Silicon Valley Liberal-tarians

To analyze the ideology of Silicon Valley, one can take two approaches. One is to start “from the bottom” and qualitatively examine the writing and influence of key intellectual figures in the community. This method will yield a host of arcane and idiosyncratic ideologies and worldviews, which may or may not be reflected in political competition and policymaking, either directly or indirectly. The second approach is to consider the current structure of political cleavages and see where Silicon Valley elites – people who play a key role in the Silicon Valley business community – fit onto this existing mapping.

Both approaches have value, but I have focused on the second methodology in my own research. I’ve done this because it is useful for understanding how the elite actors in an outside industry or interest group might influence politics in the short term. Other social scientists have taken a similar approach in the past. For example, the Democratic Party transformed was transformed from an organization with segregationist leadership to a racially liberal organization over the course of the Twentieth Century. In Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965, political scientist Eric Schickler explains that this transition didn’t happen because of strategic decisions made by party leaders but because of bottom-up pressure from interest groups. In particular, the incorporation of African Americans into the racially progressive Council of Industrial Organizations (in contrast to the more racially conservative American Federation of Labor) played a crucial role in both the civil rights movement and the realignment of American politics.

So how do outside elites exert influence on a party? As the economist Albert Hirschman has suggested, they can attempt to influence a party from within its coalition (voice) or leave the party and engage in external competition (exit). By examining Silicon Valley elites’ views on existing political debates, we can attempt to predict whether they will exhibit voice or exit.

That is the basic idea behind a February 2017 survey I conducted with David Broockman, a political scientist at U.C. Berkeley, and Greg Ferenstein, a technology journalist. We constructed a sampling frame of Silicon Valley elites based on a database from Crunchbase, which compiled a list of technology company founders based on SEC filings of Series A venture capital investments. We also conducted surveys of the mass public and partisan political donors at the same time as points of comparison.

Our findings led us to greatly rethink what we think of as “the Silicon Valley ideology,” which many pundits equate with libertarianism. In fact, our survey found that over 75% of technology founders explicitly rejected libertarian ideology. Instead, we found that they exhibit a constellation of political beliefs unique among any population we studied. We call this ideology “liberal-tarianism.” Technology elites are liberal on almost all issues – including taxation and redistribution – but extremely conservative when it comes to government regulation, particularly of the labor market. Amazingly, their preferences toward regulation resemble Republican donors.

These findings help explain why the technology industry was a core part of the Democratic coalition and why the Obama Administration was fairly lax when it came to the regulation of the technology industry. Silicon Valley worked from within the Democratic coalition to move regulatory policy to the right, while supporting the party’s positions on social issues, economic redistribution, and globalization. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the revolving door between the Obama Administration and Silicon Valley companies seemed to always spin people in or out.

However, things might be changing. There is increased hostility between the technology industry and the Biden Administration. And this is not just with respect to Elon Musk. The Biden Justice Department has recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google (on the heels of legal action against Microsoft), and the Federal Trade Commission as generally been more supportive of regulation of the industry. Prior to 2016, the technology industry was seen by Democrats as a “clean” industry (unlike fossil fuels and manufacturing) that was acceptable to engage with and take donations from. The three main fundraising stops for major Democratic politicians were usually New York (finance), Los Angeles (media), and San Francisco (technology). However, the left soon realized that companies can be associated with social externalities besides air and water pollution, such as misinformation and foreign influence in elections.

At the same time, technology elites may be becoming more conservative on issues besides regulation. I don’t have survey evidence on this, but my conjecture is that the industry has taken right-wing positions on some new issues that have emerged on the political agenda. For example, many technology elites spoke out against Covid restrictions such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, some pushed back against renewed emphases on racial equity and the re-definition of merit. More broadly, many technology elites have chafed at the left’s pushback against unbridled free speech. Technology elites have always seen themselves as disruptive, countercultural and iconoclastic, stretching back to the computer industry’s origins in the 1960s. Now that the left dominates culture, the countercultural rebels seek to fight against it.

This all leaves the technology industry between a rock and a hard place, not fitting in well with either party. It will therefore be hard for them to follow the lead of the Council of Industrial Organizations (which shared the party’s views on labor issues but not civil rights) and change the party on select issues from within. Their influence on politics must come from outside party structures. There isn’t a great roadmap for that, potentially suggesting that Silicon Valley ideology may become less politically influential.