I think probably AOC/Bernie were pretty smart even if they get nothing concrete out of it.
For one thing it sends the signal "I can be bought -- you can work with me" which is probably useful to their faction in DC if people currently assume they are radical kooks. Plus some people will actually respect them more for cold-blooded gamesmanship.
Also I've heard speculation that supporting Biden reassured people they wouldn't fight against a centrist replacement, which of course makes it easier for Biden to drop out. Plausible.
Of course it has to be Harris but I don’t even want to imagine the events on 1/6/2025 in the House if she wins the election. OTOH, odds of a 1/6-related problem is unlikely because the odds of winning the Electoral College even without Republicans pulling shit is approximately nil. But what if…?
As for Gramsci, what’s going on is actually the reverse and it’s not hanging on a state of potentiality but is in fact happening. The relatively new—at least historically anomalous—progressivism of the New Deal and Great Society is being killed to a reactionary reversion of the 1880s or the kind of nation the Founding Father’s envisioned—one in which a wealthy elite ruled, free to accumulate further wealth without the least interference from the state. (I read the Tooze piece but little stuck. Will be going back for a reread.)
BTH: will be happy to eat crow after I’ve been proven wrong on either the above points which will be late this year at the soonest.
I disagree about "nil" odds for Harris, since there are many factors yet to emerge. But the first thing I reflected on when Biden withdrew was the likely political violence if she wins. Millions of people are already primed to assume that any Dem win would be a fraudulent coup. If that Dem is a San Francisco woman of color, elevated to the top of ticket by party operatives, there will be a very large pool of people with guns who will mobilize. Trump has already said in his acceptance speech that "we won't let" 2020 happen again.
The nil isn’t re the popular vote—I have no doubt the D candidate would win. And no doubt that there’s no justifiable reason it should be anyone other than Harris.
My nil comes from the odds of the D candidate winning the Electoral College. I’m so old, I remember 2016, 2020 and J6 2021.
My fantasy would be to risk huge ugliness on 1/6/25 and have Biden resign in hopes that President Harris can win a decisive, GOP fuckery-proof victory. Back up fantasy is for Biden to use his time as a lame duck and new SCOTUS-gifted immunity and have Trump whacked as a proven threat to the nation. I can even fabricate a thorough legal reason for it.
I wanna sing Bernie's and (especially) AOC's praises a bit more. As you wrote, they have secured some meaningful goodwill for themselves with the presumptive nominee (especially AOC w/ her immediate endorsement) and it may translate to meaningful influence on policy achievements going forward. That's factionalism at it's finest. Better still, though, an upshot of the Ridin' With Biden schtick is it's now much more difficult for the GOP to stick Kamala with an "AOC and the radical left coup's candidate of choice" smear.
I agree with the diagnosis of AOC's and Bernie's calculations. I think the sum of what they "got" in exchange (gestures at supreme court reform and rent control that will never go anywhere, no movement on Palestine) is evidence of how little power they wield as the left wing of the Dems.
I also just think it's weird to try and convince people that Biden is fine and it's all some conspiracy when everyone saw what they saw.
I am relieved to read someone else who's noticed that a majority of the electorate, and of the real electors, have once already indicated that Ms Harris were fit to be President. It's not dispositive, but it's not nothing either.
The U.S. Right try to square their simultaneous potentially-costly oppressive desires and their hatred of taxation and government action with brutality. I have argued with 'libert'arians who were certain that there should be very few laws on the books, but that those should be enforced with as violent, painful, and quick punishments as possible…and that those imprisoned must be forced to work on pain of starvation.
During Prohibition, at least as Daniel Okrent limns it in "Last Call" a movement supported by Progressives,xenophobes, racial and religious bigots, and what we'd now call 'cultural conservatives', there was outright celebration of the poisoning of those who encountered badly made or insufficiently de-denatured spirits…from the Rightist portions of the coalition, the Progressives were appalled, preferring education and time to persuade people to obey the laws.
Rothbard's 'unleash the police on the bums' seems of a piece with this, much cheaper than prisons and delightful for him to contemplate.
Actually, on second thought, a large part of me believes that they have found and cleaved to these ideologies precisely _because_ they present opportunities for righteous brutality. (…as in, 'They donʼt want me hanged because they think me a traitor, they think me a traitor because they long to see me hanged.'.)
I'm not at all sure Trump rules absolutely. The Heritage Foundation, Leonard Leo, and his donors, including his newer Silicon Valley backers—for them he's something of a Trojan horse, a figurehead through which to accomplish their aims.
Well he doesn't have the energy of Hitler and Mussolini, and might be inherently safer because he's entirely out for himself, but fascist history seems to be the history of plutocrats and reactionaries who thought that they could use fascists, e.g. as subcontractors for mob violence, eventually being instead ruled by them.
This is one of fascism's fatal flaws, its eclecticism. We usually think of political philosophy as textual and argumentative. That's how liberalism and conservatism, Marxism, socialism and communism evolved. Fascism is rooted in myth, energy and passion, and didn't want or need rational coherence. Fascism is formless enough for the fascist to project their perceptions onto it as the means to an end.
You might have seen me beating my dead hobby-horse in one of these comments sections: Fascism feels liberating because the follower identifies with the Leader, who is maximally free—caring much about an ideology he couldn't change at will would get in the way of that freedom.
EDIT: Fascism perhaps can not evolve because it can not admit to not already being optimal, and because anything resembling compromise is considered feminine, which is in this context is to say 'evil'.
The Thiel observation is an interesting one -- you're right he likes monopolies, but, for what it's worth, his fellow Trump-supporters Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are champions of (at least in their own telling) "Little Tech," i.e. smaller tech firms. Andreessen has specifically praised Lina Khan.
I think a lot of these elements supporting Trump is slightly a question of taxes, slightly a question of removing regulations on AI and the defense injury, but mostly ultimately antipathy for "woke"
To put it bluntly, Andreessen and Horowitz are full of shit. Andreessen in particular has been radicalized just as much as Musk has recently, but the comparison of the two is much more instructive in pointing out that they are both maniacally driven by their own self interests. Andreessen’s firm made billions of dollars in bets on crypto-related projects. While many have pointed out that they may have structured those deals in ways they could profitably exit (and have) far earlier than the traditional IPO-driven process, they still clearly hate operating in a Gary Gensler led SEC world in which every cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin and Ethereum are securities and the promotion of them has been labeled securities fraud. The “Little Tech” or web3 vs web2 arguments they make are window dressing, to say nothing of disingenuous given how a16z made their billions from web2 investments.
As for the rest, you’re absolutely right. They want lower taxes and fewer regulations in general. Focusing on
AI is mildly amusing because I’m not aware of any actual AI regulations. The AI companies made voluntary commitments to the Biden administration that we know OpenAI has already broken, but naturally there are no consequences. None of this “Silicon Valley defection” is actually a defection. These are all guys who have been voting for Republicans for a while. The new part of this is their confidence that they will not face any meaningful blowback from employees for being so vocal in supporting someone most of their employees view with disgust. This newfound confidence and energy is due in great part to the fact Big Tech has laid off so many people that job security is much more of a concern to many workers than protesting the ownership/management class’s odious decisions.
I offered my reading on the Tech Right (see the link to Smith's Substack), but another delightful term for them I saw today is "broligarch." Karl Bode's favorite epithet for them is "brunchlord."
Thiel has the most known "dark journey" when he opened the Thiel Memorial Bridge declaring freedom and democracy to be incompatible, and accumulating the theories of Rothbard, Hoppe and finally Yarvin.
Many in tech might just be mimicking Thiel to stay relevant.
The fashoid turn has happened because of economics and culture. The era of cheap money is over for now, and high interest rates can no longer subsidize tech companies that produce growth but no value. The other is cultural.
Before the tech booms, computing's pioneers were a narrowly self-selected band of white men who seemed keen on libertarianism, and cyberspace gave the illusion that their libertarian philosophy can organize a society. As the internet grew and prospered, most of our lives have now migrated online -- including our politics. Libertarians have an anti-politics notion of politics. Also, many of the workers in tech are very political and very progressive, and the libertarian elders were mortified that well-compensated employees insulated from class struggle were supporting social movements in the Bay Area with their money and talent.
The conflicts are economic (high interest rates), cultural (libertarianism vs. politics) and historical (libertarian old guard vs. young progressives).
An awful lot of people in tech were never cool but wanted to be, and easily fall victim to whatever form of 'nerd cool' were current. For example, in 1992 I was supposed to hate Microsoft, all the more experienced programmers did. (In 1993 I actually had to do Microsoft work and found that in this case trying to be 'cool' would have steered me right.) In any event, I can see people just wanting to be more like him in ways at which they might perhaps succeed, as opposed to 'by getting as rich'.
There's a concept in social sciences called pecuniary emulation. It's a theory that lower-income people will spend their way up on material goods in the hopes of advancing their social status (e.g., middle class parents moving to the suburbs because of "good schools" and still enrolling their children in private schools; or, poor people buying expensive shoes and feeling a bind from both having low-quality shoes that betray their poverty or high-quality shoes that get well-off people chastising them for poor life choices).
Thorstein Veblen was talking about material possessions, but pecuniary emulation also applies to ideologies. In organizations, workers will start to mimic the ideologies of their bosses, one as a means of currying favor with gatekeepers and two is an unconscious belief that adopting a certain mindset and worldview is necessary to move upward in the world.
Thielist politics could be because, like in the early days of computing, a cohort of demographically and ideologically homogeneous white men self-selected to be programmers and succeeded. So it's either Darwinian or survivorship bias. The other is pecuniary emulation: Peter Thiel is not only very successful, but he sits at the center of the power intersections of tech and finance. He's also very big on surveillance and the philosophy of Rene Girard had a formative influence on him. Thiel is the closest thing to a James Bond villain in real life, so his existence out of fear or favoritism compels others to adopt a Thielian outlook on life.
In reality the vast majority of people who work in—and lead—the Silicon Valley ecosystem remain very left wing; it’s just a few contrarian investor-celebrities who have come out as hard right. The Democrats raise vast amounts of money from the SV wealthy, and the entire region is reliably left-voting at every level.
I think probably AOC/Bernie were pretty smart even if they get nothing concrete out of it.
For one thing it sends the signal "I can be bought -- you can work with me" which is probably useful to their faction in DC if people currently assume they are radical kooks. Plus some people will actually respect them more for cold-blooded gamesmanship.
Also I've heard speculation that supporting Biden reassured people they wouldn't fight against a centrist replacement, which of course makes it easier for Biden to drop out. Plausible.
Tossing out two quick, like, observations.
Of course it has to be Harris but I don’t even want to imagine the events on 1/6/2025 in the House if she wins the election. OTOH, odds of a 1/6-related problem is unlikely because the odds of winning the Electoral College even without Republicans pulling shit is approximately nil. But what if…?
As for Gramsci, what’s going on is actually the reverse and it’s not hanging on a state of potentiality but is in fact happening. The relatively new—at least historically anomalous—progressivism of the New Deal and Great Society is being killed to a reactionary reversion of the 1880s or the kind of nation the Founding Father’s envisioned—one in which a wealthy elite ruled, free to accumulate further wealth without the least interference from the state. (I read the Tooze piece but little stuck. Will be going back for a reread.)
BTH: will be happy to eat crow after I’ve been proven wrong on either the above points which will be late this year at the soonest.
I disagree about "nil" odds for Harris, since there are many factors yet to emerge. But the first thing I reflected on when Biden withdrew was the likely political violence if she wins. Millions of people are already primed to assume that any Dem win would be a fraudulent coup. If that Dem is a San Francisco woman of color, elevated to the top of ticket by party operatives, there will be a very large pool of people with guns who will mobilize. Trump has already said in his acceptance speech that "we won't let" 2020 happen again.
The nil isn’t re the popular vote—I have no doubt the D candidate would win. And no doubt that there’s no justifiable reason it should be anyone other than Harris.
My nil comes from the odds of the D candidate winning the Electoral College. I’m so old, I remember 2016, 2020 and J6 2021.
My fantasy would be to risk huge ugliness on 1/6/25 and have Biden resign in hopes that President Harris can win a decisive, GOP fuckery-proof victory. Back up fantasy is for Biden to use his time as a lame duck and new SCOTUS-gifted immunity and have Trump whacked as a proven threat to the nation. I can even fabricate a thorough legal reason for it.
I wanna sing Bernie's and (especially) AOC's praises a bit more. As you wrote, they have secured some meaningful goodwill for themselves with the presumptive nominee (especially AOC w/ her immediate endorsement) and it may translate to meaningful influence on policy achievements going forward. That's factionalism at it's finest. Better still, though, an upshot of the Ridin' With Biden schtick is it's now much more difficult for the GOP to stick Kamala with an "AOC and the radical left coup's candidate of choice" smear.
I agree with the diagnosis of AOC's and Bernie's calculations. I think the sum of what they "got" in exchange (gestures at supreme court reform and rent control that will never go anywhere, no movement on Palestine) is evidence of how little power they wield as the left wing of the Dems.
I also just think it's weird to try and convince people that Biden is fine and it's all some conspiracy when everyone saw what they saw.
I am relieved to read someone else who's noticed that a majority of the electorate, and of the real electors, have once already indicated that Ms Harris were fit to be President. It's not dispositive, but it's not nothing either.
Wow… what a quote at the end there. Thanks for bringing my attention to that writing.
The U.S. Right try to square their simultaneous potentially-costly oppressive desires and their hatred of taxation and government action with brutality. I have argued with 'libert'arians who were certain that there should be very few laws on the books, but that those should be enforced with as violent, painful, and quick punishments as possible…and that those imprisoned must be forced to work on pain of starvation.
During Prohibition, at least as Daniel Okrent limns it in "Last Call" a movement supported by Progressives,xenophobes, racial and religious bigots, and what we'd now call 'cultural conservatives', there was outright celebration of the poisoning of those who encountered badly made or insufficiently de-denatured spirits…from the Rightist portions of the coalition, the Progressives were appalled, preferring education and time to persuade people to obey the laws.
Rothbard's 'unleash the police on the bums' seems of a piece with this, much cheaper than prisons and delightful for him to contemplate.
Actually, on second thought, a large part of me believes that they have found and cleaved to these ideologies precisely _because_ they present opportunities for righteous brutality. (…as in, 'They donʼt want me hanged because they think me a traitor, they think me a traitor because they long to see me hanged.'.)
I'm not at all sure Trump rules absolutely. The Heritage Foundation, Leonard Leo, and his donors, including his newer Silicon Valley backers—for them he's something of a Trojan horse, a figurehead through which to accomplish their aims.
Well he doesn't have the energy of Hitler and Mussolini, and might be inherently safer because he's entirely out for himself, but fascist history seems to be the history of plutocrats and reactionaries who thought that they could use fascists, e.g. as subcontractors for mob violence, eventually being instead ruled by them.
This is one of fascism's fatal flaws, its eclecticism. We usually think of political philosophy as textual and argumentative. That's how liberalism and conservatism, Marxism, socialism and communism evolved. Fascism is rooted in myth, energy and passion, and didn't want or need rational coherence. Fascism is formless enough for the fascist to project their perceptions onto it as the means to an end.
You might have seen me beating my dead hobby-horse in one of these comments sections: Fascism feels liberating because the follower identifies with the Leader, who is maximally free—caring much about an ideology he couldn't change at will would get in the way of that freedom.
EDIT: Fascism perhaps can not evolve because it can not admit to not already being optimal, and because anything resembling compromise is considered feminine, which is in this context is to say 'evil'.
The Thiel observation is an interesting one -- you're right he likes monopolies, but, for what it's worth, his fellow Trump-supporters Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are champions of (at least in their own telling) "Little Tech," i.e. smaller tech firms. Andreessen has specifically praised Lina Khan.
I think a lot of these elements supporting Trump is slightly a question of taxes, slightly a question of removing regulations on AI and the defense injury, but mostly ultimately antipathy for "woke"
To put it bluntly, Andreessen and Horowitz are full of shit. Andreessen in particular has been radicalized just as much as Musk has recently, but the comparison of the two is much more instructive in pointing out that they are both maniacally driven by their own self interests. Andreessen’s firm made billions of dollars in bets on crypto-related projects. While many have pointed out that they may have structured those deals in ways they could profitably exit (and have) far earlier than the traditional IPO-driven process, they still clearly hate operating in a Gary Gensler led SEC world in which every cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin and Ethereum are securities and the promotion of them has been labeled securities fraud. The “Little Tech” or web3 vs web2 arguments they make are window dressing, to say nothing of disingenuous given how a16z made their billions from web2 investments.
As for the rest, you’re absolutely right. They want lower taxes and fewer regulations in general. Focusing on
AI is mildly amusing because I’m not aware of any actual AI regulations. The AI companies made voluntary commitments to the Biden administration that we know OpenAI has already broken, but naturally there are no consequences. None of this “Silicon Valley defection” is actually a defection. These are all guys who have been voting for Republicans for a while. The new part of this is their confidence that they will not face any meaningful blowback from employees for being so vocal in supporting someone most of their employees view with disgust. This newfound confidence and energy is due in great part to the fact Big Tech has laid off so many people that job security is much more of a concern to many workers than protesting the ownership/management class’s odious decisions.
I offered my reading on the Tech Right (see the link to Smith's Substack), but another delightful term for them I saw today is "broligarch." Karl Bode's favorite epithet for them is "brunchlord."
Thiel has the most known "dark journey" when he opened the Thiel Memorial Bridge declaring freedom and democracy to be incompatible, and accumulating the theories of Rothbard, Hoppe and finally Yarvin.
Many in tech might just be mimicking Thiel to stay relevant.
The fashoid turn has happened because of economics and culture. The era of cheap money is over for now, and high interest rates can no longer subsidize tech companies that produce growth but no value. The other is cultural.
Before the tech booms, computing's pioneers were a narrowly self-selected band of white men who seemed keen on libertarianism, and cyberspace gave the illusion that their libertarian philosophy can organize a society. As the internet grew and prospered, most of our lives have now migrated online -- including our politics. Libertarians have an anti-politics notion of politics. Also, many of the workers in tech are very political and very progressive, and the libertarian elders were mortified that well-compensated employees insulated from class struggle were supporting social movements in the Bay Area with their money and talent.
The conflicts are economic (high interest rates), cultural (libertarianism vs. politics) and historical (libertarian old guard vs. young progressives).
They may be mimicking Thiel to feel 'cool'.
An awful lot of people in tech were never cool but wanted to be, and easily fall victim to whatever form of 'nerd cool' were current. For example, in 1992 I was supposed to hate Microsoft, all the more experienced programmers did. (In 1993 I actually had to do Microsoft work and found that in this case trying to be 'cool' would have steered me right.) In any event, I can see people just wanting to be more like him in ways at which they might perhaps succeed, as opposed to 'by getting as rich'.
There's a concept in social sciences called pecuniary emulation. It's a theory that lower-income people will spend their way up on material goods in the hopes of advancing their social status (e.g., middle class parents moving to the suburbs because of "good schools" and still enrolling their children in private schools; or, poor people buying expensive shoes and feeling a bind from both having low-quality shoes that betray their poverty or high-quality shoes that get well-off people chastising them for poor life choices).
Thorstein Veblen was talking about material possessions, but pecuniary emulation also applies to ideologies. In organizations, workers will start to mimic the ideologies of their bosses, one as a means of currying favor with gatekeepers and two is an unconscious belief that adopting a certain mindset and worldview is necessary to move upward in the world.
Thielist politics could be because, like in the early days of computing, a cohort of demographically and ideologically homogeneous white men self-selected to be programmers and succeeded. So it's either Darwinian or survivorship bias. The other is pecuniary emulation: Peter Thiel is not only very successful, but he sits at the center of the power intersections of tech and finance. He's also very big on surveillance and the philosophy of Rene Girard had a formative influence on him. Thiel is the closest thing to a James Bond villain in real life, so his existence out of fear or favoritism compels others to adopt a Thielian outlook on life.
Two days later: https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations
In reality the vast majority of people who work in—and lead—the Silicon Valley ecosystem remain very left wing; it’s just a few contrarian investor-celebrities who have come out as hard right. The Democrats raise vast amounts of money from the SV wealthy, and the entire region is reliably left-voting at every level.
Noah Smith wrote about the Tech Right last week. (It's a subscriber-only post.)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/understanding-the-new-tech-right