It is true just about everywhere, but especially in America: Real power is having control over the flow of resources. Property. Money. Information. If you command the levers of production—who gets what, when, and how—you dictate what the future holds and who gets a say in it. Or in this case, you get to decide the future of the United States. On the verge of another presidential election, no one knows that better than Silicon Valley CEOs and investors, some of whom publicly announced their support for Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, this week.
Behind the calculated loyalties of Big Tech, says Jared Clemons, a political science professor at Temple University, we can begin to understand what is happening in the moment before us. “I try to not be hysterical about politics. I know that’s really hard because you turn on the TV and it seems like the world is always falling apart,” he tells me. “But none of this started happening overnight.”
Clemons identifies as socialist but “not in like a crazy, conspiratorial way,” he jokes. He believes the best path forward is a collective future where we let go of the vestiges of a capitalist past, which Republicans and Democrats refuse to relinquish. He wants people to understand that the old ways of bureaucratic governance no longer serve us. (Clemons routinely unpacks complex issues like this on his YouTube series, #Poli-Side-Eye.)
“I think the danger in looking backward and saying, ‘Oh, there’s this point in which we had this thing, but now we don’t have it,’ is that it makes you reactionary to me. It cuts off your imagination, because you’re not thinking about what could be,” he says. “You’re focusing on trying to recover something in the past. You’re never going to get that back.” Better futures, Clemons adds, are possible, but “we have to be willing to fail.”
JASON PARHAM: I want to start by following the money. This week at the Republican National Convention Trump announced that his pick for vice president was J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator whose short but swift rise in politics was majorly funded by Peter Thiel. Elon Musk also came out in support of Trump, as did billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Big Tech is backing the MAGA movement this election cycle. What’s your take on this?
JARED CLEMONS: The best way to understand the economy is through production—what we are producing, what we are circulating, how is what we are producing getting to people. What do we buy, essentially. If you analyze politics through that lens, I think it becomes a lot easier to understand, especially the incentives and the motives of the very wealthy.
What’s one of the first things Trump did when he got elected in 2016? Really, the only big policy platform he had were sweeping tax cuts, which was a huge giveaway to corporations and very wealthy people, particularly people who had a lot of their wealth in the stock market. Part of the reason that you’re seeing a lot of support for him now is because those tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2025.