The donors – the domestic owning class – were always a self-aligned ingroup, and it’s been that way since before the country was founded. The fact that they have gotten complacent in just green-washing and rainbow-washing their marketing instead of allowing actual concessions to be made is not really a change in their ideology so much as their strategy. They still have the same goals that they’ve always had, it’s just that the tiny little check on their power that the left and the working class more broadly represented has been systematically dismantled.

It’s not a matter of what the owning class “believes” as though these conditions are a highly subjective thing, because ingroups are not just a quirk of psychology or social perspective, they can be and often are interest groups, people who share a common material interest. The owners are correct that it benefits them broadly to crush the power of labor so they can maximize profits, just like they know it benefits them broadly to do other things like scapegoat minorities, use drug policy as a pretext for mass-incarceration, and so on.