How Trumpism Threatens Silicon Valley

[Commentary] Peter Thiel’s $1.25 million contribution to Donald Trump — Silicon Valley’s most conspicuous political act in this campaign — is a high-profile glitch; an aberration that emits a distorted signal about the tech industry’s true place and ambition in political America. Trumpism, a movement set aflame by Trump’s celebrity and built on channeling the nativist, nostalgic impulses of conservatives, will survive his candidacy. It now poses the most corrosive threat that Silicon Valley will confront to its aims to reshape society.

Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities. If—as Silicon Valley hopes—their deployment first invigorates urban communities across the country, improving mobility, health, and access to jobs, how will white working class and rural communities respond? These voters may well be roused to resentment, and explicit political opposition, as they watch the benefits accrue first and foremost to liberal enclaves, only amplifying anxieties about demographic shifts and social alienation. What—if any—motivation will Trump voters have to trust a Silicon Valley that they believe is accelerating the decline of their relative standing in America? For an industry that has raced to focus on palliatives for technological disruption — universal basic income to solve for the arrival of robots, for one — Trumpism leaves a warning that the implementation of technology is not a given, and may ultimately be the more pressing matter.

[Khan Shoieb is a communications strategist and served as the National Battleground States Coordinator for President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012.]