An old friend of mine from high school now works for a Republican-leaning think tank, and has written to the world
wondering why the Republican Party cannot seem to win the votes of tech
workers. He seems to think it's part of the difference between nuveau
riche and old money. I disagree entirely. I think it's mostly because
in the divisions between worker and capitalist and between nerd and
jock, the GOP has chosen to side with both the capitalists and the
jocks.
The first mistake is in identifying the tech sector with the rich, the really rich, people so rich the GOP actually serves their interests. The tech sector unequivocally falls within the top 30%-40% of households by income most of the time, but not the top 10% and top 1% or even 0.1% favored by Republican policies. Most people in tech are still actually salary-earners, and that means we/they don't gain anything from public policies aimed at "incentivizing" (read: giving advantage to) capital-owners, owners of bonds and equities. In fact, outside of start-ups and the biggest, best tech companies - who form an elite even within the technology field (albeit a semi-meritocratic elite) - stock grants and stock options are not actually that common a form of compensation, putting salaried technology and engineering professionals even more firmly into the "worker" rather than "capitalist" camp.
Ditto ditto on the bipartisan support for things like H1-B visas and "tax breaks for outsourcing". We techies see this visa as a clear assault on our labor market. Whatever the intention behind the H1-B program (and it is a noble intention), it's demonstrably true that the top users of the program are Indian outsourcing companies. We can carry the issue further: the creation of overtime-pay exemptions for "computer professionals" by the Bush Administration in 2002 was a direct and lobbying-directed assault on the working conditions of the high-technology industry. California's liberal refusal to uphold non-compete agreements is another area in which tech workers vote for our own economic interest.
Ditto ditto again on support for scientific research in the United States, which is actually a partisan issue. Democrats have a constituency in academia, so they try to keep the NSF and NIH budgets up. Tech workers know that things are better for us when there's a steady stream of research funding, even if we ourselves are not in academia (and how much more so when we are!). Same position on education: tech workers with families want an education system that lets them live wherever they like and still give their kid a decent chance on growing up to maintain or raise their standard of living; tech workers do not want to be faced with ever-rising competition for housing plots in the forever-shrinking number of good school districts (this is what drove my own family out of Brooklyn back in the mid-'90s). Also, from our perspective, the defense industry is not that strongly linked to the tech industry: you can move from defense to tech as a worker, but increased resources for defense companies do not trickle out to the rest of the tech industry.
On to social policies. Techies are NEERRRRDS, and thus almost always come out socially liberal even when not economically liberal. Bill Gates was born with every financial advantage in life, he was born privileged, but he's still a social liberal for the same reason almost all techies are: social conservatism, to our ears, sounds a lot like high-school bullying. It reminds us of hearing that Dungeons and Dragon players are faggots, that math is for dorks, etc. etc. Remember how deeply ingrained those social clique differences can be at a young age. The same basic factor stops techies from becoming religious fundamentalists much of the time: it's hard to listen to fundamentalist preachers condemning homosexuality in one sentence and video games in the next. As a result, we develop a kind of solidarity from the gamers to the gays, not to mention the gay gamers. This kind of "Donnie Darko"-esque anti-fun authoritarianism is a very real current in American social conservatism. Anti-geek persecution in American high-schools of the post-Columbine, pre-9/11 period - coming largely from proto-conservative officials - actually got nasty enough that a journalist covering the issue unironically used Buffy the Vampire Slayer's term for modern American schools: hell-mouth. This does not a generation of socially conservative geeks and tech-workers make.
The result is that the tech community divides mostly into liberals and moderate liberals, flanked on either side by ideologue socialists and ideologue libertarians. None of these things has any home in today's GOP. When your primary debates on social issues didn't sound quite so much like high-school bullies discussing who to attack next and your economic policies did not revolve around suppressing all wages and labor rights for all workers to the advantage of a tiny minority of entrenched capitalists..... well, back then, you were able to draw solid support from upper-middle class professional families as one might find in industries like high technology. Back then, order, tradition and stability were not coterminous with abject worship of the Almighty Dollar. Back then, you could be an innovator in science and technology while favoring Burkean conservatism's cautious and stable approach to social change. Hell, back then, much of science fiction took exactly that stance: the world was not always ready for the "creative destruction" of the Next Big Thing. That, however, was then, and this is now.
In summary, the GOP's attitudes of extreme social/religious conservative authoritarianism, war-driven state capitalism for the well-connected and blatant suppression of labor have combined into a party whose only natural constituency is the Southern aristocracy. Tech workers can vote for Libertarians like Gary Johnson or Christian Democrats like Angela Merkel. What we can't support en masse are Randian wackjobs like Paul Ryan, neo-Confederate religious nuts like Rick Santorum, or their combination in divine-right Mormon Work Ethic capital-supremacists like Mitt Romney.
And let's not even talk about Congressmen who want to "balance" the budget by canceling debts owed to the Social Security Trust Fund, cutting off our parents and grandparents while simultaneously demanding we of the working class always pay back debts incurred on houses and education.
The first mistake is in identifying the tech sector with the rich, the really rich, people so rich the GOP actually serves their interests. The tech sector unequivocally falls within the top 30%-40% of households by income most of the time, but not the top 10% and top 1% or even 0.1% favored by Republican policies. Most people in tech are still actually salary-earners, and that means we/they don't gain anything from public policies aimed at "incentivizing" (read: giving advantage to) capital-owners, owners of bonds and equities. In fact, outside of start-ups and the biggest, best tech companies - who form an elite even within the technology field (albeit a semi-meritocratic elite) - stock grants and stock options are not actually that common a form of compensation, putting salaried technology and engineering professionals even more firmly into the "worker" rather than "capitalist" camp.
Ditto ditto on the bipartisan support for things like H1-B visas and "tax breaks for outsourcing". We techies see this visa as a clear assault on our labor market. Whatever the intention behind the H1-B program (and it is a noble intention), it's demonstrably true that the top users of the program are Indian outsourcing companies. We can carry the issue further: the creation of overtime-pay exemptions for "computer professionals" by the Bush Administration in 2002 was a direct and lobbying-directed assault on the working conditions of the high-technology industry. California's liberal refusal to uphold non-compete agreements is another area in which tech workers vote for our own economic interest.
Ditto ditto again on support for scientific research in the United States, which is actually a partisan issue. Democrats have a constituency in academia, so they try to keep the NSF and NIH budgets up. Tech workers know that things are better for us when there's a steady stream of research funding, even if we ourselves are not in academia (and how much more so when we are!). Same position on education: tech workers with families want an education system that lets them live wherever they like and still give their kid a decent chance on growing up to maintain or raise their standard of living; tech workers do not want to be faced with ever-rising competition for housing plots in the forever-shrinking number of good school districts (this is what drove my own family out of Brooklyn back in the mid-'90s). Also, from our perspective, the defense industry is not that strongly linked to the tech industry: you can move from defense to tech as a worker, but increased resources for defense companies do not trickle out to the rest of the tech industry.
On to social policies. Techies are NEERRRRDS, and thus almost always come out socially liberal even when not economically liberal. Bill Gates was born with every financial advantage in life, he was born privileged, but he's still a social liberal for the same reason almost all techies are: social conservatism, to our ears, sounds a lot like high-school bullying. It reminds us of hearing that Dungeons and Dragon players are faggots, that math is for dorks, etc. etc. Remember how deeply ingrained those social clique differences can be at a young age. The same basic factor stops techies from becoming religious fundamentalists much of the time: it's hard to listen to fundamentalist preachers condemning homosexuality in one sentence and video games in the next. As a result, we develop a kind of solidarity from the gamers to the gays, not to mention the gay gamers. This kind of "Donnie Darko"-esque anti-fun authoritarianism is a very real current in American social conservatism. Anti-geek persecution in American high-schools of the post-Columbine, pre-9/11 period - coming largely from proto-conservative officials - actually got nasty enough that a journalist covering the issue unironically used Buffy the Vampire Slayer's term for modern American schools: hell-mouth. This does not a generation of socially conservative geeks and tech-workers make.
The result is that the tech community divides mostly into liberals and moderate liberals, flanked on either side by ideologue socialists and ideologue libertarians. None of these things has any home in today's GOP. When your primary debates on social issues didn't sound quite so much like high-school bullies discussing who to attack next and your economic policies did not revolve around suppressing all wages and labor rights for all workers to the advantage of a tiny minority of entrenched capitalists..... well, back then, you were able to draw solid support from upper-middle class professional families as one might find in industries like high technology. Back then, order, tradition and stability were not coterminous with abject worship of the Almighty Dollar. Back then, you could be an innovator in science and technology while favoring Burkean conservatism's cautious and stable approach to social change. Hell, back then, much of science fiction took exactly that stance: the world was not always ready for the "creative destruction" of the Next Big Thing. That, however, was then, and this is now.
In summary, the GOP's attitudes of extreme social/religious conservative authoritarianism, war-driven state capitalism for the well-connected and blatant suppression of labor have combined into a party whose only natural constituency is the Southern aristocracy. Tech workers can vote for Libertarians like Gary Johnson or Christian Democrats like Angela Merkel. What we can't support en masse are Randian wackjobs like Paul Ryan, neo-Confederate religious nuts like Rick Santorum, or their combination in divine-right Mormon Work Ethic capital-supremacists like Mitt Romney.
And let's not even talk about Congressmen who want to "balance" the budget by canceling debts owed to the Social Security Trust Fund, cutting off our parents and grandparents while simultaneously demanding we of the working class always pay back debts incurred on houses and education.
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