Democrats Are Blowing It with Silicon Valley
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
To provide some context on that number, assuming that most of them are under 65 and college graduates, that's possibly even a slightly Republican lean, though if you assume they're mostly men that probably swings it back again a little.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trum...
> Three weeks ago, an industry newsletter, The Information, reported that the share of Republican-aligned contributions from employees of Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta this election cycle tripled to 15 percent in 2022 from 5 percent in 2020.
> In 2017, David Broockman, Gregory Ferenstein and I conducted the first large-scale survey of the founders of technology companies. We found that they were heavily Democratic, with over 75 percent indicating that they supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Yet technology founders were unusual in that they took liberal positions on wealth redistribution but conservative positions on regulating the economy, particularly the labor market. Their basic worldview is to let the free market operate and then redistribute after the fact through taxes and transfers.
> What changed? While our survey found that technology founders were extremely liberal on social issues like gay marriage, abortion and gun control, I question whether the same can be said for more recent social divides around transgender rights, racial equity and the penumbra of other issues surrounding the concept of “wokeness.”
> One clear source of friction has been the growing influence of organized labor, which has proved more popular with younger workers and has a clear seat at the table in the Biden administration.
> The roots of the high-tech industry are embedded in the countercultural movement of the 1960s, so it was perhaps unsurprising that technology elites viewed themselves as part of the left. Now that the left dominates major cultural institutions, some members of the tech community represent the new counterculture.Had they taken a more balanced approach with mergers and acquisitions and providing basic checks on their corporate power rather than letting them do whatever they wanted, we likely wouldn't be in the situation we're in currently. Now we have to play catch up in enforcing laws against antitrust and anticompetitive and their entrenched power makes it much messier and it's also become entangled with the government also trying to apply pressure on social media companies fighting what it considers "misinformation".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-obama-nea...
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...
Despite Biden's supposed enthusiasm about reigning in Big Tech, he was also a party to letting them accumulate the power they have now, though Lina Khan's appointment was a positive step.
Oh look Reagan’s man abusing workers during Clinton’s time: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Let’s not pretend 2008-2016 was a bubble of failed oversight. 2007-08 crash, 2000 dotcom, looting pensions for Wall Street in the 80s.
There is the whole “SCOTUS handing one party an election in 2000.”
There’s no way I’m buying into such a specific narrative about the democrats when the entire government and public treat each other like shit propping up decades of headlines about inequality going up.
https://truthout.org/articles/absence-of-universal-health-ca...
Or if you want to take it even further back than that, one could even argue that the American version of Christianity that got entangled in capitalism was also responsible:
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism
It's actually not a specific narrative or the only cause of blame, it's actually just one facet of the larger narrative you're describing. In the recent history of the entrentched political power and wealth hoarding of Silicon Valley, the last decade is very relevant to our current situation. The Obama administration let many mergers and acqusitions happen that we today recognize were monopolistic and anticompetitive. They were mainly allowed to take place because of the deregulation and forces of inequality you mention, but also because of the corrupt relationships that the Obama administration had with many key SV people, especially Google. The main thing that changed is that the concept of "Big Tech" became politically unpopular because we're now paying the price for those regulatory failures.
It's the same forces at work that allowed SBF's crypto scamming to fester because of their coziness with the crypto industry while they chased fundraising dollars.
https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/crypto-industry-exe...
It goes without saying that the Republicans are even more guilty of this type of corruption, just with different people writing the checks. I'll admit that I feel more compelled to call out the democrats for this type of behavior, not only because it's such a letdown for me personally but also because if we expect that democrats are suddenly going to do an about-face on regulatory policy from just one administration ago, with many of the same players involved now as then, accountability is necessary.
It sounds like we actually agree on a lot more than you might assume, but just like you're pointing out with there being a larger narrative, this is a systemic issue that transcends partisanship.