How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

Opinion

Guest Essay

How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

Credit...By Talia Cotton

 

By James Pogue

Mr. Pogue is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the tech world and the new right.

Jan. 18, 2025

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/opinion/donald-trump-tech-musk-bannon.html

 

On Sunday evening, the night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, scores of “luminaries from across the New Right” are expected to gather for a dinner and gala called the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel. The event is being hosted by the young right-wing publishing house Passage Press, known for publishing the “neo-reactionary” writer Curtis Yarvin — one of the earliest of those luminaries, most famous for advocating a monarchy “run like a startup.”

 

Today, this upstart coalition of thinkers may be best described simply as the intellectual wing of Trumpism. “Celebrate the inauguration of Donald J. Trump,” the publishing house announced, “with the people and organizations that will shape the culture in his second term.”

 

The ball will celebrate more than the re-coronation of a president. It seems intended to mark the ascent of a new counterelite with aspirations to supplant the existing establishment in everything from high politics to business and culture. But this is a loose alliance, colored by rivalries and complex divisions. It has brought together people who previously had little in common. Word had it that Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist, would be at the ball. Steve Bannon, avowed enemy of the Silicon Valley billionaire class, was to be a keynote speaker.

 

Many guests were a bit nervy about outfits and expectations. They would also be navigating these fissures within Mr. Trump’s coalition. Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Bannon stand on either side of the biggest of these divides — and the one presenting the greatest challenge for Mr. Trump’s governing project.

 

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.”

 

Over Christmas, a bilious debate over the federal H-1B visa program — which brings in approximately 85,000 foreign workers, most of them Indian and most of them working in tech — unfolded on Mr. Musk’s X. It first erupted on Dec. 23, after Mr. Trump appointed an Indian-born venture capitalist named Sriram Krishnan to work with Mr. Sacks, who is set to be the administration’s “crypto and A.I. czar.”

 

The MAGA influencer Laura Loomer quickly found a post in which Mr. Krishnan had called for removing caps on how many green cards can be awarded to applicants from individual countries, and for expanding “skilled immigration.” In a separate post on X, Ms. Loomer described it as an effort to welcome “third-world invaders from India,” said “our country was built by white Europeans,” and mocked Indians as defecating “in the water they bathe and drink from.” Mr. Sacks came out to defend Mr. Krishnan, and the fight spiraled over Christmas. By early January, it had started to look like an epochal battle within America’s new ruling coalition.

 

Mr. Musk, whose companies benefited from the visa program, initially threatened to go to “war” on the subject, “the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” But he seemed shaken by the backlash from the MAGA base. Thousands upon thousands of erstwhile fans were rising up online to denounce him as a traitor or a globalist, more concerned with his profit margins than the fate of the nation.

 

The debate has genuinely high stakes, heading in the first days of a wildly ambitious presidential administration. People like Mr. Bannon see the Tech Right almost as an existential enemy to the natural human order they wanted to restore. More moderate allies on the MAGA side just hope to keep things calm and friendly. If a true conflict emerges, Mr. Trump himself might well end up siding with the part of the coalition that offers vast supplies of cash and new friends socializing and scheming with him down at Mar-a-Lago.

 

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.

 

So there is a new sense of gravity when you talk to people who want to hold the coalition together. In 2017, the rough equivalent of the Coronation Ball had been the gaudy DeploraBall. Now people would be wearing black tie. “Before we were the outsiders looking in, and now we’re walking in the front door,” the podcaster Jack Posobiec told Politico. “Because this is a regime change.”

 

Earlier this month, Breitbart published an article that seemed calculated to make the dissonance between MAGA and the Tech Right into a real, and perhaps irreconcilable, split. It included translated snippets of an interview in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in which Mr. Bannon — who retains a huge amount of influence in both the incoming Trump administration and the wider MAGA sphere — presents himself as an uncompromising chief of the “nationalist-populist” core of Trumpism.

 

In the article, Mr. Bannon “declared war” on Mr. Musk, and by extension the whole set of tech barons who had gained such influence in the Trump sphere. “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” he said, calling him a “truly evil guy.” “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

 

This challenge was widely seen as a new cycle in the H-1B visa wars. But when I called him, Mr. Bannon articulated a very different and bigger reason for his challenge. I asked him if he saw the same deep-level philosophical tension I did. “A tension?” he asked. “I would almost argue it’s an unbridgeable gap.”

 

He named a roster of major figures on the tech right whom he saw as enemies: Mr. Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the neo-monarchist writer Mr. Yarvin, and Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and technologist who promotes the idea of “network states,” new countries run on blockchain.

 

Mr. Bannon accused the tech barons of promoting “technofeudalism” and “transhumanism”— bending human life into technologized and unnatural new forms. “This thing is all tied together,” he said. “They have a very well thought through philosophy and a very well thought through set of ideas, and they’re trying to implement that. And to me, everybody’s afraid, everybody’s scared because of their power.

 

“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.”

 

This disconnect between MAGA and the Tech Right has deep philosophical roots. The political theorist Patrick Deneen, in his book “Regime Change,” makes a point about the American right that has been plainly true for decades — that for most of modern history it has not actually been a conservative movement. He calls Republicans of the Liz Cheney or George W. Bush mold “right-liberals” and argues that their “unwavering support for a free market, ideally unhindered by regulation and political limits, frequently resulted in economic disruptions and dizzying change that undermined the stability of the very social institutions that conservatives claimed to prize.”

 

In a widely read 2022 essay titled “Why Conservatism Failed,” a young Catholic University of America assistant professor named Jonathan Askonas sharpened this point. He described how the old Republican guard failed to account for the power of technology, as they claimed to be standing for the American flag and family.

 

“When you descend from lofty rhetoric about ‘traditions’ and ‘values,’” he wrote, “a huge number of the actual practices and social institutions which built those virtues have disintegrated, not because of progressivism or socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology.”

 

When I spoke to Mr. Carl, the former Trump administration official, he brought up an infamous interjection into the visa debate by Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote a very long post on X in December describing an American culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” and extolling “nerdiness.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ,” he said, “or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”

 

The response was savage. Everything he posted in the days afterward continued to be flooded with vitriolic and often racist mockery, bringing back up the H-1B debate, and coloring him an enemy of the movement.

 

Mr. Carl is the author of a book called “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.” So it’s pretty obvious which side he falls on in these debates. But he’s intent on keeping the coalition together. “That post was silly,” he told me. Even so, he didn’t think Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy should be viewed as enemies.

 

“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.”

 

On the flip side, some people have ended up finding a place in this new counterestablishment without even being necessarily conservative. “We’re all really trying for the same basic American dream sorts of things,” said Julie Fredrickson, a venture capitalist who backs crypto startups. A friend of Mr. Carl’s, she is also a kindred spirit with prominent figures on the tech right.

 

Ms. Fredrickson describes herself as a liberal, but she has grown increasingly frustrated by a federal government that she believes acts almost like a “moat,” preserving the power of huge established interests over both smaller businesses and technological innovation: big banks over crypto, giant, inefficient defense contractors over the new military-tech startups emerging in Southern California, oil and gas production over companies like a small-scale nuclear startup she’d just invested in.

 

To her, the H-1B issue was just another example of the basic problem that had driven the Tech Right toward Mr. Trump. Small companies, she said, rarely managed to navigate the visa system. “That’s the area in which both MAGA and tech really agree,” she said. The current system only helps “the multinational consulting corporations that are using it.”

 

She was still leery of the anti-immigrant talk that had emerged in the debates. “We should want the 1 percent minds,” she said. “And I mean that partially from a security state perspective, because I’m terrified by the prospect of China winning on that. I do actually think that ‘yeah, I want to win’ is a stronger message than ‘I want to do it with only people that look like me.’” She was voicing the twinned sense of possibility and frustration animating the Tech Right today: “Can we just get back to winning?”

 

When I spoke to Mr. Bannon, he articulated a criticism of the tech world that, perhaps surprisingly, is one that at least some right-wing tech figures share: “We haven’t created anything on the technology side like the airplane or the internal combustion engine or the steam engine or anything big,” he said. “It’s all been algorithms.”

 

Peter Thiel, who emerged in 2016 as the first prominent tech billionaire to back Mr. Trump, has described to me his view that technologies like social media or smartphones can offer an illusion of progress while offering dubious benefits, at best, to the world at large. After Mr. Trump’s first win, he led a quickly abandoned effort to begin dismantling the regulatory state.

 

But Mr. Thiel ended up largely sitting out of the 2024 election, skeptical that a second Trump administration could carry out a serious project to remake American governance. Now Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are leading a much higher-profile effort, through what they call the department of government efficiency.

 

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy are both slightly comic public figures, prone to dopamine-addled mucking-about in arguments on X. The outsize attention they draw can end up obscuring the complicated interplay between the imperatives of MAGA and the Tech Right.

 

“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.”

 

Both sides see their path as the best approach to make America more dynamic — the MAGA intellectuals through a hoped-for “refounding” that would restore a sense of national identity and purpose, and the Tech Right through drawing the best talent from a worldwide pool, and letting competition and capitalism rip.

 

Mr. Trump himself has kept something like a kingly remove from the early squabbles of the aristocracy emerging in his shadow. His vice president, JD Vance, might be able to act as an intermediary between these rival wings. A former venture capitalist married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he nonetheless adopted the populist-nationalist style of politics.

 

“He probably leans more towards the populists,” Mr. Khan said, “but the dude cooks vegetarian food and hangs out with Indians all the time.” Mr. Vance has a foot, and many friends, in both worlds — and a strong political interest in bridging the gap. “I feel like he’s the one that can keep the energy going, and go between the two,” Mr. Khan said. “And I don’t think either side will totally win.”

 

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.

 

For now, some within Mr. Trump’s orbit are happy to give them a chance. But others are already looking toward a struggle to decide who really holds the power as their revolution gets underway. “It’s time to have the debate,” Mr. Bannon told me. “You’ve got to hit them while you’re strong.”

 

James Pogue is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the tech world and the new right.