Democrats Urged to Bow Down to Tech Fascism

As Silicon Valley embraces MAGA fascism and plots a post-American century, some consultants are urging the Democratic Party to bow down to the tech oligarchs.

From a Wall Street Journal article headlined “Democrats Try to Halt Silicon Valley’s Swing to the Right” (see gift link at bottom of page):

Last year’s election delivered the biggest blow in decades for the marriage between Democrats and Silicon Valley. Repairing the damage is proving difficult.

Adam Kovacevich, the chief executive of the center-left trade group Chamber of Progress, is trying to play marriage counselor. Kovacevich has spent months talking to Democrats, tech workers and former Biden administration officials about what pushed tech executives away from the party and how to mend the relationship.

Some executives who reliably give to Democrats feel that party leaders view Silicon Valley as a piggy bank and aren’t promoting policies that help the industry. The trend is fueling concerns among Democrats that bleeding support among tech elites like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is another obstacle for a party facing its lowest poll numbers in more than three decades.

Amazingly, the story blames Silicon Valley’s support of MAGA fascism entirely on the Democratic Party. The supposed reason: Democrats have in the past refused to give tech oligarchs everything they want. President Joe Biden resisted crypto and insisted on laws to protect against tech abuses. Multiple Democrats quoted in the piece say Democrats must do more to support “innovation”—code for capitulating to tech interests.

“It would be an own goal for us to become the anti-innovation party,” said Kovacevich. 

But this framing fundamentally misrepresents what's actually happening in Silicon Valley today. As I said in my recent talk at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, Silicon Valley is currently about fascism, not innovation.

Tech billionaires have lined up behind a president who is violating the Constitution every day. Trump is sending troops into Democratic cities for sport. Masked men with guns are kidnapping immigrants of the street in violent scenes designed for maximum terror. Freedom and democracy are under daily assault as Trump attempts to transform the USA into an autocracy—all while making billions in corrupt crypto schemes.

The tech oligarchs, even the supposedly Democratic ones, apparently have nothing to say about the destruction of American democracy. They see only an opportunity to get more out of the system as Trump tears it apart.

None of this is mentioned in the WSJ story. Never mind the fact that Elon Musk gave a Hitler salute at the inauguration, or that tech billionaires won’t utter a word of criticism about Trump’s fascist dismantling of the rule of law. This is apparently just business as usual with zero concern for the moral consequences.

And, somehow, the only answer is for Democrats to bend the knee to people like Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman (who once compared Trump to “Hitler” but now caters to him). This means allowing the billionaires to do whatever they please—or risk losing their financial support, a point made explicitly in the story.

“These guys just want to build things and make money and so does Trump,” said Cooper Teboe, a Democratic adviser in Silicon Valley.

That is a very strange way to describe what is happening in this country today. Also: Is it the president’s job to “make money” while in office? 

“You Americans, you are so naïve,” Joseph Brodsky, an essayist and poet who was expelled from the Soviet Union, famously told his students at Columbia University. “You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.”

The WSJ story is a perfect example of what Brodsky meant. Nearly every single Democrat quoted in the piece uses the word “innovation” to explain why Democrats must kowtow to tech.

But bowing down to tech in 2025 means bowing down to Trump. Forget innovation—Silicon Valley has become a powerful force of collaboration with an authoritarian regime. Now, Democrats are being urged to accept this, to normalize it and to, in their own way, become collaborators as well.

The linguistic sleight of hand isn't accidental. It’s a well-known trick of political framing. The so-called “center” or “middle” is somehow always further to the right. Those who would challenge today’s rampant corruption or greed are accused of opposing a social good like “innovation.”

As the late David Golumbia wrote in Cyberlibertarianism: The Right Wing Politics of Digital Technology:

This is how cyberlibertarianism works: it is not so much about party politics as it is about controlling the terms of discourse and the conversation itself. This ensures that only rightist political formations ever get on the table and all concerns are subsumed under a general faith that digital technology will inevitably make things better, even if ‘better’ is never precisely defined.

Golumbia died in 2023 and his book was published posthumously. But in the final chapter, he observed that Silicon Valley cyberlibertarianism was morphing into fascism.

Golumbia saw what Brodsky warned about: how language becomes the pathway for evil. Authoritarians twist language to make horrific outcomes seem inevitable and reasonable. But let’s be clear: Democrats who embrace the false ‘innovation’ framing aren't supporting progress—they're normalizing collaboration with a fascist regime, one euphemism at a time.

In my Commonwealth Club talk, I said my greatest fear was that tech fascism would use its money to cow or corrupt the Democratic Party, thus removing all obstacles from its path. The WSJ story makes it clear that process is well underway, with Democrats being urged to sell out the country in exchange for donations.

Click here to read “Democrats Try to Halt Silicon Valley’s Swing to the Right” in the Wall Street Journal.

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