The line is from Shakespeare, The Tempest: “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” That’s spoken by Prospero when he finds himself shipwrecked on a strange island. Shipwrecked on a strange island, that’s not a bad characterization of the United States at the moment, a bit metaphorical, perhaps, but nonetheless apt. And these trumpsters and the T-T-Alphas, they are indeed strange bedfellows.
That’s the subject of an opinion piece by James Pogue, in Saturday’s NYTimes, How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last? Bannon and Andreessen, Andreessen and Banon:
It’s a gap in worldviews that went overlooked in the heady days of the campaign. When Elon Musk endorsed Mr. Trump, putting a great deal of personal money and energy into the project of MAGA populism, he joined figures like the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks and the crypto exchange founder Tyler Winklevoss in what represents one of the most surprising and disruptive alliances in American political history. Tech emerged as an alternate power center to the Republican establishment. Silicon Valley money filled in for dollars lost from the traditional donor class. As the presidential transition took shape, tech figures stepped in to supply “elite human capital,” as they put it, to staff the new administration. All the biggest tech companies made sure to offer a $1 million tribute to help fund the inauguration.
But the core of the aspiring Trumpian aristocracy are still reactionaries and nationalists aching to restore an American way of life thought to be lost after decades of “globalist” technocracy. They are often deeply skeptical of the idea that the innovations promised by tech companies represent progress, and they describe America as “not just a country, not just an economy, but a people with a common history,” as Jeremy Carl, a deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the first Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, told me. The tech figures who came to the movement in 2024 were often sympathetic to Trumpian nationalism. But they tended to be more interested in making money and launching a new era of “American dynamism.”
And that leads us to the “bilious debate over the federal H-1B visa program.” Bilious indeed. And it’s by no means over: “The trouble between the two camps will now be an unavoidable undertone at the inauguration.” Here’s the stakes:
The coalition is achingly close to achieving a long-held conservative dream — of fashioning a high-low alliance powerful enough to supplant the liberal establishment and remake America. It is a project that might well collapse if one side or the other gets too much of what it wants, and ends up driving the other away.
Bannon’s enemies: “Mr. Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the neo-monarchist writer Mr. Yarvin, and Balaji Srinivasan...” [BTW, that loony interview with Yarvin, Yikes! Has the C-suite at the NYTimes lost its freakin’ marbles?!] Bannon wants nothing to do with the “technofeudalism” and “transhumanism” of the Tech Team, nor, I might add, do I.
“I’m a populist-nationalist, and I’m dug in on this,” he said. “I know I can take them on.” He had already seen criticism. “Everybody’s coming to me to say, ‘You can’t do this. Isn’t it going to show a rift?’ I said, ‘What do you mean a rift? It’s better to get it out now.’”
To Mr. Bannon, this chasm went deeper than some small-bore spat about visas. “These people are technofeudalists, and it’s a dangerous, dangerous thing,” he said. “Here’s what I’m glad about. It’s going to be the populist-nationalist movement that’ll take them on and break them. Because quite frankly, the established order is too gutless. The established order will go with anything that keeps their privileges.”
Are we going to see the Cage Match of the Century, and so early into it at that?
“The thing about Elon,” Mr. Carl said, “is that it’s not really clear what he thinks.” Mr. Musk had defended the H-1B program by arguing that America needed to attract the “top ~.1 percent of engineering talent.” But he had also just waded into politics in Britain and Germany, where he’d promoted parties like the more-or-less openly ethnonationalist Alternative for Germany. “So that would seem to contradict what it looked like he was saying in the immigration debate here,” Mr. Carl said. “It might be that he kind of picked this fight as a way of showing he has complex views.”
And maybe they’re not complex at all, just confused. And so we lumber on:
“I think the Tech Right is going to win in the short-term,” said Razib Khan, a geneticist and tech consultant who is friendly with many figures in both the MAGA and Tech Right spheres. As he saw it, the talent and money were mostly on the side of tech.
“The Tech Right is pro-American,” he said. But it’s pro-American in the sense that they see America as “an empire that takes over the world and goes interplanetary.” This was too rationalist of an approach for many on the MAGA side, which is shaped in large part by Christian faith and, at least for some, a belief that America should be a homeland for “heritage Americans” of Northern European extraction. They are “not excited about the American Empire,” he said, or racing into space. They care more about the values of a “pre-1960s America, the values of a Western civilization.”
And then there’s Vance:
Mr. Vance once told me that he thought something “genuinely, seriously bad,” was coming to America, unless conservatives could “assemble a coalition of populists and traditionalists that can actually overthrow the ruling class.” The MAGA sphere has now managed to draw some of the richest people on earth into this project, with figures like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Musk casting themselves as unlikely allies in a populist overthrow of the American elite.
We’ll see.
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