California’s hard left lurch is a matter of much discussion. As a side-bar but related matter, there exists tech’s similarly hard left climate of opinion, much of it originated and housed in the state. Tech’s leftist orientation was made glaringly obvious in a Stanford Graduate Business School study of December 2017.* Next question: Does tech’s hard left lurch correspond to California’s transformation into a hard left bastion?
I’ll start off by saying, I don’t know. Correlation ain’t causation.
There’s no doubt, though, that tech is an overbearing piece of California’s fiscal and economic puzzle. Has its prevailing ideological bearings bled into the state’s political bloodstream? A connection can only be intimated, not necessarily proven.
The Stanford study makes clear that an incoherent blend of self-interest and lefty tropes blanket Silicon Valley and its offshoots like a thick layer of smog. Techies overwhelmingly, almost militantly, stand four-square with the cultural left in the culture war. LGBTQ everything, multiculturalism, racial/ethnic/gender victimology, environmentalism, gun control, unrestrained abortion, a rejection of traditional institutions, open borders – the usual stuff of the left-wing orthodoxy – feature prominently.
All the while, techies don’t like anybody telling them what to do, especially the government. Yet, government isn’t treated like Christianity, something for the unenlightened and hide-bound rubes. While they don’t like regulation, they seem to be fully on-board with government-directed redistribution. Is the inconsistency an attempt to paper over their guilt about their riches? Could be.
Somehow their brains allow them to harbor “no government” alongside “lots of government”. All the isms and assaults on traditional institutions, and the Robin Hood regime, mandates a whole lotta government. I suppose that they want government to make everybody else live and believe like them. At heart, then, this is Stalinism.
Some have attributed this motley collection of beliefs to the hippies of yore as there appears to be a line of mental and lifestyle, if not genealogical, descent. The hippies were a mess, though. Their hedonism and gross naivete about human nature gave us STD’s, a drug epidemic, and a new generation of Democratic Party activists. Have the techies taken over where the hippies left off? Quite possibly.
Now we have the techie industry taking root throughout the country, and with it, implanting its mental smog and lifestyle. In that sense, California is the future – a dystopian one.
RogerG