Ask HN: Serious) can someone ELI5 why tech elites are turning to the right?

[moomoo11]

Really sorry for the politics angle but I’m curious to learn about the high level implications and reasons why VCs and power tech elites seem to be turning towards the right.

Please don’t go into politics and stuff again I’m trying to understand the reasons and future outlook from a tech perspective.

[claytongulick]

I think if you watch Andreessen & Horowitz describe their thinking, it will explain their perspective [1].

For others, such as Musk, I don't think it's as much "turning to the right" as it is that many on the left, which used to be a bastion of civil liberties and free speech protection, have abandoned that position and embraced speech suppression.

This has become so pronounced that the label "liberal" is pretty confusing these days, and many folks feel the need to clarify that they believe in "liberalism" as in "Classical liberalism" [2] because many modern "liberals" have moved away from many of those traditional beliefs.

There also seems to be a strong and growing anti-capitalist sentiment in the Democrat party which has driven some business folks that were traditionally "left" away from that ideology.

And while it may sound a bit trite, I think another factor is that they are simply getting older.

The phrase "if you're not a liberal in your 20's you have no heart, if you're not conservative in your 30's you have no brain" has existed in some form since the 1700s [3] and been remarked on even in the American Journal of Medicine [4]. It's pretty common for people's viewpoint to change with age.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

[3] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/24/heart-head/

[4] https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343(16)30193-0/pdf

[ben_w → claytongulick]

FWIW, "liberal" was used by the American right as an ironic snipe at the American left for as long as I've been paying attention to international (I'm British) politics.

25 years ago, it was about guns.

[peutetre]

> I’m trying to understand the reasons and future outlook from a tech perspective.

There are no reasons or future outlook from a tech perspective.

You exist in a society of people. Technology is quite beside the point.

[gaws]

Pete Buttigieg said it best: "These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican party that tends to do good things for very rich men."

[orionblastar]

The Right issues tax cuts for the corporations and the Left wants to tax corporations to pay for social programs.

ELI5: The right is pro-corporations and the left is anti-corporations.

[ggm]

It's my belief a lot of the tech VC are autodidactic. They place a very high value on their own certainty. This tends to depreciate academic knowledge. Experiential, engineering grounded thinking predominates. And, a historical tendency to seek and value Ayn Rand and "self made man" schools of thinking.

They emphasise Individualism over collectivism, and naturally that goes to smaller non interventionist government philosophy along with anti unionism and low taxes.

Another common component of this is a belief to be poor is bad life choices, and sometimes even genetic: poor people are unsaveable. Why bother? It's innate and/or their own choice.

Since they find and value their own fellow minded people of HNW they aggregate, self confirm, and now organise.

Some (mostly older) tech entrepreneurs and creators are different. Bell labs types, European education, stronger affinity to community and social enterprise, less rigid belief in IPR and their own "rightness"

Gates is somewhat in the middle. Melinda helped him unpack a lot of socially beneficial choices, as did Warren Buffet. I wouldn't call either of them left but they are certainly not Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. They appear to appreciate collectivism, at some level.

[cen4]

Read Pareto's Circulation of the Elites and Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.

All possible behavior of the Ruling and Non-Ruling Elites is covered. "Tech" Elites aren't doing anything different from what Elites of the past have done.

[nomilk]

> tech elites are turning to the right

This assumption requires scrutiny. One theory is: some of the left moved further left (perhaps without noticing), so from their perspective centrist (or even slightly left folks) now appear as right or far right.

[skhunted → nomilk]

The center in the U.S. has shifted to the right since Clinton’s presidency. It was he who supported and enacted free trade agreements without labor or human rights conditions. He ended Glass-Steagal. Obama enacted the Heritage Foundation’s healthcare plan which used to go by the name of RomneyCare. Bush 2 is seen by many in the right as a RINO. Same for John McCain, Romney, and other prominent Republican politicians.

The theory you posit is not supported by the facts.

[JojoFatsani → nomilk]

It doesn’t require much scrutiny when you can see where the money is going.

[thelastgallon]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40985687

[orangesite]

Massive investments in AI and Crypto, both of which will face less regulatory oversight and more opportunities to centralize both wealth and power under a Trump presidency.

[JSDevOps]

There’s more purse in the latter

[Cheyana]

I got this…

::cracks knuckles::

$$$$$$$

[ZeroGravitas]

Why do you think they're "turning" implying a recent change.

Peter Theil owns the potential Vice President and has done since Vance was a student. Theil has long been saddened that women won't vote for his favourite policies, saying he thinks capitalism and democracy are incompatible.

[breckenedge]

Always have been.

[Cypher]

because the left were good at talking but bad at producing.