The politics of JD Vance, Donald Trump’s new running mate, might require a lot of explanation if you’re still accustomed to the traditional Democratic/Republican divide — a Yale-educated former venture capitalist and economic nationalist with ties to Catholic integralists and an odd respect for Lina Khan? But for those who have watched the sharply curving arc of Silicon Valley conservatism it’s almost an inevitable convergence. Vance’s politics are an idiosyncratic blend of the heartland populism inspired by his well-known life story and a deeply held contempt for modern liberal institutions, informed in part by his friendship with Paypal mogul Peter Thiel. Those politics largely overlap with a cadre of Silicon Valley futurists who have become increasingly, and vocally, pro-Trump. Elon Musk, reneging on an earlier statement, said he would donate $45 million a month to a pro-Trump super PAC. Tech news outlet The Information reported this morning that venture capital giants Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz will contribute their own millions to Trump. The fusion of the Silicon Valley right with Trump’s titanic populist movement has created a genuinely new political force in America, and traditional Reaganite Republicans are worried they’re being consigned to the ash heap of history. “He’s the VP of choice for the vanguard of new right policy wonks in DC, waiting to fill roles in the next administration,” said Samuel Hammond, senior economist at the right-leaning tech and policy think tank Foundation for American Innovation. The elevation of a figure like Vance could force one important question for the future of the GOP, and American policy, and the tech-industry players who see themselves as driving it — how deeply does the party’s grassroots actually care? Polling last year from the right-populist American Compass think tank showed a broad base of support within the GOP for Vance-ian economic and cultural issues. But “the grassroots,” as policymakers on the right and left know all too well, includes institutional actors and activists with their own interests. Vance envisions a very powerful hand for the president in setting policy, for instance. But not everyone on the right embraces his ideas about government power. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a longtime champion of said grassroots, said today that he shares Vance’s concerns about tech platforms censoring conservatives, but also that “I get nervous if you have big government getting involved with some new requirement or regulation. A lot of times, I think that could potentially lead to more censorship.” In an indication of what this politics might look like — and whether it really connects with the party’s rank and file — tech podcaster and investor David Sacks spoke last night at the Republican National Convention not about technology as an engine of growth, or even about the glories of American business, but about how “Democrat rule” has allegedly ruined his home city of San Francisco and why the U.S. should cease backing Ukraine. Sacks and his podcast co-host recently held a $500k-per-couple Trump fundraiser. It was largely talked over by an indifferent crowd at the RNC… at least until he began to praise Trump at its conclusion. There’s little evidence thus far that Republican voters are specifically clamoring for technocratic industrial policy, or closer executive control over the federal bureaucracy, leading some to brush off these big-money investors’ love of Trump as a simple ploy for another round of tax cuts. Surely some level of economic interest is at play, but there’s something more to this phenomenon than mere investor-class solidarity. Vivek Ramaswamy downplayed Vance’s VC past, telling POLITICO’s Morning Tech that his underdog background is “the more important part of this.” And every good underdog needs its Goliath-like oppressor. In this new vision of American politics, that oppressor is the infrastructure of liberal governance itself. Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” decries America’s governmental institutions as “now compromised and corroded and collapsing — blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance.” As a view of society, it tracks closely with Vance, who in an interview accused liberals of following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s theories of power in their alleged twilight, and with Trump’s raging on Truth Social against “Democrat Judges” and any number of allegedly biased institutional powers. This form of hatred for government is crucially different from traditional, Ayn Rand-influenced Reaganite politics, which prioritized low taxes as a way to simply “starve the beast” in Washington and get bureaucrats out of the way. As Semafor’s Liz Hoffman pithily put it this morning, “Wall Street Republicans want to shrink government; Silicon Valley Republicans want to weaponize it.” By wresting American government from the clutches of the liberal “uniparty” right-populists would then use it to hound tech companies viewed as excessively censorious or progressive, reduce America’s geopolitical obligations and subsidize American manufacturing, all positions shared by Vance, Trump and many on Silicon Valley’s right. (Julius Krein, the founder of the nationalist policy journal American Affairs, wrote in an email that “Sen. Vance is an excellent choice and will make a great VP.”) The overlap of these wonky pursuits and Trump’s populist appeal can be explained in part through the thought of a pair of figures who tend to leave liberal institutionalists quaking in their boots. Curtis Yarvin, a Silicon Valley blogger associated with the “neo-reactionary” movement and a personal friend of Vance and Peter Thiel, is a frequent source of alarm for liberals who point to his writing on subjects like “How I stopped believing in democracy” and his frequent need to defend himself by saying things like “I am not an ‘outspoken advocate for slavery,’ a racist, a sexist or a fascist.” But Yarvin’s overarching critique of American society — that a liberal infrastructure of unelected federal bureaucrats, civil society groups, high finance and media that he calls the “Cathedral” unilaterally impose policy on Americans from above — is almost identical to Vance’s, a political debt he’s publicly acknowledged. And the theme carries over to Vance’s affinity for the writings of Patrick Deneen, the self-described “postliberal” philosopher whose conservative Catholic view of a “common good”-oriented government Vance has endorsed. These esoteric but influential strains of thought provide a useful framework for understanding how Vance embodies the policy implications of the raw, instinctual Trumpian ethos that all politics amount to culture war. Silicon Valley bigwigs, whether they lean left or right, want things done and want them done fast. Vance’s vision of sweeping, radical reform in American government is in keeping with that desire — he mused in 2021 on a podcast that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” So are his more down-to-earth pro-competition, pro-industrial, hawkish-on-China policy positions. If Trump wins re-election, his White House could very well be just as inconsistent and triangulating as it was the last time around, but he’s picked an heir to the GOP who has a very new kind of ideological consistency — meaning American politics could bear its mark through 2028 and far beyond. Brendan Bordelon contributed to this report.
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