Tomorrow, Silicon Valley leaders will sit down for a summit with Donald Trump. Larry Page, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, and Sheryl Sandberg are all expected to attend. The agenda is unknown, but the mood is likely to be tense. After all, tech executives overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton and loudly railed against the dangers posed by a Trump presidency. And Trump regularly lashed out at Silicon Valley on the campaign trail, bashing the industry for building hardware overseas and importing foreign engineers.
But tech has little to fear from Trump. If his cabinet appointments are any indication, he seems keen to govern as a free-market fundamentalist, cutting taxes and regulations to the bone. Trump’s elevation of ultra-hawkish ex-generals to key cabinet posts also suggests that he will aggressively expand the sprawling surveillance state inherited from Obama. This is excellent news for companies like Palantir, which sell data analytics tools to the CIA, the NSA and other agencies. Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who broke with his Silicon Valley colleagues to embrace Trump. Thiel now sits on the transition team, and has begun drawing a select circle of tech industry allies into Trump’s orbit. He and his friends are likely to make lots of money.
And that’s only the low-hanging fruit. Depending on Trump’s appetite for domestic repression, Silicon Valley may benefit from even bigger market opportunities. Building a registry of all Muslims in the United States, for instance, would require a fair bit of technical expertise and infrastructure. When The Intercept asked nine big tech companies whether they would help create such a registry, only Twitter said no. The righteous indignation has receded, it seems.
But there’s another, deeper reason that tech and Trump will prove highly compatible. It’s not merely that tech CEOs will thrive under Trump. It’s that Trump embodies a particularly extreme version of the worldview that Silicon Valley epitomizes.
This worldview can be summarized in a single word: neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can mean many things, including an economic program, a political project, and a phase of capitalism dating from the 1970s. At its root, however, neoliberalism is the idea that everything should be run as a business – that market metaphors, metrics, and practices should permeate all fields of human life.
No industry has played a larger role in evangelizing the neoliberal faith than Silicon Valley. Its entrepreneurs are constantly coming up with new ways to make more of our lives into markets. A couple of decades ago, staying in touch with friends wasn’t a source of economic value – now it’s the basis for a $350bn company. Our photo albums, dating preferences, porn habits, and most random and banal thoughts have all become profitable data sets, mined for advertising revenue. We are encouraged to see ourselves as pieces of human capital that must ceaselessly enhance our value – optimizing our feeds and profiles, hustling for follows and likes and swipes.
If Silicon Valley is turning our personal lives into a business, then Trump hopes to turn our government into one. Like all of Trump’s ideas, this isn’t especially original. For decades, neoliberal politicians of both parties have promoted the notion that government should not only serve business, but operate like one. They’ve argued that public services should be privatized, or at least model the “efficiency” of the private sector. They’ve claimed that business is the highest form of human endeavor, and that the role of the state is to empower and emulate it.
Indeed, these neoliberal ideas have become so dominant over the past four decades that they are shared by nearly all mainstream politicians. But no one has ever pushed them further than Trump. The basic recipe of Trumpism involves taking a coded or qualified political sentiment and making it as loud and unambiguous as possible. What other politicians express with a wink and a whisper, Trump yells at the top of his lungs. He turns subtext into text, makes explicit what was previously implied.
Racism, misogyny, and Islamophobic fearmongering were all fixtures of American political life before Trump came along, but he articulated them with a bluntness seldom seen in conventional politics. Similarly, the neoliberal assumption that government should resemble business is widely held across the political spectrum. Yet Trump has taken it to an extreme, applying the logic of neoliberalism so literally as to be almost parody.
Trump built his campaign around the premise that his chief qualification for the presidency was his success as a businessman. He promised to make America great again by bringing business discipline and dynamism to government. It’s true that he often denounced the depredations of corporate America, lobbing populist salvos at free trade, outsourcing, and Wall Street for hurting working people. But his principal solution to these sins of business was always more business: he would cut deals with CEOs and foreign leaders, drawing on his talents as a negotiator to get American workers better terms.
Since his victory, Trump has begun turning his campaign rhetoric into reality. He is making government look more like a business than ever before. He has created the wealthiest cabinet in history. He has selected a fast food executive for secretary of labor, a billionaire Goldman Sachs alum for secretary of treasury, and the CEO of ExxonMobil for secretary of state. He is also preparing to personally profit from the presidency, refusing to cut ties with his corporate empire. Trump will run government not merely like a business, but as a business.
Liberals are quick to condemn these moves as further evidence that Trump is far outside the mainstream. They portray him as fundamentally foreign, a “banana republic” strongman whose rise to power was the result of a Russian plot. But the truth is that Trump is deeply, maximally American. He didn’t import his politics from abroad, but simply followed the governing logic of American society through to its radical conclusion. The reason that 62 million Americans were prepared to entrust the presidency to a billionaire best known for playing a businessman on television is because they’ve been absorbing the tenets of market absolutism their whole lives. Trump may have campaigned as an outsider, but his appeal was radically mainstream.
Yet if Trump personifies neoliberal ideas, his victory also reflects a revolt against neoliberal policies. The uncaged capitalism fostered by neoliberalism has produced an era of spiraling inequality, stagnant wages, declining life expectancy, and an increasingly post-democratic political system that is more or less openly oligarchic. These things make people angry, and Trump used that anger to get himself elected.
The irony is that Trump will only intensify the crisis that put him in power. His cure for the social catastrophe of neoliberalism is a stronger strain of neoliberalism. Trump is like a lunatic doctor who, after a treatment has nearly killed his patient, decides to double the dose in the hopes of a better result.
Whether we survive depends on the political struggle ahead: not only in the streets and statehouses, but at the level of ideas. Defeating neoliberalism will require not just the creation of a movement, but the creation of a new common sense. At its heart must be the belief that democracy is a better way to organize society than markets – that some things are not for sale.