The Tech Right and How The Left Can Fix Itself w/ Jon Askonas

Hey, Upstream listeners. Today, we're airing my conversation with John Esconas. John is an assistant professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, and a writer for publications like National Affairs, City Journal, The New Atlantis, and Compact. In this episode, John and I discuss the emerging New Right coalition between MAGA and Silicon Valley tech leaders. We explore what's holding this alliance together, examine the tensions that have already surfaced, And uncover the less obvious but potentially significant fault lines, like attitudes toward transhumanism and biotechnology, that may challenge the coalition in the future. Please enjoy.

Jon, welcome. Excited to have you here.

Thanks for having me on.

So it's funny, you know, the last few years we've been talking about sort of in our wildest dreams almost if a counter-elite would emerge and usurp the throne from the mid-incompetent elites. I'm sort of being a bit glib here, but it kind of happened, or maybe the foundation has been paved for it to happen. As we kind of make sense of what really happened here, Sort of, you know, you wrote a great post in City Journal about how Silicon Valley's shift away from Democrats is not just about the election. It's broader than that. Why don't you sort of give us the lay of the land of what happened here?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. In some ways, it's the important question. You know, some of us, I think, were paying attention to it and laying the foundation for it well before the election, but now it's sort of front and center. I mean, the visual, I'm sure it was shocking to you, the visual of Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai and Jeff Bezos sitting and Mark Zuckerberg on the dais, inauguration, just absolutely wild. So the underlying shift is driven by the kind of ongoing political realignment. And there had been a lot written, and there is a lot written about the kind of mass dynamic of this, right? The rise over the last 40 years, the Republican Party has become much more working class. It's still a predominantly white party, but it's actually a much less white party now than it was 40 years ago in some ways. The Democratic Party has become much more associated with college-educated voters, with women. I mean, the gender segregation in voting has never been higher than it is now in party identification. So people are kind of paying attention to these mass dynamics, which are driven by the changing political economy of the United States. I think they were paying a little less attention to maybe the elite dynamics. On the one hand, you have the kinds of business elites, Fortune 500 CEOs that had been sort of the bread and butter of the Republican Party in the '80s, now much more contested. But on the other side of it were tech elites going back to the '90s, from the era of the Clinton Democrats all the way through the Obama administration. Other than maybe Hollywood elites, folks in tech seem to be the most entrenched part of the Democratic coalition. But even by the end of the Obama years, there were kind of cracks, I think, in that really important divergences between the interests of and ideas of folks in tech and where the Democratic Party was going and where the Republican Party was going. And what we saw in 2024 is not exactly a wholesale defection, like you're a majority of VCs, for example, probably are still Democrats, but a substantial defection of parts of that tech elite. And now that's the conversation we're having.

I interviewed Ezra Klein on this show a couple of years ago. And one thing he picked up on is that there seems to be a bit of a civil war between sort of the CEO class and maybe some of the VCs and sort of the employee class. And some people say it's like X versus LinkedIn, right? It's just the tale of two, two Cs. And It is really interesting. You know, I think COVID really enabled tech to be publicly sort of anti-left because just the amount of incompetence, you know, and Mike Solana, Balaji really led the way here for criticizing San Francisco's governance. It's funny, I remember when Brian Armstrong had the, his post about, hey, we're having no politics at Coinbase. That was one of the most controversial moments of the last like 5 years, I feel like, because you can, I think people had a sense for, okay, if we let this happen, then every other company is going to want to adopt this and we can't sort of impose our politics anymore. And he wasn't even saying we're going to be right-wing. He was just saying just no politics. And he wasn't even saying no DEI or anything. And so that's, you could start to do that, but there was still a question. I remember even 2023, Will tech support Trump? I remember asking people and it was kind of uncertain, you know, support DeSantis, but Trump was so beyond the pale for so long that there was this concern about, hey, would that be okay? And then of course Elon buys X and then it becomes this sort of rapid spiral after a couple endorsements that then everybody does, a significant amount of people on the tech right, this whole class that emerges, the tech right. And then I think one thing you've helped, you've written about is, and thought about is like, where does the tech right fit in with the MAGA right, or just the right, the new right in general of the last 10 years? We saw a little bit of the conflict over the holidays around immigration. There's a lot of contradiction. You know, some people say, hey, but there's still, you know, agreement on most issues, even if there's some key differences, immigration being one, but also I think transhumanism or the role of technology being another. So why don't you help us to understand some of these fault lines?

Yeah. And the fault lines within this new coalition are super interesting. Before going there, I think actually the kind of story of Coinbase is a really interesting fable for the kind of like a microcosm of the overall effect. So you go from You know, Brian Armstrong saying, we're gonna— no politics in the workplace. Why did he do that? Because there was this conflict between Coinbase as a company and the interest therefore of like the founder, founding team, the investors in Coinbase, and an employee base, or really, and really a really small minority of the employee base who were really energized by cultural issues. So this is where, you know, like you can tell a story about wokeness, you can tell a story about DEI. You can tell a story about San Francisco's kind of dysfunctional politics there. But by 2024, Brian Armstrong was very pro-Trump and pro-Republican. Why was that? That's actually a totally separate set of issues, which is you couldn't be a crypto company in a Democratic administration, it turns out. And there were coalitional reasons why, especially having to do with Elizabeth Warren, why the Biden administration was so anti-crypto, but that really escalated. There's another world. In fact, there's a world in which Kamala Harris is reelected and makes a pivot towards crypto, and then a lot of that kind of goes away, and then you're still left with some of the kind of cultural issues, but you don't have this looming survival-level existential threat to crypto as an industry. And that was repeated. That's true of crypto. That was true of AI. I would argue that's true of some kinds of hard tech. And I think the kind of background of this story is the pivot in Silicon Valley away from kind of B2B and consumer-based SaaS and software applications to other sectors where the interests of people building in those sectors and the kind of Democratic Party coalition are much starker. So it's one thing if you're an AI company or leave AI aside. If you're a software company, Democratic Party would love to have you. But if you're an AI company, you need to build energy plants to run your data centers. And suddenly the fact that every other constituency of the Democratic Party wants to make it more expensive and/or impossible for you to do that is suddenly an existential issue. So I think underlying some of the kind of surface-level culture war politics issues, there are also really deep political economy issues that are at stake. But yeah, so within this new coalition, you have this really interesting mix of— I think in some ways the 3 big pieces of the new coalition are the tech right. And interestingly enough, I think tech right is very important for an elite class. It's supplying a lot of really important talent. for the new right, supplying a lot of really important donor relationships. Not obvious that it's a huge voter base, which we can talk about whether that's important or not. And the other 2 are sort of MAGA, whatever you want to— the parts of the Republican Party, maybe most important, centered on America First policies, concerned about immigration, concerned about the direction of the country and kind of returning, making America great again. And the other, of course, the other important pillar is MAHA, Make America Healthy Again. And I think that's maybe the least understood part of this. It's not just, you know, it's people who are, who maybe were kind of apolitical 5 years or more, really radicalized by COVID, radicalized by chronic disease, radicalized by kind of confrontations with and the kind of total crisis of credibility of the health establishment. It's also, I think, the direction of a lot of social conservatives. So a lot of folks who maybe were really animated by, for example, pro-life issues are now in some ways migrating. They haven't changed their minds about anything, but they really strongly identify now also with some of the conversations in Maha world. So I think these are kind of the 3 pillars of the new right coalition.

It's funny to contrast it with the fusionism of old. What was it, the libertarian slash billionaires, this sort of Anti-communists and evangelicals.

Yeah, exactly. So the social conservatives, like business Republicans, libertarians, and anti-communists, all motivated by an existential struggle with communism. So it's interesting to think, like, what unites this coalition? And I think what you could say is it's an existential fight with, for lack of a better word, the cathedral. Yeah, it's really interesting to go back and read Menger's Moldbug and Nick Land circa 2014, 2015, talking about all the issues that I think are animating politics here a decade later.

What would, like, for people who haven't read those, some in the audience familiar, some not, what do you think they'll have better appreciation for? Like, help flesh out what it really means to be fighting the cathedral separate from or adjacent to or addition to fighting just wokeness more broadly.

Yeah. Well, I think the idea here is, so the old fusionism, the fight was to protect in the kind of existing American system, whether it's actually existing kind of communities and churches and traditions, tradition for lack of a better word, actually existing businesses and entrepreneurship and capitalism, or of course the American Constitution and form of government. against the threat of revolutionary communism. They wanted to kind of overthrow all of those things. What's interesting, and maybe makes this new coalition maybe more energetic, maybe more willing to go on the offense, is that the thing that they all are engaged against is the establishment or the establishment institutions, whether that is a regulatory administrative state that makes it impossible to build good businesses in high technology, whether that is a administrative state and media and universities that are increasingly hostile to kind of traditional American culture and actually actively discriminating against ordinary heritage Americans, to an establishment that is totally captured by a particular approach to science and medicine that doesn't work for— it hasn't delivered for a lot of people. So the interesting thing, there was like the calls coming from inside the house, right? Whereas the fight against communism is at least ostensibly about international communism and it's maybe sort of domestic fifth column. This new coalition is very squarely aimed against the existing institutions, the existing establishment that controls American institutions. And that's why there's so much kind of willingness to kind of break those institutions. It's funny reading the news. The New York Times will report breathlessly about All this damage this is going to do to universities. And then of course, anybody who voted for President Trump is like, 2 thumbs up. Like, great.

Yeah, you already sold me. Yeah, you already had me.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's that great meme, one of my favorite memes, which is like the Peter Parker meme of like, I already told you I'm voting for Trump. You don't have to sell me on it.

Yeah, well, it is funny, by the way. I mean, Curtis Yarvin, a few years ago, we were scared to have him on our show because what would the blowback be? And now New York Times, you know, with a flattering picture of him.

Yeah.

And, you know, I guess a somewhat hostile interview, but, you know, giving him like, you can't ignore him anymore. And now there's sort of Ezra Klein is having sort of, you know, right-wing people on the show try to understand, hey, what happened here? You know, it's funny. Derek Thompson came out with a tweet the other day and he was like, oh, I think what's the reason why people shifted right is because during COVID everyone was, you know, cooped up and, you know, men got, you know, discovered YouTube radicalization. It is, it's funny, it's never positive. They realized that, you know, certain institutions were taking advantage of them. It's all, they got sort of warped somehow.

Well, you know, it's weird, you know, trying to observe the kind of Democratic— in 2012, Republicans were walloped by, you know, Obama, and they had sort of postmortem And I think the most notable thing about it is how much of a failure it was and how Trump in 2015, 2016 does pretty much the opposite of everything that this postmortem had said and of course wins. If the Democrats are kind of in a similar moment where they're going through a postmortem, but it seems clear that they're just totally lost. And one evidence of that is all this focus on messaging, right? There was a report of some kind of secret Democratic confab about how do we recover from 2024? And half of it was about like, here's how you do better video content. There was no sense that the message is the problem.

Yeah, it's really funny. And it's sort of like—

Or this search, like, oh, we have to find our liberal Joe Rogan and that will deliver the young men back to us.

Yeah, well, you had Joe Rogan if you didn't sort of push him out. Yeah, it's really funny. Joe Rogan was a Bernie supporter. Yeah, it's really—

and he only—

what, he only endorsed Trump right at the very end? So, uh, yeah, it's, it's fascinating.

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Okay, so we talked about what the right has in alignment. Now maybe let's talk about the potential fractions or the potential sort of contradictions or conflicts and how you think they might get resolved or where this goes from here. And I also want to hear more about Maha as well.

Yeah. And to be clear, I'm not an expert on Maha, just something I'm trying to learn more about. And I think it's really underrated as a phenomenon. I mean, a lot of the contradictions— look, there's, you know, if you view the issue as really the direction of the last 40 years of American politics, there's a lot of common ground still kind of in the coalition. It's going to be a ways— I think it's going to be a while before it really kind of runs out of runway. But there are, you know, obvious kind of cracks. So, you know, one important crack is on immigration. You know, the tech right generally is sort of very pro immigration, maybe not full open borders, but at the very least wants, you know, views the right rubric as making America the nation the most competitive for business and technology anywhere in the world. Doesn't necessarily, and you know, in some cases is actively opposed, supports quote unquote meritocracy, actively opposed to giving, you know, Americans, people who are born here, a leg up in or protecting them from international market forces or anything like that. You know, it runs completely diametrically opposed to the interests and the kind of perspective of like the MAGA movement. This is an area where it's a real problem that the tech right is such a small electoral coalition. So, you know, you might have seen Vivek kind of mouthing off about this on Twitter and then immediately, you know, being the first one fired by Doge. The first victim of Doge. It just seems very clear that outside of maybe some very narrow technical issues, the tech right doesn't really have the juice to go against kind of the broad— President Trump's broad base on immigration as an issue. Although, interestingly enough, I think there's actually maybe more diversity of opinion. I think there are some folks in the tech right who are actually, at least privately, quite skeptical of the generic idea that we need to have our doors open for global talent. But we can talk about that. Another one which I think hasn't really come up yet, but probably will in the next 4 years, if not in the next 10 years, is kind of transhumanism, for lack of a better word. A lot of folks in MAGA and in more so in Maha are very skeptical of, quote unquote, of science, very skeptical of messing with natural biology. And Many folks in the tech right are really enthusiastic about accelerating the pace of new biotech especially. And so I remember a year or so ago, I think Florida banned lab-grown meat. And what's really interesting is it wasn't really a front page issue for most of the country, but if you were paying attention to kind of the nascent tech right group chats or newsletters or whatever, there was a little tempest in a teapot over this, with folks, some folks on the tech right, basically deploring this idea. And I think, again, running diametrically opposed to the interests of a lot of other people in this coalition. So I think stuff around lab-grown meat, around new drugs, around new vaccines, around— and then not even to mention around genetic screening for embryos and IVG and some of the other kind of really advanced reproductive technology. I think that's an area where there's going to be some real tensions.

And who are these Maha people? Are they former, basically like hippie Democrats? Is it RFK tribe? Help us better understand this base.

Yeah. And again, I think the reporting on it from mainstream sources have been pretty bad, to be honest, and kind of sensationalist. So I'm going more on the people I personally would kind of categorize this way. I think it's a mixture of David Shore, the kind of democratic political data scientist, has this notion of issue salience or has popularized work on issue salience. The idea that how people vote, who they support, is not so much about changing people's minds, it's changing about what are the most important issues to them at one moment in time. So one thing that enabled the tech right, ironically, is like, is the left really one on really won on gay rights, really won on, at least kind of fought to a draw on abortion, to the point where it actually kind of removed those issues from the table. Right. So a lot of folks in tech were very stridently pro-Democratic because they were very sort of socially liberal. Well, a lot of those issues are now just not really— they won, so they're not really political issues. So I think a lot of folks, some of the folks in Maha are People who are socially conservative, religiously conservative, but increasingly worried about and animated by issues more around vaccine mandates, around some of the kind of health effects of the kind of food system we have, medical system we have. It's interesting, vaccine resistance used to be a left-coded issue 10 years ago, and now it's very much a right-coded issue. So Democratic Party has pushed out this entire kind of crunchy hippie counterculture, which has Hundreds of thousands, millions of people, and they're now pretty firmly entrenched, I think, as part of this new coalition. Yeah, I think it's a lot of folks who are otherwise not political, but sort of see this is their main issue. Their main issue is that they feel they're not listened to by the medical establishment. They feel that they maybe had a bad experience with chronic illness, chronic disease. I mean, the rates of Americans with chronic illness, chronic disease, add in mental health, It's tens of millions of Americans. Some large fraction of them conclude that the problem is medical establishment. So I think that's kind of a sleeper political issue in some ways, which, to his credit, RFK Jr. has really kind of realized. And frankly, I think President Trump has a good sense that there's a powerful political coalition here.

Yeah. And so going back to the tech right, one thing you mentioned is Hey, they have the dollars, but maybe not the numbers. And so what does this mean for the limitations of what the tech right can do?

I think that's a great question, and I think that's an important sort of thesis to be paying attention to. The one interesting exception to this, and I think again, one of the real sleeper issues in the 2024 campaign is crypto. Tens of millions of Americans use cryptocurrency, own cryptocurrency, like cryptocurrency, whether they made money on it or not. And that actually gave a kind of really distributed political incentive to vote for President Trump. I talked to a number of people during the election, working class minorities who owned crypto. They were all supporting President Trump basically because of this issue. So I think that's an interesting— there's a way in which tech if it's successful around Web3, actually does create a kind of larger constituency, at least around this one issue. But broadly speaking, I think that some of the issues tech faces are not going to be motivating issues for ordinary Americans. I think many of them are technical enough that tech will still be able to kind of have its voice within the party. I think it means that if there are particular issues where the tech right is going up against the rest of the coalition, Then there need to be really substantial efforts made to lobby for and educate about why tech is supporting that position. And I think it's just a different kind of fight than on those more technical issues.

And even within the sort of tech community, there is some differences on immigration. It's not as dovish as it used to be. It feels like the tide is somewhat turning there. in terms of, yes, high-skilled immigration, but, you know, want it to assimilate and want it to, you know, there's less, there's more sympathy for the criticism of, hey, these are just like mill shops once you get in the weeds of sort of the H-1B stuff. But yeah, it's interesting.

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Okay, so now let's get back to what do the Dems do and what's the future of the left? Because it feels like over the last 4 years, it's almost like if you were trying to lose or you couldn't do better, like if you were trying to alienate, you know, a certain important subset, you know, in terms of Like, I think the crypto thing was just so silly. Like, I don't see a strong anti-crypto constituency that is going to get you much more votes. And, you know, the AI stuff too. And so it's like, way to alienate tech. Like, where do you see the Dems go from here?

Yeah, and of course, you know, parties can be stuck because of their own internal dynamics, can be sort of stuck for a while. So there's no, It's not necessarily the case that they'll get it together by 2028 or even 2032. When Nixon won in '68 and '72, it took basically the Democrats until Bill Clinton to really kind of pivot to and develop a new working theory that was successful, electorally successful. I think there's 3 obvious things. One, And you see Democratic Party elites kind of pushing for this. One is moderating on some of the culture wars issues. I mean, I think a really good barometer for somebody who will just say the, the, like, you know, highest, uh, um, you know, somebody who would just say like the highest probability, they're gonna— the ChatGPT version of like a Democratic politician is like Pete Buttigieg. And the fact that he's kind of come out and said like, oh, you know, diversity as a value is really important, but we kind of went overboard with some of this. you know, like reeducation camp type stuff. That's a really good barometer, I think, for where the kind of smart money is going in the Democratic Party.

Yeah.

So I think there'll be some moderation on some of these culture wars issues. I think that's one. The second is what people like Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein are interested in, sort of abundance agenda. Matt Yglesias thinking like, you know, Democrats actually have to deliver on policy, have to actually try to deliver on quality of life. And so, you know, what can we do to make it easier to build sustainable energy projects? What can we do to make it easier to build housing? I think that kind of momentum will continue to pick up. And it's interesting to see how in California, even though California still has some of the worst housing politics in the country, there has been quite a, quite a shift towards building pro-housing. in the last 10 years, at least at the state level, maybe not the local level depending where you are. So there'll be that, you know, taking some of those issues off the table. And then the third is, I think, leaning into kind of the kind of Bernie Sanders, like, left economic populism case. You know, you can already see they're testing out like the rise of the bro-oligarchs, like tech bro-oligarchs, the bro-oligarchs, um, you know, a little bit of like Luigi posting. So I think that there is, there will be— Marx was not wrong to say that capitalism has its own inherent contradictions. There are these routine explosions in or crises within the kind of business cycle. And I mean, I even read one person, one kind of leftist on Twitter saying basically like, wait around for the next economic crisis and then lean hard into whatever Whatever it was, lean hard against it with kind of left-wing economic populism. So I expect that we'll see a lot of that as well.

Right.

You know, it's really interesting. Yesterday, the White House had this tweet that really failed, and it was a video of the deportation and sort of, you know, saying sound on, and you could hear the chains, and it backfired significantly. And you could imagine a world where Things like that happen too often. You know, someone said like, you know, it used to be virtue signaling. Now it's vice signaling that people are doing. And there's this question of, does the pendulum shift back? Does the pendulum swing happen too hard right, just like it happened too hard left? And does that create an opportunity for sympathy for a counter movement?

Yeah, I mean, that's the nature of pendulums is to be swinging. It wouldn't be a pendulum if it wasn't swinging back. I think there's something inevitable about that. I think what is interesting is the institutional context. Is to, you know, can, how much of a replacement of the existing elite, how much of a replacement of existing institutions is there before the pendulum swings back and you can't do it anymore?

Right. And this was why Curtis and others were always dubious of a counter movement because they were dubious that you could really get into some of those institutions and make some damage or do some changing. So let's get into sort of the state of the cathedral now. It seems like Doge is trying to go after the civil service. There's the university system, which it seems like there's attempts to go after that as well. There's the media, which sort of on its own has kind of, well, thanks to Elon and many others have fragmented such that there's like a, it feels like the most progress has been made there in terms of plurality or diverse political media ecosystem. where the New York Times doesn't really set the agenda as much as it did a few years ago. Feel free to counter that or edit my characterization, but why don't you comment on sort of the state of the cathedral and where you see that going?

Yeah. I mean, I think so to your point, I mean, I think what's different about Trump too compared to any Republican since Reagan is the sense of maybe having read and internalized some Curtis Yarvin. We will not succeed in reforming institutions, but we might succeed at destroying them. And I think that's very much the kind of attitude of the kind of MAGA coalition right now. The media was already so wrecked by the rise of the internet and the kind of change in media environment that the only thing left to do is to knock out some of the residual sources of support from whether it's overpriced political subscriptions to stripping NPR funding. But that seems pretty well along. And then on universities and the civil service, yeah, it's literally about, you know, how much can you, can you damage them enough to displace them from, as from being an elite power center? So the universities, you can do it through a whole slew of, I mean, most universities are basically in violation of civil rights law for the last 10 years. And for the first time, you know, Trump admin is actually gonna go after them for this. And there's a lot of tools that they have to claw back. funding and sue universities. Obviously, like, things like reducing the indirect reimbursement rate are a huge blow to universities. And then on the civil service side, yeah, I mean, that's where you have DOJ. But what's interesting about DOJ is most people I know who are here in Washington were very skeptical about DOJ precisely because So many of the problems around funding are actually kind of congressional problems. And that's been true, right? To the extent that DOJ is having problems, it has to do with Congress's authority to allocate money. Where DOJ has been wildly successful beyond, I think, what folks in Washington were expecting is on the digital infrastructure side. So I have a new essay in The New Atlantis called The New Control Society, which is really about how the internet is reshaping politics in our civilization. And one of the ideas I have in that essay is this kind of what I call the existential battle between the protocol elite of law and the protocol elite of code. So, you know, the reason why the administrative state was so resistant to presidential authority before was that they had all of these rules, standards, regulations, administrative proceedings, et cetera, that gave them a lot, that they were very skilled at manipulating and gave them a lot of autonomy even from the president. And what— but what's interesting is beginning in the Obama era, Obama really introduced a number of modernization programs for the effect of making government more effective, but it had this additional effect of creating a new kind of center of power. And what DOJ has been able to do is take over the actual digital infrastructure of government in ways that kind of route around the ability of bureaucrats and the kind of deep state to control regulation. So like, I mean, look at what they did with USAID. You know, if you take over the email and take over the credential system and you turn off work from home and you turn off the website, like, does the agency still exist? It's an interesting— it's an interesting question. So I think this approach is really novel and new and I think quite promising. And then in addition, being able to use AI to kind of sift through and popularize and draw attention to waste, fraud, and abuse is again, I think quite a new capability.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Say more about what you think the the impact of Doge might be, or how you think of the 2 sort of protocols you mentioned might reconcile with each other or where it's going to shake out?

Well, I don't think they're going to reconcile because I think what you have is an elite versus elite contestation, right? So the idea that like a protocol elite of law, these are Elites whose power comes from the ability to understand and manipulate the sort of regulatory environment, right? And that's an environment that lives in policy documents, lives in documentation, it lives in proceedings, it lives in process, bureaucratic process. You know, at a very indirect way, it lives in kind of the legal, you know, legal decisions. And, you know, the hope of this protocol elite was to be able to use AI to extend and automate their existing power. So, you know, look at what they've, you know, look at what Europe is doing. If you wanna see this approach, where this approach dominates, look at what Europe is doing. So you're taking like existing, you know, hate speech laws and now you're using LLMs to enforce them in a way that was never possible before. It's on the flip side, you have, you know, I think the kind of hope of the protocol lead of Code is actually we can use digital automation to replace Bureaucracy. We can actually streamline bureaucracy, cut humans out of the loop in favor of efficiency. So I think that there's a you know I think this I don't think there is a way of kind of reconciling these. I think that there will be a kind of legal modus vivendi, like there will be court decisions about what is and isn't allowed. But again, I think I think merely changing the facts, the fact so for example, you know the ultimate justification for a civil servant's job is that. You need the civil servant to execute a program that Congress has authorized and mandated. Well, if you can replace them with an algorithm or replace them with an AI agent, you don't need the civil servant anymore. So I think there's actually, you know, I think there's actually quite a bit of that can be done with this new approach.

It is fascinating because, you know, many years ago, Balaji, you know, as prescient as he is, he often is, as Sometimes too prescient. He said, hey, there should really be this media organization that is focused on identifying government waste. Like, you know, everyone's trying to keep Amazon or Facebook accountable. Who's keeping our government accountable? Like, where does the money go? Especially because Amazon and Apple and Facebook have natural accountability mechanisms, which is the customer. You know, and the government doesn't really exactly. And so, and you see, Elon creating this sort of, you know, this movement around transparency, around all this energy around all this money was going to all these places. People just didn't know about it or didn't know enough to care. And now there seems to be some outrage around, or enough to gain some legitimacy to do something there. And I'm curious how far that goes. Like, you know, I was at a dinner last night with Rick Caruso and a bunch of other Silicon Valley sort of CEOs and investors. And, you know, California is the 5th largest economy in the world. Like, their budget is absolutely massive. And if there was a Doge for California, or if there was a, you know, some sunlight and transparency on how much waste is in that system, I mean, I wonder if there would be enough outrage for there to be a movement around that as it relates to changing things.

Well, what's interesting is we already are seeing a number of state-level DOJ efforts. I know of one in Wisconsin, but I've been told there's like half a dozen states that have started these so far. I expect many more will follow suit. So I think we're beginning to see that. So what's interesting is all of the data was already there, right? All of the— in fact, thanks to the Obama administration, all of the spending data was already online and accessible even even accessible via API. The only thing that's changed is the media environment and the ability to draw attention to and kind of not only draw attention to the spent particular items, but creating an affordance where people can gain clout or gain engagement by finding absurd items of government waste, right? So you're creating— what that does then is it creates this decentralized mechanism for people to kind of hunt hunt through this data and draw attention to it. And I think that is what's new and interesting. And on the one hand, I don't know how self-sustaining that is, but if you were a really smart— if I were a libertarian billionaire, you could easily imagine creating incentives. You could have a waste, fraud, and abuse hunting contest where every week you had a $10,000 prize for whoever has the most absurd example of waste, fraud, and abuse. You could do things to kind of popularize and promote and kind of keep this energy going and take advantage of this sort of decentralized process. And I think that's frankly what successful activism looks like in the 21st century. We don't have very many good models for it yet.

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. This dovetails back to our conversation about the future of the left. Because Rick Russo is a Democrat, but he kind of sounds like a Republican. And it's funny, I remember around the election afterwards, Matt Yglesias had a tweet where he's kind of a list of policies that he thinks the Democrats should rally around. And David Sacks replies, congratulations, you're a Republican. Which is all to say that, and it feels like the, even the abundance agenda itself, kind of supply-side progressivism, it feels like, well, it's certainly much more moderate, much more central. Rick Caruso calls himself a radical centrist. And so it'll be interesting to see, like, is basically, are Democrats just Republicans with some extra steps, with some sort of sprinkle, some good, you know, moderate Republicans sprinkle some good feelings, you know, good sort of vibes, more sort of egalitarian vibes. That's a potential path. Another, you know, we also hear the meme dark wokeness that implies that wokeness didn't go far enough. You just need to be even more intense. And there's always a risk of that as well. But, but yeah, it'd be interesting to see in the, especially California in this next sort of, you know, cycle because of what happened in Los Angeles, because of how incompetent the city has been, especially if Kamala runs. And I hear she may run. I hear maybe she won't run because she thinks she can run for president again. And so if, yeah, exactly right.

So we should be so lucky.

Exactly. So if California gets a moderate governor, a central governor or sort of right-wing, whether it's Democrat or Republican, it'll be interesting to see, you know, can that, because I feel like it's like where San Francisco goes, where California goes, sort of, it's a bellwether. So it was in terms of when it went far left, you know, in terms of wokeness. It'll be interesting to see.

Yeah, no, I think you're right. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the rise of the New Democrats in the late '80s, what they ultimately achieved was, to some extent, the biggest evidence of the success of the Reagan Revolution was they took the best parts of the Republican platform and adopted different positions for the weakest parts and turned that into a pretty powerful electoral coalition. It's easy to imagine them doing that now, right? In fact, many of, many of the positions— this is, this is the really hilarious thing— many of the positions that President Trump took, has taken, that are the most, were the most outrageous for the establishment were Democratic positions in the 1990s.

Yeah.

Right? You go, like, in the 1990s, Democrats were more opposed to immigration than Republicans because of the labor vote. They were more, they were more pro- tariff and opposed to free trade. You can go kind of issue by issue and find ways in which Trump put together his coalition by adopting Democratic policies from the 1990s.

Yeah, I just got a message, by the way. I know you got to drop, so we'll wrap here. Jon, this has been a great discussion about the tech right and the future of the left and where we are and where things are going. We'll put your new articles in the show notes. Highly recommend people find Following your work, and thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll have you back at some point.

Thanks for having me on, Eric.

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