Silicon Valley’s Trump supporters are dicing with the death of democracy | John Naughton

In How Democracy Ends, his elegant book published after Trump’s election in 2016, David Runciman made a startling point. It was that while the liberal democracy that we take for granted won’t last for ever, it will not fail in ways familiar from the past: no revolutions, no military coups, no breakdowns of social order. It will fail forwards in an unexpected manner. The implication was that people making comparisons to what happened in 1930s Germany were misguided.

Until a few weeks ago, that seemed like sound advice. But then something changed. Significant sectors of Silicon Valley – which for decades had been a Democrat stronghold – started coming out for Trump. In 2016, Peter Thiel, the contrarian billionaire and co-founder of PayPal, had been the only prominent Valley figure to support Trump, which merely confirmed the fact that he was the region’s statutory maverick. But in the past few weeks, quite a few of the Valley’s big hitters (Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, to name just three) have revealed themselves to be supporters of – and donors to – Trump. Musk has set up and donated to a Republican-aligned political action committee (or Super Pac). On 6 June, the venture capitalist Sacks hosted a $300,000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Trump at his San Francisco mansion. And so on.

Why all this sudden interest in politics? It’s probably a mix of several different factors. One is Biden’s plan for a billionaire tax (and his administration’s enthusiasm for antitrust litigation). Another is Trump’s newfound enthusiasm for cryptocurrencies. A third is that Biden had raised far more money in campaign contributions. Finally, and most importantly, before Biden’s withdrawal the Trump bandwagon had begun to look unstoppable.

The last two factors are what bring the 1930s to mind. In 1932, the Nazi party was in deep financial trouble and when Hitler became Chancellor the following year he made a personal appeal to business leaders for help. The money rolled in from 17 different business groups, with the largest donations coming from IG Farben and Deutsche Bank. At the time, those donations must have looked like shrewd bets for the industrialists who placed them. But, as the historian Adam Tooze put it in his landmark book on the period, it also meant that German industrialists were “willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in Germany”. In return for their donations, Tooze wrote, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level. Corporate profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment. Fascism turned out to be good for business – until it wasn’t.

One wonders if any of these thoughts went through what might loosely be called the minds of the tech titans savouring their $300,000 dinners on a June evening in San Francisco. My guess is not. The denizens of Silicon Valley, you see, really don’t do history, because they’re in the business of creating the future. Accordingly, they have nothing to learn from the past.

Which is a pity, because history has some lessons for them. Those German industrialists who decided in 1933 that they had to back Hitler might not have had a clear idea of what he had in store for Germany and possibly knew nothing of his plans for the “final solution”. David Sacks’s dinner guests, though, have no such excuse: Project 2025, the plans for Trump’s second term, are out in the open in a 900-page document on the web.

It makes for interesting reading. It has four core aims: protecting children and families; dismantling the administrative state; defending the country’s borders; and restoring individual “God-given” freedoms. But at heart, it’s a plan for a vast increase in presidential power (including bringing the Department of Justice under presidential control), replacing nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists, rolling back environmental legislation, mass deportations and a lot of hysterical stuff about deleting “sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights” from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, and piece of legislation.

The rationale for Project 2025 was concern that when Trump came to power in 2016 he hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with his new powers, and to ensure that next time he will. As public concern about the document has risen, he has tried to dissociate himself from it. This could be because he doesn’t think he will need a plan after he’s elected. Speaking to a Christian convention in Florida the other day he said “Get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it any more. Four more years, you know what: it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians.”

And the moral? Be careful what you wish for. Silicon Valley, please copy.

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What I’ve been reading

Where to start?
Tim Harford has written a really interesting essay titled “How to fix the UK? Let me count the ways” in the Financial Times.

False balance
There’s a thoughtful Substack by the historian Timothy Snyder on both-sides-ism, a pernicious delusion of mainstream media.

In the ether
Molly White’s sceptical blogpost for her newsletter, Citation Needed, reflects on when cryptocurrency policy became an election issue.