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The stories that matter about money and politics in the race for the White House
Imagine if four summers ago we had been told that it would be the American left that would accuse others of doing weird things. In 2020, the era of defunding the police, of pretending that White fragility It was a rational book, the progressives were cornering themselves as the oddballs of public life. Politics is a current that goes beyond culture, so the decisive moment could have been comedian Dave Chappelle making fun of them.
How Republicans have allowed this to change since then should be the subject of an investigation, and it could start in Palo Alto. If Donald Trump loses the presidential election, his courtship of the tech world, or its support for him, will not look like the masterstroke it once seemed. However generous the campaign donations from that sector, much of the perceived abnormality for Republicans comes from the same place.
Tech weirdness is usually two things. One is intellectual obsession. Tech mates’ favorite topics are usually good ones: demographic decline is Seriousness, freedom of expression is threatened, but given too much prominence for the average voter’s taste. The other component is tonal. The tech world is rife with an almost adolescent eagerness to provoke that clashes outside of podcasts and Internet chat rooms.
Both problems come together in the person of JD Vance, the disciple of Peter Thiel, who is hard to imagine as a running mate before the alliance between technology and Trump. What the Republican ticket needed was another Mike Pence, another reassuring emissary for suburban moderates. What emerged was someone over whom Trump exerts a moderating influence. If this makes enough voters in enough states nervous, no donation was worth it.
It may be useful to compare the Palo Alto mentality with that of Wall Street, that other financier and shaper of American politics. If only because financial markets are sensitive to events (an oil crisis, a foreign coup, a crop blight), those who work in them have to be at least somewhat tethered to practical reality. There is little profit in abstract thought, and not much time for it either (hedge funds are a partial exception). What reinforces this obstinacy is the fact that financial centers are located in large cities, where human contact is constant and the messiness of life is part of the furniture.
Meanwhile, much of the technology is developed on the landscaped corporate campuses and single-family homes of the Santa Clara Valley (or, increasingly, Texas). It has a revenue model that relies on autonomous products, taking years to develop or code, rather than constant judgment and response to real public events. Add to that thousands of world-class mathematicians and engineers, and it would be strange if a kind of brilliant unworldliness didn’t take hold. As a generator of wealth, American technology is phenomenal. As a player in politics, it can be clumsy.
Big Tech is not right-wing. It sends money to Democrats in astonishing torrents. This century may never produce a progressive artifact like the Microsoft Ignite Video from 2021 in which the staff lists all the indigenous peoples who have ever occupied the studio site. No, the problem is absolutism: the appropriation of ideas, left or right, to the nth degree. Riots in the UK? “Civil war is inevitable,” judges Elon Musk, about a nation that did not have a civil war over the Corn Laws, the Somme, or the loss of empire. This very Northern California millenarianism is strange, not to say wrong and often unfalsifiable.
Remember, the Republicans’ entanglement with the tech world goes beyond donors and candidates to the products themselves. For years, conservatives resented their marginalization on Twitter. Any fool could see that it was a blessing. The right was forced out into the world while liberals lost themselves in punditry (“gaslighting”) and mutual admiration. Rather than let the left get away with it, conservatives fought back and, on the surface, “won.” But to what end? What value has the Muskified platform had for Republicans? Judging by some tweeted reactions From tech moguls to Vance’s appointment (“WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. BEST COUNTRY ON EARTH, BABY”), the right is now the self-congratulatory, closed-off group with no idea how it’s perceived by disengaged voters.
Of course, you can be weird and win. Democrats seem to me to be just as confident as Republicans were a month ago. The question is whether Trump’s chances are better or worse as a result of his much-touted Silicon Valley support. Worse overall, I think. The newbie It began airing in the pre-streaming Arcadia we call 2004. A man who owes his political breakthrough to linear television never needed his pioneering but strange new friends.