How Democrats alienated Big Tech and why it might not matter
In January 2017, Sergey Brin rallied beside progressive activists at San Francisco International Airport to protest Donald Trumps travel ban. Eight years later, the Google co-founder sat with right-wing nationalists at Trumps second inauguration. Brin is far from the only tech mogul who has (apparently) warmed to Trump in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg once bankrolled liberal causes. Now, the Facebook founder dines with Americas favorite insurrectionist at Mar-a-Lago. In 2016, Marc Andreessen argued that Hillary Clinton was the obvious choice for president, and that any proposal to choke off immigration makes me sick to my stomach. Last year, Andreessen endorsed Trump.And, of course, Elon Musk has gone from being an Obama-supporting climate hawk to quite possibly the single most influential advocate for and patron of far-right politics in the United States. Silicon Valleys apparent rightward shift was already causing consternation in blue America last year. But Democrats outrage and anxiety over the red-pilling of Silicon Valley has only increased since Inauguration Day when Brin, Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook all sat with Trumps camp in the Capitol Rotunda.Some Democrats view Big Techs rightward lurch as a political crisis, one brought on by their own partys policy mistakes. In this account, Democrats needlessly alienated a powerful industry by embracing an anti-corporate economic agenda that is both politically costly and substantively misguided.Others in the party, meanwhile, insist that the Biden administrations attempts to tame Big Techs power were both good politics and good policy. In their telling, voters hate corporate monopolies and love antitrust enforcement. And the extraordinary wealth and power of large tech companies constitute a threat to democratic government a reality that Silicon Valleys present chumminess with Trump only underscores. From this vantage, the tech industrys interests and the general publics were always irreconcilable. And as Silicon Valley grew wealthier, it was bound to gravitate toward Americas more pro-business party. The Biden administrations error, therefore, was not doing too much to antagonize Big Tech, but too little. This debate collapses together several distinct questions. Some of these are ideological such as whether the Biden administrations approach to antitrust enforcement was worthwhile on the merits. Today though, I want to focus on two factual questions at the center of the intra-Democratic dispute over Big Tech:How and why did the tech industrys politics change during the Biden era?Would it be politically damaging or beneficial for Democrats to maintain (or build upon) Joe Bidens approach to regulating the tech industry? I think the answers to both these questions are more complicated than either progressive or pro-business Democrats allow. Why tech moved rightTo understand why Silicon Valley has moved right in recent years, its helpful to consider what had previously tethered the industry to the center-left.Many in the tech world argue that Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party were long bound by an implicit deal: Democrats would support the development of new technology, celebrate entrepreneurs, and take a light touch approach to regulating the digital sphere in exchange for tech moguls backing socially liberal causes, progressive taxation, incremental expansions of the welfare state, philanthropies, and Democratic candidates.This was a pretty good bargain for the typical tech founder since it effectively entailed the Democratic Party embracing nearly all of their preferences. Survey data on the views of Silicon Valley moguls is limited. But a 2017 study of tech entrepreneurs politics found that they were left-leaning on almost all issues including taxation and redistribution but quite right-wing on questions of government regulation and labor unions. This distinct ideological profile has been dubbed liberal-tarian.Given that Democrats have always been the party more supportive of regulating industry and promoting organized labor, the partys alliance with tech was long fraught with some tension. But in recent years, both sides began souring on their supposed contract for a variety of reasons. But three were especially significant:1) Changing economic conditions raised the costs of liberalism for tech companies. When an industry is enjoying explosive growth, it has less incentive to align with the right. Democrats might nibble into its profits with their relatively high taxes, or inch its compliance costs with their greater regulatory scrutiny. But when your sector is awash in cheap financing and soaring revenues, the price of allying with a left-of-center party can look negligible. As Andreessen put the point to the New York Times earlier this month, back in the days of Clinton and Obama, the tax rates didnt really matter because when an internet company worked, it grew so fast and got so valuable that if you worked another three years, say, youd make another 10 X. Another 5 percent higher tax rate washed out in the numbers.Silicon Valley enjoyed such favorable conditions for much of the 2010s. But the tech boom faded during Bidens tenure. In 2022, rising interest rates started diverting capital away from the tech sector: With safe assets now offering an attractive guaranteed return, investors grew more reluctant to funnel cash into risky ones. Stock market valuations fell and layoffs spread. At the same time, as Noah Smith notes, tech investors and executives started running up against structural constraints on profit-making. Many venture capitalists looked at Google and Facebooks success in cornering and dominating their respective markets, and bet that they could establish similarly monopolistic businesses in other corners of digital commerce. But by 2022, theyd discovered that achieving such market dominance was harder than theyd thought.Meanwhile, social media companies struggled to combat the inherently finite nature of human attention: Once youve lured roughly 5 billion humans onto social media and turned a hefty percentage of them into addicts theres only so much screen time left to monetize.In this context, we would expect tech moguls whod been only lightly committed to the liberal part of liberal-tarianism to start heeding their own narrow material interests. After all, it was a similar mix of rising interest rates, inflation, and slowing profitability that helped prompt corporate Americas right turn in the 1970s.To be sure, the tech industrys fortunes have rebounded since 2022, thanks in no small part to the AI boom. But the experience of a capital crunch and profit squeeze however temporary seems to have made a lasting impression on many in tech, whose political contributions began shifting (modestly) toward Republicans in 2022.2) The Biden administrations economic policies threatened big and little tech alike.For the reasons above, it wouldnt have been surprising for the tech industry to have drifted toward Republicans over the past four years, even if Democratic policy remained as friendly to tech as had it been under Barack Obama.In reality, the Biden administration took a much more adversarial stance than its predecessors. Bidens Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department collectively brought antitrust cases against Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft.This blitzkrieg of aggressive antitrust enforcement naturally irritated Silicon Valleys giants. Perhaps less predictably, it also antagonized smaller tech firms and startups. In theory, one might expect little tech would want the government to curb the market power of their gargantuan competitors. In practice, however, many startup founders and investors aspire to either grow their own firms into behemoths, or failing that, get bought up by a larger company. By chilling merger activity, the Biden administration effectively blocked many startups plan B, while choking off a reliable source of returns for venture capitalists.VCs and startups also took exception to the Biden Securities and Exchange Commissions vigorous regulation of cryptocurrency, as well as the administrations executive order on AI safety. In November 2023, a contingent of startup founders and investors denounced the latter, arguing that the orders reporting requirements put small AI firms at a competitive disadvantage, as they could less comfortably shoulder regulatory compliance costs than their larger rivals.Finally, Biden proposed a new tax on the unrealized capital gains of Americans with more than $100 million in wealth. This would mean that when a megamillionaire investors stock portfolio or real estate holdings gained $5 million in value, they would need to pay a tax on that amount, even if they did not sell those assets. Tax policy wonks like this idea. But super-rich tech investors very much do not. And when Kamala Harris announced her support for Bidens plan last summer, Silicon Valleys venture capitalists had a conniption. Super-rich tech moguls care about making money. But they are often at least as covetous of social status. Past a certain point, accumulating more wealth has little practical impact on your living standards (or those of your children, or your childrens children). But a persons appetite for greater prestige tends to be less exhaustible than their desire for beach homes, Porsches, or private jets. Thus, if Democrats had spent the past decade exalting tech investors and founders, its possible that the partys increasingly adversarial policies would have caused less rancor in Silicon Valley. But Democrats became increasingly disillusioned with the tech industry over the course of the 2010s. And this culminated in a Democratic administration that undermined tech billionaires sense of self-importance.At the core level, both Barack Obama and the modal Democrat thought the average Silicon Valley company was really good and cool in 2009, Marc Aidinoff, a historian and policy adviser in both the Obama and Biden administrations, told me. Obama would go to Silicon Valley and have dinner with the CEOs and call them champions of change. What these people really wanted from the president was the sense that they were loved. But by 2021, things had changed, according to Aidinoff. Joe Biden distrusts these people, thinks they are hurting Americans, and has the sense that they arent actually making much of real value, he said.The Democrats disenchantment with tech wasnt attributable to Bidens personal skepticism of Silicon Valley alone.After the financial crisis, the partys progressive wing grew more influential. And its ascent increased the salience of both inequality and labor issues in Democratic politics. For a party increasingly concerned with wealth concentration and workers rights, tech giants that generated vast fortunes off winner-take-all markets while, in many cases, committing labor violations or undermining traditional employment did not look like engines of progress.As importantly, the notion that social media platforms promoted democracy and social reform fell into disrepute. In the wake of Obamas election and the Arab Spring both of which were widely credited to novel media technologies many liberals bought into the idea that Facebook and Twitter would abet a more egalitarian politics. But authoritarian regimes proved adept at restricting online speech. And if social medias potential to facilitate rightwing extremism wasnt clear to liberals before 2016, it was apparent to them afterward. Following Trumps victory, many Democrats blamed their partys defeat on Facebooks dissemination of fake news. Around the same time, research suggesting that social media could have adverse mental health effects started to accumulate. All this combined with tech platforms adverse impact on traditional journalism led the mainstream media to view Silicon Valley more critically. Between 2012 and 2019, the New York Times coverage of Facebook turned sharply negative, according to one prominent data analysis.Add in Silicon Valleys growing enthusiasm for crypto a technology that appeared to be good for little beyond scams and speculation and it isnt hard to see why Democrats soured on Big Tech. The partys newfound skepticism of the industry didnt just translate into greater regulatory scrutiny, but also, a withholding of both praise and access. According to some in tech, the sectors leading lights felt themselves shunned and slighted by the Biden White House.I think the fundamental problem, and I heard this from many, was that former President Biden was unwilling to meet with tech CEOs and entrepreneurs, the billionaire investor Mark Cuban told me. It was that simple.One former Biden official echoed this assessment, saying that tech companies couldnt get meetings with a lot of the key regulators. Certainly [FTC commissioner] Lina [Khan] wouldnt meet with people she liked to say, Were enforcement, you cant really meet with us.Andreessen recently reminisced that Bill Clintons Democratic Party had celebrated and loved tech companies. Bidens Democratic Party, by contrast, often refused Andreessens ilk the time of day. Spurning Silicon Valley is politically costly but potentially affordableIts clear then that Silicon Valleys rightward turn was precipitated, at least in part, by a change in the Democratic Partys attitudes and policies toward the tech industry.And theres reason to think that the partys anti-tech turn is politically costly on net. Were other tech billionaires to emulate Musks political giving or other social media companies to imitate Xs boosting of right-wing content the damage to Democrats could be considerable. And the Trump administrations manifest openness to trading political power for financial support makes this a live possibility, especially if Democrats promise to reprise the Biden administrations policies toward the industry.Meanwhile, its far from clear that aggressively regulating Silicon Valley can gain Democrats meaningful support elsewhere. This is not because voters oppose that general goal: In fact, in a 2024 Pew Research poll, a slight majority expressed support for increasing regulation of the tech industry, while a supermajority said that social media has had a mostly negative effect on the United States.The problem is that voters have ambivalent feelings about Big Tech writ large, and do not consider regulating the companies a priority. When Gallup asked Americans what their countrys most important problem was this month, only 1 percent named corporate corruption while 0 percent picked technology. In a post-election survey from Morning Consult and the Chamber of Progress (a trade group of companies allied with the Democratic Party), voters were presented with a list of 12 issues, and asked to name the two that were most important to their vote. Only 2 percent of respondents picked regulating technology companies as one of their priorities, making it the single least prioritized objective on the list (by contrast, 49 percent selected controlling inflation and strengthening the economy). Meanwhile, in YouGovs polling, Amazons approval rating sits at 74 percent, Googles at 70 percent, Apples at 69 percent, and Facebook at 59 percent.Given all this, its plausible that Democrats have more to lose than gain politically from taking on Big Tech. Yet its also true that the political costs of the partys anti-tech turn have been routinely overstated. In truth, Silicon Valleys rightward shift while real has been remarkably modest, whether measured in votes or donations. In 2020, Biden won Santa Clara County, which includes much of Silicon Valley, by 48 points. Four years later, he won it by 40 points. Theres some evidence that tech workers and executives became more likely to donate to Republicans during the Biden era. But 83 percent of Amazon employees donations to federal candidates went to Democrats in 2024; for Meta, that figure was 91.5 percent; for Apple, it was 95 percent.At the megadonor level, the story is a bit more complicated. Trump received more money from tech donors who spent over $1 million on the 2024 race than Harris did but thats mostly thanks to Musks prodigious giving. Musk spent $242.6 million on the 2024 election, nearly five times as much as Silicon Valleys second-largest political spender, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, a Democrat.And yet, its hard to attribute Musks political evolution to recent changes in Democratic policy. The Tesla CEO appears to have been undergoing a process of online radicalization even before Biden took office (in March 2020, Musk allegedly bet the writer Sam Harris $1 million that there would be fewer than 35,000 cases of Covid-19 in the United States, a conviction that seems symptomatic of his immersion in right-wing social media).If we deem Musk a special case and put him to the side, then Democrats retained their advantage with large tech donors in 2024: Combined, all other tech megadonors spent $30.6 million on Trump, and $120.9 million on Harris, according to an analysis from The Guardian. In any case, money was not the Democrats problem in 2024. The party and its allied groups outraised the GOP by $1.1 billion during last years campaign. To be sure, many Silicon Valley billionaires waited until after Election Day to cozy up to Trump, so their newfound support for the GOP would not be captured by this data. But those who only started currying Trumps favor once he secured the presidency are likely motivated less by antipathy for Democratic policy than awareness of Republican corruption: Trump has made it quite clear that his friends can expect favorable treatment by his government while his foes can anticipate the opposite.A number of people in tech led with vinegar during Trumps first term and learned that it was better with Trump to lead with honey, Adam Kovacevich, a former Google executive and chair of the Chamber of Progress, told me. Its not so much that they expect a lot, but they really dont want their companies to be hurt by Trump. If your competitors are building a close relationship with Trump, you dont want them to screw you.All of which is to say: The Democrats have paid a price for their crusade against Big Tech, but not a prohibitively expensive one. Democrats can (probably) afford to prioritize good tech policy over optimal politicsNone of this settles the debate over whether Democrats were right to take a more adversarial posture toward the tech industry under Biden. Moderate Democrats can look at this pattern of facts and conclude that Bidens agenda alienated a powerful industry and did little to increase their partys popular support, all while discouraging growth and innovation.Progressives, meanwhile, can counter that Democrats just proved they can take on concentrated corporate power and still retain an overwhelming financial advantage over the GOP and thus, the party has no excuse not to prioritize the interests of ordinary Americans over those of tech billionaires.Ultimately though, the important disagreement here is the substantive one. If Democrats can ingratiate themselves to tech billionaires in ways that have little substantive cost such as giving them face time or rhetorical encouragement they might be well-advised to do so. But the party as of yet faces no imperative to abandon policies that benefit the general public, for the sake of appeasing Silicon Valley titans. Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:
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