US election: Much of the Republicans’ ‘weirdness’ stems from their new tech friends
Elon Musk meets then president Donald Trump in the White House in February 2017, as Trump adviser Steve Bannon stands close by. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
How Republicans have allowed this state of affairs to flip since then should be the subject of an inquest. And it might start in Palo Alto. Ifloses the presidential election, his courting of the tech world, or its embrace of him, won’t seem the masterstroke that it did at the time. However lavish the campaign donations from that quarter, much of the Republicans’ perceived abnormality stems from the same place.
It might be useful to compare the Palo Alto cast of mind with that of Wall Street, that other funder and shaper of US politics. If only because financial markets are sensitive to events – an oil shock, a foreign coup, a crop blight – those who work in them have to be at least somewhat tethered to practical reality. There is little profit in abstract thought, and not much time for it either.
Big Tech isn’t right wing. It wires cash to the Democrats in amazing torrents. This century might never produce a woker artefact than the Microsoft Ignite video from 2021, in which staff itemise all the indigenous peoples who once occupied the studio site. No, the problem is absolutism: the taking of ideas, left or right, to the nth degree. Riots in the UK? “, of a nation that didn’t have a civil war over the Corn Laws, the Somme or the loss of empire.
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