J.D. Vance and the Tech-Trad Alliance

Just over seven months ago, the talented pseudonymous writer Trace Woodgrains wrote an essay announcing the Republican Party’s doom — not the doom of electoral irrelevance, since the G.O.P. clearly isn’t going anywhere, but the doom of being unable to find enough talented people to actually carry out its agenda, shape the culture, or really govern the United States.

Citing data on highly educated America’s leftward swing and his own experience as a “a gay, centrist Biden voter” who feels like one of the most right-leaning students at his law school, Woodgrains argued that Trump-era conservatism suffers from a fatal human capital problem, an inability to generate elite support on any meaningful scale. Conservative populism, he suggested, is a potent mass movement with an enduring vacuum at the top.

This week, with the nomination of J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate and the recent surge of support for Trump’s campaign from Silicon Valley, Woodgrains reconsidered the durability of his diagnosis. The Vance pick, he wrote, suggests that “the G.O.P. is looking to make an appeal to anti-woke Silicon Valley or finance types to fill the void left by the Republican Party’s competency crisis,” with Vance himself as an exemplar of what a right-leaning counter-elite might look like. And the response from tech money, especially, suggests that it might be working, since it’s not just Peter Thiel backing Trump this time around; it’s Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and many more. And why? Because nature abhors a vacuum:

I like this argument because it supplies a structural context to a sudden shift that a lot of observers are scrambling to explain: See, among others, Reed Albergotti and Noah Smith running through a list of policy issues, cultural changes and, yes, vibe shifts that help explain why the Trumpian G.O.P. suddenly has more support in Silicon Valley than in 2020 or 2016.

All these indicators are helpful to understanding the emergent “tech right.” But if you look at the shift through the lens suggested by Woodgrains’s analysis, what you see is a somewhat predictable rebalancing, a system trying to move closer to an equilibrium. A situation where one electoral coalition has plenty of political influence but remarkably limited elite representation might just be inherently unstable: If a coalition can win elections and hold power, even if it seems culturally disreputable, eventually some group of elites will find reasons to support it (and try to turn its power to their ends). And both liberals who hoped for the permanent marginalization of Trumpism and right-wingers who feared the permanent dominance of a culturally liberal “Cathedral” possibly overestimated how long the American elite could remain unified without some modest crackup, some realignment within the ruling class.

But I would add two important qualifiers to Woodgrains’s description of an emergent tech right that decides it needs to hold its nose and “pander to social conservatism” to share power in the G.O.P.

The first is that to some degree Trump himself smoothed the rightward path for the tech barons, by remaking the Republican Party along somewhat more post-Christian, pagan-lite, “Barstool-conservative” lines. Here some of the distinctive features of this week’s Republican convention, from the sidelining of pro-lifers in the platform-writing process to the speech by a former stripper and OnlyFans performer, are themselves helpful in explaining why it feels culturally easier for tech money to support the Republican Party. It’s still a socially conservative party — if Musk moves two of his companies’ headquarters to Texas, he’ll be moving them to a state that heavily restricts abortion — but it’s not the G.O.P. of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, or for that matter of George W. Bush.