Two titans explain why Silicon Valley veered right

The jarring prominence of tech CEOs at President Donald Trump’s inauguration—positioned, as many noted, in front of Trump’s Cabinet picks—represents a massive sea change in American business and its cultural politics. The tech world’s turn to the right post-election has captivated anyone who watched these companies serve as a GOP punching bag for the past several years. There are plenty of good business reasons for any billionaire to want a healthy relationship with the notoriously transactional Trump administration, and equally numerous reasons for Trump to show off how much corporate America has fallen in line. But as cynical as both motives seem, there’s also something deeper about the politics of tech culture afoot—or at least the political frustrations of tech-world bosses operating in the West Coast cultural milieu. In the days leading up to the inauguration, two tech leaders in separate contexts explained, from their own perspectives, the complex cultural phenomena that led to this point. The two have different politics, but both are thought leaders from the world of venture capital, so they speak a little more freely than your typical corporate executives. Marc Andreessen, a major Trump booster who was involved with the new president’s transition, and Paul Graham, who urged moderates to vote for Kamala Harris, now both argue that the progressive norms that have transformed American institutions since Barack Obama’s second term hit especially hard in Silicon Valley. That, combined with (and maybe, in their telling, responsible for) the Biden administration’s adversarial relationship with the tech industry, led to the remarkable scene at Trump’s inauguration.