Will Silicon Valley Turn California Red?

The same tech titans who embraced Trump might lead to a GOP renaissance in CA

A few days ago in this space I noted at length the New York Times interview with the curious and idiosyncratic Curtis Yarvin, but there was another New York Times interview a few days earlier that is equally worth noting at length: Ross Douthat’s conversation with Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, the man who brought us the first user-friendly web browser 30 years ago, Netscape.

Marc Andreessen

The Interview is entitled “How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms.” I really hope Democrats don’t read this article and take it to heart, because they might actually recover their political prospects sooner. And even though it appears in the New York Times, the daily in-house memo of the Democratic Party, I think is possible that many Times readers will be so offended at Andreessen’s bracing attacks on Democrats that they’ll stop reading. (Judging by the angry reaction in the 2,000 online comments about the interview I may be right on this judgment.)

Andreessen was among the tech titans who were fully in the bag for Democrats going back to the Clinton years, and signed on for the expected sequel with Barack Obama. His narrative of how he and other tech titans started getting worried during the Obama years ratifies a thesis I’ve been developing for a long time that it was during Obama’s second term that wokery (for shorthand) and anti-capitalist mania broke out rapidly from the college campus and began dominating American life, and that this was Obama’s design and intention. (There is empirical data to back this up; some other time.)

A few key excerpts:

Andreessen: The most natural thing in the world for somebody like me [in the 1990s] was, ‘Oh, of course, I’m a normie Democrat. I’ll be a normie Democrat forever.’

Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood: You’re me, you show up, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a capitalist, you start a company, you grow a company, and if it works, you make a lot of money. And then the company itself is good because it’s bringing new technology to the world that makes the world a better place, but then you make a lot of money, and you give the money away. Through that, you absolve yourself of all of your sins. . .

Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in ’96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.

Andreessen goes on to explain that they didn’t mind that Demoracts were the high-tax, high-spending party, in part because everyone was making so much money the tax burden amounted to couch-cushion change for most of them.

But then “the Deal” started breaking down in the Obama years.

Andreessen: In retrospect, what happened is after Obama’s re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change.

The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in ’15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes. . .

The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.

They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.

We’re also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.

And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities. . .

So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”

As everyone knows, after Trump’s surprise win in 2016, the tech companies—especially Facebook and Twitter—were blamed for Trump’s win. Remember “Russian collusion” on social media? Andreessen says this attack, which intensified further under the Biden Administration, even though tech companies—especially Mark Zuckerberg—atoned for their sins by backing Biden heavily in 2020, unnerved the Valley. Along the way he makes a stunning confession about how the Valley, and big business generally, actually see their place in the world:

Andreessen: First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.

That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.

I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.” “I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation — they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.

I find it’s funny, because the only true groups of people who think that corporate C.E.O.s are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left, who are full-on Marxists, who really believe that, and then people on the far right, who I think fear that the C.E.O.s are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then later realize that they’re not.

So the primary response from the Silicon Valley tech companies and the kinds of people that you’re talking about was not “Here’s what we need to do to make money and to live under a Democratic regime.” The primary thing was the complete exact kind of panic that you saw in the rest of corporate America and that you saw in the press.

Fast forward now to 2020:

Andreessen: And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

Things got really aggressive during that period. And so I go from watching Brian Williams every night and just being lied to 500 nights in a row to, basically, reading the Mueller report, reading the Horowitz I.G. report and being like, “Oh, my God, none of this is true.”

And then you try to explain to people, “This isn’t true.” And then they get really mad at you because how can you possibly have any sympathy for a fascist? . . .

My point is, we were softened up for the Biden radicalization. Then the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be. . . They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.

There’s a lot more to this fascinating narrative, with lots of sound thoughts on the Administrative State, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (who Andreessen notes was way ahead of everyone else in Silicon Valley in seeing where things were going), and so forth. I’ve barely scratched the surface here. If you have time do read the whole thing at the link in the second paragraph above.

But more to the point is this question: Having dumped the Democrats for Trump in 2024, will Silicon Valley now cast its eye on California, and recognize that Gavin Newsom, like Kamala Harris, Mayor Karen Bass, and every other Democrat leader in the state are exactly the same as the Obama-Biden regime? (By the way, I’m trying to spread the summary view that Karen Bass being in Ghana when the fires broke out, after being warned of elevated risk before she left, was her “dinner at the French Laundry” moment.)

Victor Davis Hanson told me this morning that he hears strong rumors that some Silicon Valley tech titans aren’t waiting for next year’s election, and are actively thinking about running another recall against Newsom right now. It may or may not be a sensible idea politically, but stay tuned.