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Their nicknameVCVCUSSRFDR VCYour browser does not support the element. may not have aged well, but their ideas proved powerful. In the early 1980s a group of rising Democratic congressmen started calling for the American government to promote a “high-tech revolution”, to stoke the economy, to counter competition from Japan, and to help their own party shuck its statist, retrograde image. They became known as the Atari Democrats, after the company that turned television sets into platforms for a breakthrough video game, Pong. One of those Democrats, Al Gore, succeeded in passing a law in 1991 that, as he put it, would “link your computer to millions of computers around the country, give you access to huge ‘digital libraries’ of information, and deliver services we cannot yet imagine”.Money from that law financed a supercomputing centre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where a young programmer named Marc Andreessen helped create the first popular Web browser, Mosaic. Mr Andreessen went on to co-found Netscape and to become one of the most successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Like many other technologists, he assumed that he would support Democrats in election after election, until Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump came along.After Mr Trump won earlier this month, Mr Andreessen summed up his reaction this way: “It felt like a boot off the throat.” Speaking on the podcast he hosts with his partner, Ben Horowitz, another longtime supporter of Democrats who also backed Mr Trump this year, Mr Andreessen added, “Every morning I wake up happier than the day before.”Ms Harris easily carried the counties that include Silicon Valley. But her margin shrank compared with Joe Biden’s in 2020, and technologists say that high-profile defectors such as Elon Musk are eroding the stigma that once accompanied support for Mr Trump, just as it accompanied support for Democrats before the Atari insurgents appeared. Once the cool kids, Democrats have begun to seem the party of caution and even priggishness, more preoccupied with word-choice than productivity growth. As the Atari Democrats once did, Mr Trump and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, a former , have the chance to identify their party with progress and the future, at least as technologists define them.An almost spiritual faith that technology can solve any problem, including those created by technology, turns some denizens of Silicon Valley into single-issue voters. That is the case with Messrs Andreessen and Horowitz. They support politicians of either party they think will help “Little Tech,” or startup firms, a focus that also aligns with their financial interest. On their podcast they argued that stifling regulation and lack of clarity from the Biden administration have hampered innovation in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy and defence technology, putting America in some critical fields behind China, which Mr Andreessen called the “ 2.0”. They despised a proposal from the Biden administration to tax unrealised capital gains, saying it would ruin equity-rich but cash-poor founders of startups.It did not help that Mr Biden and his top regulators would not meet the duo, who issued their endorsement in July, while Mr Trump not only had dinner with them but gave out his mobile number. They were heartened that, when it came to any emerging technology, he assured them, “we have to win”.Some Democrats recognise their party risks being identified with bureaucracy and stasis. “The Democratic Party needs to be the party that is for building things, for dynamism, for new industry,” says Congressman Ro Khanna, whose district includes Silicon Valley. “We’ve lost some of that to Trump.” Mr Khanna, a possible candidate for president in 2028, looks more to Franklin Delano Roosevelt than the Atari Democrats for a model. They “were blind to inequality”, he says, and as a result were “accomplices in the creation of an America that today has such a different outlook if you’re living in Cupertino then if you’re living in Youngstown, Ohio”.The right approach, he says, is “not marrying deregulation and tax cuts with dynamism, which I would argue is the Trump phenomenon with Elon Musk and Andreessen. It’s marrying this innovation and dynamism with an progressivism.”To be Silicon Valley’s new champion Mr Trump may have to soften some views, including on climate change, and resolve some contradictions within his movement. Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur and former Republican candidate for president, has identified a rift over regulation. In a speech in July, he noted that while “national protectionists” praised antitrust regulation and consumer protection under President Biden, “national libertarians” like him “believe in dismantling the regulatory state altogether”. He added, “I don’t care to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.”Mr Trump has put him, along with Mr Musk, in charge of proposing cuts in government, and Mr Ramaswamy has spoken of eliminating “countless” regulatory agencies and 75% of the federal bureaucracy. But foremost among the “national protectionists” is Mr Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, another Trumpist from the Little Tech world. Mr Vance has praised Mr Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, and advocated such aggressive government intervention as breaking up Google.Further complicating the picture is that Mr Trump, who as president will be exempt from conflict-of-interest and disclosure laws that apply to other officials, now has his own social media company, Truth Social, as well as a cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. He will be a competitor in the tech industry as well as its regulator-in-chief. When it comes to technology, Mr Trump has several possible ways to win.
