>It seems the Repugs always want to target those elements of the State
>apparatus that supports the Dems business factions and vice versa. The
>post-New Deal state largely being the execrescence of business
>factionalism played out via the two party duopoly; competitive
>rent-seeking and all that....
Yes, partially, and to compete with one another, they had to make alliances with working class forces to gain the votes needed. The business elites embodied in the Republicans, having previously allied with "Tory" Democrats in the South, increasingly made their bid directly to socially conservative and racist working class sectors to counterbalance the union and inner-city alliances of the Democrats.
Which alliance was made and took power mattered not just for which business sectors gained rent-seeking opportunities but for which kinds of concessions were made to working class forces - between backlash racist repression or raises in the minimum wage, between bans on abortion or restraints on sexual harassment, between subsidies exclusively for hetero marriage or concessions of rights to gays and other family arrangements,
If you treat working class forces as actually having agency and not just being victims, you can reverse this formulation and note that progressive working class forces have achieved some degree of power and concessions from capital by exploiting tensions and competition between different business sectors. The reverse can also be said of socially and racially conservative working class forces as well. Of course, business elites themselves exploit the divisions between working class forces, but that is the challenge of radical politics in a formally democratic system - maximizing working class electoral unity while maneuvering to pit business sectors against one another to blunt their unified economic power.
-- Nathan Newman