practices, like charging customers a monthly fee for debit card usage.  As you can imagine, Bank of America executives were shocked by Obama’s “audacity” to invite them to help finance the 2012 Democratic National Convention.  To entice the bank’s executives, Democrats even moved the president’s acceptance speech to Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, where they courted wealthy donors and sold them million-dollar skyboxes that allowed them to sit high above the masses below that hated their guts because the president had whipped them into a jealous frenzy.

Obama spent his days winking at Occupy Wall Street protestors, and his nights undermining them entirely by ensuring that big corporate lobbyists would have a seat at the Democratic policymaking table.  And it seems to have worked, because in 2016 and 2020, big money donors, particularly in the securities and investment industry, provided financial support to the Democratic presidential candidates that dwarfed the big money donors’ contributions to Donald Trump.

One can only imagine the furor about how dark corporate money was influencing the outcome of the election if the contributions in those years were so decidedly in Trump’s favor, but since they weren’t, Democrats haven’t seemed to notice.  But one might think that they should have, because Democrats’ historic distaste for these globo-corporate profiteers, who are currently financing Democratic political victories to advance their own self-interests, is ostensibly rooted in something fundamental to the Party’s professed nature, and that is the protection of American workers.

But the Democrats’ labor priorities saw a marked change in recent years from their labor union roots.  No longer were they seeking wage protections for the employees of XYZ Widgets in Lansing, or to protect the workers of entire American industries.  No, they began arguing that it is a human rights imperative to allow any foreigners, and particularly those from impoverished nations, to enter America illegally, and thus illegally compete for and undercut the wages of American workers.

This benefits illegal aliens, the big businesses who reap excess profits on illegal labor, and Democrats who are importing new voters.  But, lucky enough for Democrats, their constituents seem to have forgotten altogether that they were once in favor of protecting the wages of American workers and taxpayers, who unquestionably suffer due to illegal immigration.

This symbiotic arrangement between big business and the Democratic Party is parasitic and destructive to the unwilling host that is the American citizenry, and not only in a financial sense.  Giant, multi-national corporations are now the leading spokespersons for Democrats’ social initiatives and policy propositions.  It’s incredibly likely that the first multi-national corporation that comes to your mind is one of countless that have entered a coalition of businesses supporting of the Equality Act, a radical proposition that is laden with vague language that is incredibly susceptible to broad abuses by politicians with power, and which will utterly destroy religious liberty in America.

With the Equality Act, the federal government is now seeking the broad authority to demand that a confused young boy must be allowed to shower with your sixteen-year-old daughter after volleyball practice, or that nuns must finance abortions.  Global corporations, headed by multi-billionaires who have profited tremendously by undermining American voters and workers, have signed on in droves to support this broad, seemingly illimitable assault on individual liberty.

What unites the Democratic Party today isn’t the protection of blue-collar workers, as it once was, but the coddling of former college students who incurred large debts to get their socialist indoctrination, and who want their neighbor, the plumber, to pay those debts for them.  Big business profits and lobbying are no longer a problem, of course, now that the profits are being used to benefit the Democratic Party and its platform exclusively.  Big-tent concepts like tolerance and liberty are out of fashion, replaced by demands for coerced acceptance of countless provable and evil untruths, such as the notion that white people are inherently arrogant and ignorant, or that a boy is no different than a girl, or that to be an American citizen means nothing more meaningful than managing to get your feet on American soil.

And Democratic Party simply no longer seems to care about the obvious and objective madness in any of that.

The Democrats’ villains today are no longer rich business tycoons who don’t “pay their fair share” while exercising their power and influence to undermine American workers and strangle individual liberty.  Today, it’s only too clear that the villains they seek to destroy are the very same taxpaying, middle-class Americans that they claim to have been championing.

William Sullivan is an author whose work discussing politics, economics, history, and culture in America has been frequently featured at American Thinker for over a decade.