So I had to drop everything and tell you about a warning promulgated by a Wall Street Journal writer: If those Republicans don’t stop being so libertarian and populist, big business might take its big money over to the Democrats.

By big business the author apparently means the businesses that are represented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Those populist Republicans have to stop shouting “crony capitalism” as if it were an altogether bad thing. Business and government, after all, often reach sensible bipartisan decisions, such as immigration reform and the Common Core. Such matters, which ought not to be controversial, are being made so by populist demagogues.

On immigration, the perception is that big business and the Democrats, from somewhat different but pretty complementary perspectives, want to flood the country with low-skill workers to bring down the cost of labor. That, of course, is not so good for American worker — or so it would seem. But it is good for American big business, and the C of C thought is that everyone will be benefit eventually from the increased productivity and profit. So the American worker should understand that his worry about the security and compensation of his present job is unreasonably short-term. Still, I have to add this sort of ”sensible” thinking shortchanges the idea of American citizenship, and it’s not true that the distinction between citizen and non-citizen is merely “rent-seeking” by citizens. It goes without saying that I’m not endorsing the populism that morphs into a nativism angrily insensitive to the plight of abandoned children. But our serious goal should be to be sure that everyone in our country is accounted for, legal, and with a road to citizenship, or not just “guest workers” (a very un-American category). And, of course, we have every right to regulate who we let into our country with the welfare of American citizens and citizenship in mind. To avoid any misunderstanding, let me say that I am for a very generous, hospitable, and global immigration policy, but we do have to have an actual policy.

It’s true that, on the Common Core, many of the criticisms are rather paranoid, and I will even agree that they might be at the expense of a real national conversation on the costs and benefits of technocratic national standards. Still, the populists have a point that the business-government-expert bipartisan coalition that produced these standards and the financial incentives for the states to embrace them was at the expense of real political deliberation about the best ways to make our schools better. And the record of technocratic educationists in creating and implementing educational reform that actually delivers what it promises has been pretty abysmal so far. Who can’t admire the populist spirit that refuses to bow down to the know-it-all evil empire that includes big business, Silicon Valley, educational experts, bureaucrats, and the Obama administration?

My takeaways: It is really not very clear, if you think about it, that the Democratic party is full of socialist hostility to our oligarchs. Many or most of them in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street are already voting Democratic. The ones that remain Republican want to impose on their party the uncritical faith that cutting taxes on job creators and getting rid of as many regulations as possible are all that’s required to grow the economy and so make all lives better, and they want partisans to ignore their “crony capitalist” works that often contradict their faith. That the WSJ voices their threat to switch if their faith is denied is a pretty telling piece of somewhat laughable blackmail.

The article talks about some Democratic dream of an alliance of big business and labor. I don’t know how that would work, although it would be very paternalistic. I do think if ordinary working Americans became convinced that unions are toast no matter what they or the Democrats do, then they might switch to the somewhat populist Republicanism for both cultural and economic reasons. But they have to be persuaded that the Republicans have their backs.

Random caveats: I don’t mean to diss the fine work done by the Chamber of Commerce; the local C of C is one of the indispensable pillars of the prosperity we enjoy in Rome / Floyd County, Ga. I don’t even mean to diss oligarchs (at least much). To be an oligarch is to think like a rich person. If more people did that, we’d have more rich people. And that would actually be a good thing.

One more thing: The dissidents who appreciated my appreciation of the libertarian opposition to the Common Core suggested I actually go after accreditation and certification too. Here’s what I really think about accreditation.