My fears about the MAGA-Silicon Valley alliance

A severe blow to liberal democracy at best, techno-dictatorship at worst

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the emerging partnership between Silicon Valley and the MAGA movement. One lens through which to view this is that we’re seeing a sort of new Gilded Age, with an alliance of the very rich and the powerful to their mutual benefit. Silicon Valley’s big players - from Elon Musk through Mark Zuckerberg to Sam Altman - recognize that a president who personalizes everything can be persuaded to run things the way they wish through flattery and bribery. In return, Trump receives an important source of funding and influence over the social media apps which mediate much of the national conversation.

Another way to look at the unfolding alliance is as something akin to the oligarchy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This system is based not just on mutual benefit but also fear. Putin maintains his position at the top of the hierarchy because he can use state power to destroy any oligarch who gets out of line politically. When Mikhail Khodorkovsky tried to turn his wealth into a political platform in the early 2000s, Putin destroyed him and forced him into exile. And Khodorkovsky got off relatively lightly - any oligarch trying to challenge Putin today would probably end up dead.

Zuckerberg et al. don’t face that kind of threat - yet - but they recognize the need to suck up to Trump in order to keep their business interests and lives intact. Step out of line, and they’ll face weaponized government investigations and potentially much worse.

I think both of these ways of looking at the situation have a lot of merit, but they also don’t fully encapsulate what I find so alarming about the Silicon Valley-MAGA alliance. And what I find so alarming is that, in brief, it looks like it could be the beginning of the sort of techno-dystopia which has long haunted my nightmares.

Liberal democracy is not some natural state of being. It is a specific political regime which has evolved over centuries and only reached its current form of nominally universal rights fairly recently. It is fragile. Political regimes end when they become unable to deal with the challenges of their time, or when dedicated actors set out to destroy them. In fact, political regimes usually die through a combination of both of these things. They become weak through circumstances, and then their enemies overturn them.

In the twentieth century, liberal democracy in the United States survived both the Great Depression and the threat of Nazi totalitarianism. Either of these might have killed it. But instead Franklin Roosevelt dramatically increased the role of the state in the economy and pushed the United States into a position of world leadership. He overcame both the circumstances and the enemies. Liberalism emerged as a different beast, but it did emerge. However, there’s no reason to think that we will always continue to be so fortunate.

Technology has always played a big role in my imagining of how liberal democracy might end. Part of the promise of liberalism is that technological progress will improve our standard of living and make life more comfortable. But technological progress has always had a darker side, too - you only have to look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two bright flashes that heralded the beginning of the so-called “liberal international order”, to see that.

But the technologies that I worry about are more subtle and insidious. They’re the mass communication technologies which have transformed the way we talk to one another in the past decade or so. They’re the powers of surveillance and data-gathering which the internet - and the fact that so much of our life nowadays is transacted on the internet - make possible. And they’re the technologies of influence and interpretation that neural networks enable.

All of these are in the hands of the amorphous blob of capital and political power that we call Silicon Valley.

If you wanted to establish a new, illiberal political regime today, these would be the places to start. They are the commanding heights of the digital world. From them you could control speech, track and influence the opinion of all citizens, and sniff out dissent before it had much of a chance to manifest itself. You might take a light touch, amplifying pro-regime voices and subjecting anti-regime voices to silencing and humiliation. After events like Musk’s takeover of Twitter, that’s the world we’re arguably already living in.

Or, particularly in response to some crisis, you might use a much heavier hand - marrying the vast trove of data that technology companies possess about us with the power of the state in order to establish a dictatorship.

We’re not there yet, but the ease with which the knees of the titans of Silicon Valley turn out to bend suggests that this is one of our possible futures. The CEOs all have different reasons for sucking up to Trump. Some, like Musk, seem to be true believers, while others like Zuckerberg seem just to be scared witless. The question, now, is how far Trump might push it. What will he demand in return for continued protection and favors? And how will the alliance evolve as the world - not to mention liberalism itself - is buffeted by further crises in the years to come?

Some astute observers of American politics might recognize that the fears I am voicing are the mirror image of those voiced by segments of the American right in recent years. For a long time, there have been complaints that tech companies were aggressively liberal, censoring right-wing speech and expressions of conservative values. As a result, conservatives are likely to react to liberal fear about the MAGA-Silicon Valley alliance with two sneering responses. Firstly, how does it feel when the shoe is on the other foot? And secondly, don’t you feel silly for dismissing our fears about the power of these companies in the first place?

But there is a big difference. For a long time, the basic liberalism of Silicon Valley - its commitment to the liberal democratic regime - was fairly clear. There have always been disagreements around the boundaries of speech and political behavior in a free society, but what is vital is a common commitment to the rules of the constitutional order. But American conservatism has become increasingly detached from these rules, as evidenced by January 6th and Trump’s abuses of power since retaking office. Silicon Valley putting its thumb on the scale for liberal democracy against its illiberal foes is one thing; Silicon Valley joining forces with those same enemies of democracy is quite another.

Unfortunately, the MAGA movement has once again figured out how to hit American liberalism in one of its weak spots. Once upon a time, Silicon Valley represented the bright future of a technologically-bountiful liberalism. But the commitment of those companies to this vision was only skin deep, and was susceptible to changing political winds.¹ At the end of the day, profit and their own continued existence are the most important things. If they can better protect themselves by placing the bounty of technology at the disposal of the forces of illiberalism, it seems that many consider it a small price to pay. For the rest of us, by contrast, the price may ultimately be very high indeed.

Thanks for reading America Explained. This post is free. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which allows you to read every post and access the full archive. It also enables me to put more time and energy into this newsletter, something that I’m hoping to do in order to cover the new administration more thoroughly. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks for supporting independent media and making it possible to do what I do.

There was also recently a good discussion of these issues in the

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1. On the other hand, I give no credence to the theory - widely offered by apologists - that Silicon Valley’s change of heart was caused by liberals being too mean to tech CEOs. Zuckerberg might have gotten frustrated that liberals weren’t giving him more credit for trying to combat misinformation at Facebook, but this can hardly have been the decisive factor in his change of heart. It’s not like if Kamala Harris had won in 2024 he would still have swung hard MAGA. This is purely about Facebook’s relationship to coercive state power and Zuck’s desire to avoid being on the receiving end of it at all costs.