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Republicans also have plenty to offer the tech industry on the most salient cultural topics of the moment,revealing a third reason for the shift to the right : entrepreneurs are Americans, too.
Covid-19 pushed Silicon Valley in a radical new direction. Many in San Francisco, including Y Combinator’s Garry Tan and Mike Solana, founder of industry media company Pirate Wires,have become vocal critics of the city’s leniency on crime and drugs, which they see as having reduced the tech hub to squalor. Other entrepreneurs found themselves, as parents, fighting with teachers’ unions that sought to keep schools closed for months or years, imposed masks on toddlers well after the science had proved this unnecessary, andpromised to lie to the parents of children with gender dysphoria. It was this last item that proved the “final straw” for Muskin his decision to leave California.
This hardly means that the tech industry is full of social conservatives. Democratic polling guru David Shor has popularized social science research finding that, given a mix of agreement and disagreement with candidates’ positions,=voters will support the candidate with whom they agree most on the issues that seem most politically active or “salient” at the time. In Silicon Valley, as in much of the rest of America, the issues where social liberals and libertarians most disagreed with the George W. Bush-era GOP (for example, gay marriage, stem cell research, and abortion rights) have fallen in salience,while affirmative action, critical race theory, and gender ideology have risen.
If the GOP pushed hard for, say, a federal ban on abortions or the overturning of gay marriage, it would alienate many otherwise curious tech founders.But under Trump, the party is, if anything, moving in the opposite direction (to the consternation of traditional social conservatives).Forced to choose between highly theoretical and hysterical claims about the GOP threat to gay marriage andthe very real actions of progressive politicians to enshrine extremely unpopular woke ideas in schools and government, many in the tech industry have become more concerned about the latter. And this shift, already underway before, went into overdrive after October 7 and the revelation of substantial sympathies for Hamas and anti-Semitic forces on the left.
Something else, more inchoate, explains the tech turn beyond retail politics or recent events. When Solana identified the beginnings of a “vibe shift” in February 2023,he had his finger on a deeper cultural pulse: a rising desire to cast off timidity and compliance in the name of freedom.
This points to a final reason for tech’s move rightward: the Right has become the more dynamic political camp. When Trump stated in his RNC acceptance speech, “Ambition is our heritage. Greatness is our birthright,” many in the tech industry nodded along. In a similar vein, Mark Zuckerberg could praiseTrump’s response to being shot as “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Trump and the rise of the “New Right” have made it possible to rethink old ideas, propose crazy new ones, and offer bold, ambitious plans for revitalizing America. These plans, coalescing around an America First pursuit of the national interest, align well with an industry full of entrepreneurs and builders eager to accomplish something unprecedented, if only to prove that it’s possible.
Consider some of the hottest tech companies today: chip maker Nvidia, defense tech firm Anduril, and spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX are doing work of straightforward significance to America’s status on the world stage.Andreessen and Horowitz’s firm has a portfolio for “American Dynamism” companies that exemplify “the spirit of innovation, progress, and resilience that drives the United States forward.”
https://www.city-journal.org/article/tech-for-trump