Imagine being told four summers ago that it would be the American left accusing others of weirdness. In 2020, the time of Defund the Police, of pretending that White Fragility was a rational book, progressives were boxing themselves into a corner as the oddballs of public life. Politics being downstream of culture, the hinge moment might have been the comedian Dave Chappelle making sport of them.
How Republicans have allowed this state of affairs to flip since then should be the subject of an inquest. And it might start in Palo Alto. If Donald Trump loses the presidential election, his courting of the tech world, or its embrace of him, won’t seem the masterstroke that it did at the time. However lavish the campaign donations from that quarter, much of the Republicans’ perceived abnormality stems from the same place.
Tech weirdness tends to consist of two things. One is intellectual obsession. The favoured issues of tech bros are often good ones – demographic decline is serious, free speech is threatened – but get much too much prominence for the median voter’s tastes. The other component is tonal. Rife in tech is an almost teenage eagerness to provoke that jars outside of podcasts and internet chat rooms.
Both glitches come together in the person of JD Vance, the Peter Thiel mentee who it is hard to imagine as running mate before the tech-Trump entente. What the GOP ticket needed was another Mike Pence, another reassuring emissary to suburban moderates. What emerged was someone on whom Trump is the restraining influence. If this unnerves enough voters in enough states, no donation was worth it.
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It might be useful to compare the Palo Alto cast of mind with that of Wall Street, that other funder and shaper of US politics. If only because financial markets are sensitive to events – an oil shock, 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 being a partial exception.) Reinforcing this hard-headedness is the fact that financial hubs are situated in big cities, where human contact is constant and the messiness of life part of the furniture.
Much of tech, meanwhile, plays out in the landscaped business campuses and detached homes of the Santa Clara Valley (or, ever more, Texas). It has a revenue model that relies on self-contained products, years in the making or coding, rather than constant judgments and responses vis-a-vis real public events. Pour in thousands of first-class mathematicians and engineers, and it would be strange if a sort of brilliant unworldliness didn’t take root. As a generator of wealth, US tech is phenomenal. As an actor in politics, it can be maladroit.
Big Tech isn’t right wing. It wires cash to the Democrats in amazing torrents. This century might never produce a woker artefact than the Microsoft Ignite video from 2021, in which staff itemise all the indigenous peoples who once occupied the studio site. No, the problem is absolutism: the taking of ideas, left or right, to the nth degree. Riots in the UK? “Civil war is inevitable,” judges Elon Musk, of a nation that didn’t have a civil war over the Corn Laws, the Somme or the loss of empire. This very Northern Californian millenarianism is weird, not to say wrong and often unfalsifiable.
Remember, the Republicans’ enmeshment with the tech world goes deeper than donors and candidates to the products themselves. For years, conservatives resented their marginalisation on Twitter. Any fool could see it was a godsend. The right was forced out into the world as liberals lost themselves in insider jargon – “gaslighting” – and mutual admiration. Rather than leave the left to it, conservatives fought back and, on the surface, “won”. But to what end? What has the Muskified platform been worth to the Republicans? To judge by some tweeted reactions from tech moguls to the Vance appointment (“WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY”) the right is now the self-high-fiving in-group with no clue how it comes across to uncommitted voters.
You can be weird and win, of course. The Democrats strike me as about as overconfident as the Republicans of a month ago. The question is whether Trump’s chances are better or worse as a result of his much-celebrated support from the Valley. On balance, worse, I think. The Apprentice started airing in the pre-streaming Arcadia we call 2004. A man who owes his political breakthrough to linear television never needed his pioneering but odd new friends. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024