Can the Tech Bros Find a Home in the Conservative Coalition?

In modern American politics, any movement, even a populist one, requires support from some group of elites and donors. A great challenge for conservatism in the past generation was that Wall Street supplied both. Not only the ethos, but also the self-interest of the hedge-fund manager steered the Republican Party’s message toward a hyper-individualism and market fundamentalism that was neither conservative, nor popular, nor wise.

Wall Street’s fading influence has been salutary, but in its place a community of influential entrepreneurs and investors from Silicon Valley, often called the “tech bros,” is ascending. Whether that aids construction of a durable, conservative governing majority depends on their priorities, how they understand their role, and how political leaders respond.

ONE THING TO READ THIS WEEK

Your one thing to read this week is “Trump Will Have to Choose: Populism or Elon Musk,” by Sohrab Ahmari at the New Statesman.

Ahmari focuses in on Donald Trump’s decision to participate with Elon Musk in a “Spaces” event on Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter). A Spaces conversation with Musk, you’ll recall, is also the way that Florida governor Ron DeSantis chose to launch his own ill-fated presidential campaign. In each case, embarrassing technological glitches postponed the event. In each case, the event didn’t get much better once it did start, presenting the candidate in a bizarre light and focusing on niche issues. Trump ended up joking with Musk about the good fun of firing striking workers.

“By cheering Musk’s brutal treatment of his workers, the Trump campaign has sadly vindicated those who saw its pro-worker rhetoric as a mere façade,” writes Ahmari. And indeed, Musk’s track record on labor is awful. Of course, the same goes for Musk on China, seeing as he sold the U.S. down the river with his willing transformation of Tesla into a Chinese company. Musk is a loose cannon and a political liability, but he is considered cool within the niches of the typically young, way-too-online Right that seem bizarrely committed to repelling as much of the broad American middle as possible; a doppelgänger of the woke-Left campus activists determined to doom their own side even faster.

If conservatism merely swaps out the financial sector’s East Coast market fundamentalism for the tech sector’s West Coast techno-libertarianism as its driving force, the coalition will be no stronger. Every minute spent promoting cryptocurrency is a minute not spent talking to voters about things they care about or developing policies that might benefit the nation. Transgressively finding the most blunt and offensive way to phrase some logically defensible point may be good fun at the bar, but it is a disaster on the stump. Every time a politician touches this stove, he gets burned. The better metaphor is probably shoving a hand directly into a roaring fire.

To be clear, investors, entrepreneurs, and technologists should all be welcomed into the conservative coalition. Indeed, given their economic outlook and cultural commitments, and given the alternative of current progressivism, they obviously belong on the Right side of the aisle. But they also have to understand that being good at building companies is not the same as being good at politics, and indeed that the more they confuse the two the more they will be undermining their own goals. Politicians, likewise, need to remember that their job is not to score invites from the people they want to get a beer with, it is to be that person for the typical voter.

BONUS LINK: At the start of the pandemic, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote a powerful manifesto, “It’s Time to Build.” This is an excellent example of how the tech community can engage constructively, drawing on its areas of genuine expertise to amplify an aspirational and broadly appealing message.