By Ross Douthat
Just over seven months ago, the talented pseudonymous writer Trace Woodgrains wrote an essay announcing the Republican Party’s doom — not the doom of electoral irrelevance, since the GOP clearly isn’t going anywhere, but the doom of being unable to find enough talented people to actually carry out its agenda, shape the culture, or really govern the United States.
Citing data on highly educated America’s leftward swing and his own experience as a “a gay, centrist Biden voter” who feels like one of the most right-leaning students at his law school, Woodgrains argued that Trump-era conservatism suffers from a fatal human capital problem, an inability to generate elite support on any meaningful scale. Conservative populism, he suggested, is a potent mass movement with an enduring vacuum at the top.
This week, with the nomination of JD Vance as Donald Trump’s running mate and the recent surge of support for Trump’s campaign from Silicon Valley, Woodgrains reconsidered the durability of his diagnosis. The Vance pick, he wrote, suggests that “the GOP is looking to make an appeal to anti-woke Silicon Valley or finance types to fill the void left by the Republican Party’s competency crisis,” with Vance himself as an exemplar of what a right-leaning counter-elite might look like. And the response from tech money, especially, suggests that it might be working, since it’s not just Peter Thiel backing Trump this time around; it’s Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and many more. And why? Because nature abhors a vacuum.
“Republicans offer a sort of Faustian bargain to ambitious anti-woke secular sorts: make your peace with the evangelicals, pander to social conservatism, and gain sway in a coalition crying out for policy competence,” Woodgrains wrote in an essay on his website. “More than a few will take that bargain. People are drawn to power voids.”
I like this argument because it supplies a structural context to a sudden shift that a lot of observers are scrambling to explain: See, among others, Reed Albergotti and Noah Smith running through a list of policy issues, cultural changes and, yes, vibe shifts that help explain why the Trumpian GOP suddenly has more support in Silicon Valley than in 2020 or 2016.
All these indicators are helpful to understanding the emergent “tech right.” But if you look at the shift through the lens suggested by Woodgrains’s analysis, what you see is a somewhat predictable rebalancing, a system trying to move closer to an equilibrium. A situation where one electoral coalition has plenty of political influence but remarkably limited elite representation might just be inherently unstable: If a coalition can win elections and hold power, even if it seems culturally disreputable, eventually some group of elites will find reasons to support it (and try to turn its power to their ends). And both liberals who hoped for the permanent marginalization of Trumpism and right-wingers who feared the permanent dominance of a culturally liberal “Cathedral” possibly overestimated how long the American elite could remain unified without some modest crackup, some realignment within the ruling class.
But I would add two important qualifiers to Woodgrains’ description of an emergent tech right that decides it needs to hold its nose and “pander to social conservatism” to share power in the GOP.
The first is that to some degree Trump himself smoothed the rightward path for the tech barons, by remaking the Republican Party along somewhat more post-Christian, pagan-lite, “Barstool-conservative” lines. Here some of the distinctive features of this week’s Republican convention, from the sidelining of anti-abortion activists in the platform-writing process to the speech by a former stripper and OnlyFans performer, are themselves helpful in explaining why it feels culturally easier for tech money to support the Republican Party. It’s still a socially conservative party — if Musk moves two of his companies’ headquarters to Texas, he’ll be moving them to a state that heavily restricts abortion — but it’s not the party of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, or for that matter of George W. Bush.
But then second, there is also some actual congruence between the tech right and what I’ve called the “neo-traditionalist” version of religious conservatism. For some (not all) tech people and some (not all) religious conservatives, a political alliance isn’t just a matter of hold-your-nose convenience: There’s also a philosophical convergence, a set of premises held in common about the nature of the universe and the condition of America today.
One is a shared faith in cosmic order, a belief that the world is still a puzzle waiting for solutions, not just a random jumble or a permanent mystery — that there is underlying order everywhere, and great secrets hidden from us that might yet be unlocked or revealed. (Here it’s telling that the Silicon Valley types pulled rightward seem to be mostly venture capital types or enthusiasts for “edge” products like crypto and AI — the would-be secret finders, the mystics of capitalism.)
Another is that human beings have some important cosmic destiny, that we aren’t just doomed to blink out in some entirely meaningless apocalypse, that our image-of-God side is essential to the story of the world.
Another is that Western civilization has fallen into a slough of despond and that to escape, we need to reject woke progressivism, which is setting itself up as a post-Christian church of late-modern despair.
And yet another is that there is some link between cultural and intellectual fertility and literal fertility, between dynamism and traditionalism, and that reversing the collapse of birthrates is one of the great tasks of the 21st century.
A convergence between religious impulses and technological ambitions (or between trad bros and tech bros, if you prefer) is not a novel thing in American history; just ask the great 19th-century Protestant industrialists. Nor is it unknown in the history of modern conservatism: The Reaganism of the 1970s and ’80s was, in its own way, an alliance of Californian dynamists and evangelical Christians.
Such an alliance might seem more unnatural now than it was back then. Silicon Valley is more fundamentally post-Christian than was, say, the culture of the Cold War-era aerospace industry, and some of the projects a tech right would likely embrace (radical genetic engineering, the quest for the AI god) create more fundamental conflict with traditional religious belief, sharpening the tension between America’s Christian and Faustian impulses. Under such conditions, the modest spiritual stirrings in Silicon Valley could flower into a fully pagan or transhumanist religious culture, and the tech-trad congruence could dissolve.
Or, on the other hand, the convergence might become more profound if the ranks of the “neo-trads” increase and traditional religious belief makes a comeback (I’m working on it) within the American educated classes.
This is where Vance himself looms as a potentially significant figure: As a Catholic convert with a background in venture capital, a religious believer whom the Silicon Valley right plainly regards as an ally and a friend, he’s personally a bridge between a populist religious conservatism and a Muskian tech right.
The immediate policy question, for a second Trump term, is how the tech right’s libertarian impulses can mesh with Trumpian populism and Vance’s desire to be a tribune of the common man.
But the deeper question for the right is more philosophical: Are the tech bros and trads just allies of convenience, or is Vance the forerunner of a religious elite waiting to be reborn?
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