Will Trump’s win make the rocky marriage between big tech and big blue cities even worse?

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the Blue City Blues podcast. I'm David Hyde with political analyst and consultant Sandeep Kaushik. Today's topic, are blue cities in a toxic codependent relationship with big tech? And how do we get them into counseling? Joining us with more on that and on the devastating presidential election results for blue cities, Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, who writes extensively about history, tech and politics, including her blockbuster book, The Code,

[00:00:40] Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. And in a previous life, Margaret O'Mara worked on economic and social policy in the Clinton White House. Margaret O'Mara, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:00:52] Thanks for having me.

[00:00:53] So our focus here is on what we're calling the urban archipelago, a phrase coined by Dan Savage 20 years ago, which is also the last time Republicans not only won a presidential election, but won the popular vote as well.

[00:01:07] And in that piece, Dan encouraged progressives to coalesce around a politics of urban identity.

[00:01:14] And if they lived in rural areas, to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places, which is essentially what happened over the last two decades.

[00:01:24] Rural places got a lot redder. As we know, urban places got a lot bluer.

[00:01:28] And then fast forward to today, where the left's power in America is really concentrated in cities, much more so than it used to be.

[00:01:37] And over the same time period, we've also seen a big tech invasion in San Francisco, starting with Twitter a bit earlier, then dozens of other companies moving downtown, including Uber.

[00:01:48] Here in Seattle, Amazon made a big splashy move into the urban core, eventually taking over two neighborhoods.

[00:01:54] And then Expedia built a big campus on the waterfront and many more companies moved in or expanded their operations to Seattle.

[00:02:02] And we've seen this same pattern play out in other blue cities across the country, New York, Boston, Austin, Texas.

[00:02:08] Seen a ton of tech growth recently.

[00:02:11] But the love affair between big tech and big blue urban areas has hit a rough patch recently.

[00:02:19] Elon Musk announcing that he's moving Twitter now X to Texas after complaining about San Francisco, which is where Twitter started.

[00:02:27] I wanted to start by reading you this Elon Musk tweet.

[00:02:30] It's insane.

[00:02:31] Last Wednesday night, we got stuck in the garage at the X slash Twitter HQ on Market Street because a gang was doing drugs in the street and wouldn't move.

[00:02:42] I really want to get to Elon Musk here in a minute, but start by asking you kind of how we got here, Margot Amaro.

[00:02:48] What was Twitter's relationship with San Francisco like?

[00:02:51] You know, why did they move there long before Elon Musk ended up buying the company a couple of years ago?

[00:02:57] Yeah, Twitter is part of this generation of companies that's growing up or coming into being at a time when tech firms are moving from the suburban campuses that they had mostly inhabited for the decades prior and moving into urban spaces.

[00:03:15] And a big driver of that was personnel.

[00:03:18] They were moving to be close to where the people that they wanted to hire lived and also where those people wanted to work.

[00:03:26] You had, if you're going back, you know, 15 years ago or so, you have technical people who are in demand, who can kind of choose the cities they live in and the companies they work for.

[00:03:37] Companies are competing for this talent and they are throwing lots of perks their way.

[00:03:43] And an urban location was indeed a park, a kind of a cool urban office that had lots of amenities, but it was also in a high amenity city and was an easy commute from the neighborhoods where young people, young technical people and young knowledge workers wanted to live.

[00:04:00] You remember that book? Of course, we all remember this book if we were alive then.

[00:04:05] The Creative Class by Richard Florida and his vision of cities as the places for innovation, etc.

[00:04:11] I mean, were tech leaders reading that book, sort of getting that message and saying, yes, we're going to be a part of this revolution of innovation that's happening in cities and appeal to this younger workforce that we're trying to attract?

[00:04:24] It would be nice to think that they were avidly reading Richard Florida and other urbanists, but I don't think that was what was happening.

[00:04:31] I think that it was really following, again, following the talent pool because the, you know, the irony is, is that tech companies for quite some time have been, had these, you know, back when they were exclusively kind of a more suburban phenomenon.

[00:04:48] Think about Microsoft and Redmond or think about Google down in Mountain View, California.

[00:04:53] They were offering, they built campuses that had everything you would need right at work.

[00:04:58] They were kind of like mini cities.

[00:04:59] Actually, if you go down to Facebook's or Meta's headquarters down in Menlo Park, California, one component of that is a literal main street that is enclosed within the campus that's replicating, you know, a main street of a town or a city with all the amenities you'd ever want.

[00:05:16] And these self-contained campuses were, you know, perfect for these large young workforces that wanted to have, you know, free snacks and had bike repair on campus and dry cleaning.

[00:05:28] And, you know, one of the results of that is that you never have to leave work.

[00:05:32] It's not just a nice perk.

[00:05:34] It's something for the employer that encourages people to stick around.

[00:05:37] Now, when they move to urban places, what happens often is that, and Twitter is a great example, the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, which was not only when they opened their headquarters building there, not only were they doing that because the company thought it made sense for their business, but also because San Francisco, the city, gave them a massive tax break to move to that part of San Francisco in the hopes that the presence of this company would revitalize that part of the city.

[00:06:06] This is a great example of how, you know, perhaps the Jack Dorsey's of this world were not reading their Richard Florida's and making these choices because, you know, Twitter was, like a lot of other companies, just, they built a self-contained campus with all the amenities and the in-house cafeterias and the snacks and the roof gardens and everything you'd ever need was inside the building.

[00:06:30] So Twitter moved to San Francisco, but yet people didn't really go out into the neighborhood to get lunch, which was part of the reason they got this tax break.

[00:06:39] And we saw this replicating itself in a lot of places, a lot of cities, including in Seattle.

[00:06:45] If a workplace has a lot of on-site amenities, it's not going to activate the neighborhood in the way that the economic development experts might hope.

[00:06:56] It just doesn't work that way.

[00:06:58] And this is something that is very distinctive to tech.

[00:07:01] Tech has, tech companies have really doubled down on, historically, we're kind of very focused on creating workplaces that would, in their design and in their amenities, ostensibly encourage innovation.

[00:07:13] Let me ask, how would you then, given that these are, you know, they're not hermetically sealed, people are out living in the city and going to see concerts and they're voting.

[00:07:25] So tech workers are very much a presence in cities.

[00:07:28] But given the kind of bubble that you're describing, can you generalize?

[00:07:32] Can you say anything about kind of industry, tech companies, CEO, leadership's views towards all the problems that have emerged since then?

[00:07:41] Back then, the problem was there weren't enough jobs.

[00:07:43] We were dying for Amazon to move downtown because there was a recession and they kind of saved Seattle in some ways, the thought was, by doing that.

[00:07:52] Now we've seen all of this inequality and people sort of mostly blaming big tech for those problems.

[00:07:59] But what's tech's attitude, not just in Seattle, but in all of these cities towards these problems, homelessness, addiction, et cetera?

[00:08:07] Like, what is their relationship to those problems?

[00:08:09] Yeah, I mean, I think there has been, you know, historically, these are companies that, and leaders of companies, even though we're at a moment now where a number of tech leaders are very notably extremely involved in politics, particularly at the national level.

[00:08:23] But these are, this is an industry that for a very long time kind of styled itself as apart from politics.

[00:08:28] And our business is to go heads down, focus on building and shipping great product, and then great things happen in the wake of that.

[00:08:35] And so there was kind of this dissociation of responsibility and feeling like, well, we only bring good things.

[00:08:42] We bring economic activity.

[00:08:44] And you guys are complaining because we're so successful.

[00:08:46] We brought so many jobs to your city that there's traffic.

[00:08:49] Well, that's something for you guys to figure out.

[00:08:52] You're not being very, you know, grateful for all the economic dynamism we've brought.

[00:08:57] And, you know, this is not something that's isolated to the tech industry.

[00:09:00] But I think it is something that is, you know, really, it's important to note kind of given the tech industry, its history, how it's grown, where it's grown, and its suburban origins.

[00:09:10] Let's keep in mind that this is an industry that grew up and grew in its early decades in very heavily suburban environments that didn't have a lot of friction.

[00:09:21] You know, we talk about mobile apps, for example, having, you know, having as little friction as possible to sort of as few clicks as possible to buy something online.

[00:09:29] That's something that's, you know, a user interface that is frictionless, an experience that is frictionless.

[00:09:34] Well, you know, the geography of technology for a very long time was relatively low friction.

[00:09:42] And that if you're building a research park or a campus on a apricot orchard in the South Bay, you don't have to tear down build it.

[00:09:51] All you have to do is get a farmer willing to sell you his land, and he's happy to do it.

[00:09:56] And you have a developer putting up something for you, and you just move right in.

[00:09:59] And there's not very much traffic that you have to combat.

[00:10:03] There are not people already in the area that are objecting to you being there.

[00:10:07] And so this move to the city, and we see this in Seattle, and we saw a lot of other places too, suddenly created friction that wasn't there before for these companies.

[00:10:16] These companies didn't have necessarily the capacity as kind of a state and local government relations office that was keyed to working on some of these issues.

[00:10:24] And also didn't feel like, felt like, okay, you encouraged us to come.

[00:10:30] In some cases, you lured us with tax breaks.

[00:10:32] You begged us, please, please, we're going to do everything we can to bring, you know, encourage you to come to our urban neighborhood.

[00:10:39] And now you're complaining that we were, we brought too many jobs?

[00:10:43] Like, you know, it's just, it's sort of in the same key as the pushback that comes from the push to regulate social media platforms or other platforms or to, you know, bring antitrust enforcement action.

[00:10:57] They're saying, well, we built products that are so successful that everyone uses them.

[00:11:02] Why are you penalizing us for this?

[00:11:04] This is ridiculous.

[00:11:06] You know, it does seem to me that particularly recently, tech leaders in big blue cities are increasingly vocal about criticizing what they see, I think, as the, or what they perceive to be the failures of progressive governance in those cities.

[00:11:23] And, you know, we were talking about, David started with that tweet from Elon Musk about, you know, being in the garage and people are doing drugs and what the hell is going on here?

[00:11:32] This is insane.

[00:11:33] But, you know, I've been closely following the politics of San Francisco recently.

[00:11:38] And it seems like there's a place where you've got these very wealthy tech moguls, tech investors who have been now not only very vocal about what they see is wrong with San Francisco's politics, but willing to step up and put millions of dollars of money into municipal politics, right?

[00:11:59] They're very often in efforts to oust or even recall progressive politicians that they see as failures or even as ideological enemies.

[00:12:09] And so, Margaret, am I right about that?

[00:12:12] What's going on there?

[00:12:13] Yeah.

[00:12:14] And this is a relatively new development.

[00:12:16] And, you know, we are talking about tech capitals, San Francisco here, that are various shades of blue.

[00:12:22] You know, it's kind of progressive versus centrist.

[00:12:25] It's, you know, there's, although, you know, increasingly there are, you know, increasing number of very vocal and extremely online tech moguls who are allying themselves with the right.

[00:12:34] But this is relatively new.

[00:12:37] And interestingly, it's not companies that are bankrolling these necessarily.

[00:12:42] Not, you know, there certainly is corporate money in there.

[00:12:45] It's individuals.

[00:12:46] It's individual investors, individual entrepreneurs.

[00:12:49] It's a reflection of the immense wealth that's been created in San Francisco and in Seattle in the tech sector.

[00:12:55] Particularly in the last 15 years, we've had this scale up of everything, including the fortunes of the handful of people at the top.

[00:13:03] And they are able to deploy serious, serious campaign cash to affect different electoral outcomes.

[00:13:10] Now, they aren't necessarily themselves running for office, although the newly elected mayor of San Francisco comes from a business background.

[00:13:17] But he is a heir to the Levi Strauss of the Levi Strauss family and kind of comes from, you know, a different longer, longer standing source of San Francisco wealth.

[00:13:28] But nonetheless, there is a real desire to, okay, we're going to, you know, kick the bums out.

[00:13:33] And so there's a little bit of a, you know, it's gone from, well, this isn't our problem to fix.

[00:13:38] You guys, you know, you guys got to fix the problem too.

[00:13:41] Okay, now we're going to get the people who we see as the source of the problem.

[00:13:45] We're going to kick them out of office and we're going to get new people in.

[00:13:48] And I think this also plays into a broader landscape of how these deep blue cities, how governance has been challenged, how they're even in very, very progressive leaning or left leaning places where people are reliably voting for Democrats and including left leaning Democrats.

[00:14:06] There is a kind of frustration with the status quo, a frustration with sort of quality of life issues.

[00:14:16] And ironically, these are all, these issues are often the downstream effects of this extraordinary burst of wealth creation that has, you know, pushed people out of housing, for example.

[00:14:25] I wonder if you could help us understand the differences between the tech entrepreneurs who are turning much more MAGA, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, you know, for a long time and others.

[00:14:37] It's a, it's a, I don't want to say a teeny fraction in terms of the dollars, but it, but it, but the tech industry, as I understand it, it's still mostly blue, as you said.

[00:14:46] But when it comes to the politics of big cities, which are, you know, a little bit less partisan and people's views about things like, should we build more housing or not?

[00:14:58] Don't always, you know, cut across the normal political divides.

[00:15:02] So when it comes to their view about urban politics, how different is, say, Elon Musk's vision of urban America and the future of urban America from these tech entrepreneurs who just, as Sandeep and you were pointing out, like just flooded the recent municipal elections with a lot of cash.

[00:15:19] And, and the one thing they all have in common is wanting to get the progressives out, it seems like to me.

[00:15:23] So is there anything to say sort of beyond that?

[00:15:26] Yeah, I mean, I think there, in a way, it's kind of a local reflection of what's been a kind of national trend of the way in which the tech community or sort of tech leaders have responded to or interacted with politics kind of, and I could sort of dating back to say, you know, the, well, for a long time, but we kind of see it vividly on display from the Obama era forward.

[00:15:48] On the one hand, there's a strand that is the, okay, government is broken.

[00:15:52] Let's go and fix it.

[00:15:53] We need Silicon Valley style solutions applied to government.

[00:15:57] And we said the Obama administration was a great example of this and, and, and would kind of encourage that like, oh, let's bring in people from Google and Microsoft and have them kind of help make government work better because the tech community seems to have all the solutions and they're making the world a better place and up and to the right.

[00:16:13] Right.

[00:16:14] That was then back in the dark ages of like 2010.

[00:16:18] And, and then the other strand is that of the kind of techno libertarian strand, which is that the less government, the better let's sidestep it.

[00:16:27] And let's, if we can, let's just blow it up.

[00:16:29] Let's just get, you know, we need to fundamentally rethink institutions.

[00:16:33] And one might say that at this moment, both nationally and, and we're seeing in some of these big cities, that kind of techno libertarian strain is, is coming forward more loudly and vigorously.

[00:16:43] And certainly with more money behind it.

[00:16:46] And a lot of tweet storms accompanying it.

[00:16:49] Keep in mind that the, in sort of raw numbers, we still have a very deep blue Bay Area as we do have a deep blue Seattle.

[00:16:56] We have a tech community that when they're voting are voting large margins for Democrats.

[00:17:02] And also when they're giving money to candidates, they're still more often giving money to Democrats.

[00:17:08] But there are some extremely wealthy and again, very politically outspoken and powerful investors and entrepreneurs in the tech world that have been endorsing Trump and other right wing candidates or Trumpist candidates.

[00:17:24] I wouldn't say everyone's turning Republican.

[00:17:26] Although it should be noted that back in the, back in the day for a very long time, Silicon Valley and, and the tech industry more broadly was run by people who voted Republican.

[00:17:36] It was only from the nineties forward that this sort of tight alliance between Democrats and tech emerged.

[00:17:43] Yeah, it does seem to me there's a real, or maybe a growing divide or disjuncture between some of these kind of tech moguls we're talking about.

[00:17:50] And the affluent, younger, I think very progressive, in most cases, workforces, right?

[00:17:58] That they employ in, in, in cities like this.

[00:18:00] And if you look at the precincts, like say in the city of Seattle, where tech workers tend to live, you know, Capitol Hill or South Lake Union and stuff.

[00:18:09] Those don't just vote.

[00:18:10] I mean, we're all shades, some shade of blue in Seattle, but those voters tend to vote a very left line, right?

[00:18:17] In, in Seattle politics, a kind of maximal, a maximal left line, probably because of demographic and, you know, other sorts of, sorts of, sorts of regions.

[00:18:27] So that does seem to me really real.

[00:18:30] I guess, Margaret, here's my, my thing is I've been watching the explosion of tech in, in big blue cities over the last decade plus.

[00:18:37] I started to wonder, like, I mean, on the one hand, our prosperity, the prosperity bomb that's happened in these cities is intimately connected to these big tech companies, right?

[00:18:49] My line about this is that, you know, all of our progressive virtue flows on an infinite sea of new tech money, right?

[00:18:55] On the other hand, as you say, that prosperity bomb has caused a huge number of problems and increasingly progressives in the left in these cities blame tech companies as the sort of root cause of the decline in quality of life and stuff like that.

[00:19:11] Whereas the moguls blame the progressives, right?

[00:19:13] There's this, there's this real tension that's happened.

[00:19:15] And so I do wonder at some point if maybe these companies have gotten so big that maybe they're just too big, even for big blue cities, right?

[00:19:28] Their, the scale of their operations and their presence is so large that they become both, that they, A, they reshape how the city works and how it's working, but they also become, you know, the big fat targets of stuff, right?

[00:19:43] And so I wonder, I wonder what your thought is about that.

[00:19:47] Yeah.

[00:19:48] Well, I think it plays out differently in say Seattle than other places.

[00:19:52] We've always been a big company town from the beginning, you know, first it was timber, then it was Boeing, then it was Microsoft.

[00:19:59] Now it's Amazon and Microsoft.

[00:20:01] And, and so that's a slightly different dynamic than in, even in the Bay Area.

[00:20:04] I mean, big companies have always been part of the tech scene, but I think that, but I'm really, you know,

[00:20:10] what you're observing here, I, you know, it also is, you know, this is politics that's both, you know,

[00:20:17] happening outside the company and inside the company.

[00:20:20] And I think that's also what's propelling this new political activism and outspokenness on the part of some more right now,

[00:20:27] right-leaning tech moguls.

[00:20:29] They're also responding to what they've been grappling with within their own companies over the past five years.

[00:20:36] With this worker activism, unionization drives, pushing back against management.

[00:20:42] And this is where a kind of the, the cultural edge, the cultural wars get in here,

[00:20:46] where you have executives like Musk, but not Musk alone, kind of railing against wokeism and kind of doing that.

[00:20:54] But that are, when in doing that, they're also talking about their rank and file workers, people who are in these companies.

[00:21:00] So there's this real kind of tension within companies that again, is a relatively new thing.

[00:21:05] We don't have to go back too far in time to when you look at large companies, whether it be Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta,

[00:21:14] or also small and mid-sized companies of every sale.

[00:21:17] And there was kind of this, you know, this management approach that evolved, you know,

[00:21:22] it was just sort of trying to be as non-hierarchical as possible.

[00:21:26] David Packard and Bill Hewlett, if Hewlett Packard famously called it management by walking around there,

[00:21:31] you know, that if the best ideas rise to the top, you don't have corner offices.

[00:21:35] And this translates into, you know, Google having these open message boards where,

[00:21:38] and having all hands meetings with the CEOs every week.

[00:21:43] And of course, once, to your point about bigness, once you get too big, that doesn't work anymore.

[00:21:48] It doesn't function.

[00:21:49] And we've seen again and again, these companies that begin as startups, whether it's Microsoft or anyone else,

[00:21:54] and they kind of keep that startup mentality is going as long as they can.

[00:21:59] And then at some point, there's a tipping point where it goes from being an asset

[00:22:02] to being something that's a real drag on the business.

[00:22:04] It becomes difficult to operate.

[00:22:06] You can't operate like a startup when you have tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and you're a global brand.

[00:22:11] So I think that's something that we're also seeing spill out into politics.

[00:22:15] You know, the other thing I think is worth noting is that the other double-edged sword is if you have a,

[00:22:21] you know, rapidly growing tech economy, including the one here in Seattle,

[00:22:26] it's one that has involved a good number of migrants from elsewhere,

[00:22:29] people from other parts of the country or other parts of the world.

[00:22:32] And when you have people moving here for a job or moving here for kind of a particular,

[00:22:38] you know, industry, and they have the resources to maintain a kind of live in certain neighborhoods,

[00:22:45] work in certain neighborhoods, they're in something of a bubble of their own,

[00:22:48] even though they're living in a city.

[00:22:50] They don't have the roots.

[00:22:52] They don't have the history.

[00:22:53] They don't feel the sense, necessarily a sense of civic obligation that they might have,

[00:22:57] had they been living here their whole lives or multi-generational.

[00:23:02] But also the other fact of the matter is they're working really, really, really hard.

[00:23:06] They have no time.

[00:23:08] And, you know, this is another, I think, important dimension of the blue city politics of,

[00:23:14] you know, the people who have the bandwidth to, you know, go to the city council meetings,

[00:23:19] to go and be part of neighborhood planning processes,

[00:23:21] to invest heavily in local nonprofits with their time and even their money,

[00:23:27] who kind of feel this sense of, I want to be knit into the fabric,

[00:23:31] are people who, A, have the time and resources to do it,

[00:23:34] and B, feel like they're going to be here for good or for a long time.

[00:23:38] They feel some attachment to place.

[00:23:41] And the tech economy in cities like this one and across the United States and across the world,

[00:23:47] for that matter, relies on people who are transient, who are geographically mobile.

[00:23:53] And I think that's a really important part of this.

[00:23:56] You know, these are people who are less likely to vote in local elections,

[00:24:00] especially when they're off your elections.

[00:24:02] They are people who are less likely to be informed

[00:24:04] and have a real sense of the political context and the trade-offs.

[00:24:08] I think that's where the conversation can get kind of, you know, single-dimensional,

[00:24:13] even though you have incredibly educated and thoughtful people who are here

[00:24:19] who would like to make things better,

[00:24:22] but they don't necessarily have the toolkit to do so.

[00:24:26] I wanted to ask if you could follow up a little bit more on your thought

[00:24:30] about sort of wokeism versus anti-wokeism playing out within tech companies.

[00:24:33] And then you suggested and others are talking about how that's kind of spilled out

[00:24:37] into this election more broadly, as opposed to kind of a more class-based politics,

[00:24:43] where Democrats are seen broadly as protecting worker rights and pay and those sorts of things,

[00:24:49] and Republicans are seen as supporting tax breaks and business interests.

[00:24:53] And kind of that not being the dynamic that we're seeing in this last presidential election,

[00:24:58] to ill effect for Democrats anyway, potentially.

[00:25:01] Part of the conceit of this show is that blue cities have kind of reshaped the Democratic Party

[00:25:07] and urban America and the left over the last, say, 20 years.

[00:25:11] And I'm just kind of marveling at the idea that tech is kind of leading this in terms of their internal divisions.

[00:25:18] I mean, is there anything more to say about the role that tech might be playing

[00:25:22] and kind of shaping the national conversation about, you know, what politics is all about right now?

[00:25:28] Because the one thing that's kind of left out of it among all of these workers

[00:25:31] who are making at least $150,000 a year is class, is often class.

[00:25:37] I've been thinking about this a lot.

[00:25:38] I mean, I think that we've had so many divides in American society.

[00:25:43] And one of the other, when we look at these tech, these blue cities and these tech hubs,

[00:25:47] including Seattle, they have been on the winning side of the, you know,

[00:25:52] let's call it the neoliberal divide or the age of free trade, global free trade.

[00:25:57] There have been clear winners and losers in the American economy.

[00:26:01] And blue cities have been big winners,

[00:26:03] especially blue cities where there's been a lot of tech or tech-related industry.

[00:26:07] Doesn't mean that there's not poverty and inequality and people are struggling in those places.

[00:26:12] They certainly are.

[00:26:13] But on balance, to be in San Francisco or Austin or Seattle,

[00:26:18] you are in a place of much greater economic opportunity than if you are in Dayton, Ohio

[00:26:26] or Little Rock, Arkansas, or, you know, a small town in Eastern Oregon or Eastern Washington.

[00:26:33] It's just a very, very different trajectory.

[00:26:36] And so that is, you know, that's the reality.

[00:26:39] And I think that's part of where, yeah, that there's sort of these, in these affluent places,

[00:26:44] there have been these turns towards a kind of, they've embraced a more, you know,

[00:26:50] progressive and expansive ideas of culture, social justice, moving away from class-based solidarity,

[00:26:57] you know, necessarily to ones that cut across class.

[00:27:01] And also, but there is materiality to it.

[00:27:03] You have people who are, you know, underemployed PhDs,

[00:27:06] highly educated knowledge workers who are saying, I'm not making enough to live in a city like San

[00:27:11] Francisco or LA or Seattle.

[00:27:13] So there's that too.

[00:27:14] But I think that that is, you know, and the other thing, thinking, meditating on this election

[00:27:19] and the broader politics of the blue cities in the wake of the 2024 race, kind of how much this is,

[00:27:27] you know, it was about material concerns.

[00:27:29] I worked on the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign.

[00:27:35] Before I was a historian, I was a junior campaign aide.

[00:27:38] And I was thinking in the past week since the election, how the messages of that campaign,

[00:27:44] the ones that we had on the whiteboard and the white room of,

[00:27:46] the whiteboard of the war room at the campaign headquarters,

[00:27:49] started with change versus more of the same.

[00:27:52] That was a message we had to hammer home every day.

[00:27:54] And the second one was the economy, stupid.

[00:27:56] And people might remember that catchphrase.

[00:27:59] Those two things were what this election was very much about,

[00:28:02] certainly, and what the, you know, as the data comes in.

[00:28:06] At the same time, both parties, you know, the ability of either Democrats or Republicans to

[00:28:13] offer policies, much less enact policies that have meaningfully changed the calculus,

[00:28:18] the imbalance between the winners and the losers,

[00:28:21] and has been kind of de minimis.

[00:28:23] And so there, I think cultural issues do come to the fore as something that is,

[00:28:29] that these elections have come about.

[00:28:31] I think you're right.

[00:28:32] Like it's not, especially when we think about blue city politics,

[00:28:35] it's less about class and this classic, sort of the way we think about,

[00:28:39] when we think about the historic battles for, that the working class,

[00:28:44] the American working class has battled over time.

[00:28:47] It's very different.

[00:28:49] And yet there are these real economic realities that are undergirding how elections at the national

[00:28:58] level are going.

[00:28:59] I think there's an argument that is made that I find pretty compelling,

[00:29:03] that if you look at the period of what's now called the Great Awakening, right,

[00:29:08] starting about 10 years ago,

[00:29:09] and the kind of turn to a kind of identitarian social justice politics,

[00:29:13] which really, really did take root in blue cities,

[00:29:17] it's probably not coincidental that that also coincides with the fact that these big blue cities

[00:29:24] are becoming enormously wealthy, sort of, you know,

[00:29:29] the provinces where, you know, affluent, many of them tech professionals,

[00:29:35] are, you know, kind of moving into million-dollar-plus homes and, you know,

[00:29:42] living a kind of a sort of high-end, affluent, almost gentry class kind of lifestyle, right?

[00:29:49] And that, you know, maybe it's really easy to kind of fixate on identity

[00:29:54] because we then don't have to confront our own class privilege, right?

[00:30:00] You know, on the progressive left.

[00:30:02] I mean, this is something we were talking about with Dan Savage in a previous episode of the podcast.

[00:30:07] Like, that's not a very flattering story for blue urban America.

[00:30:11] Like, these cities are no longer the kind of really the engines of working-class

[00:30:18] and lower-middle-class uplift to bring people, you know,

[00:30:21] to take in, you know, the tired and the poor and the dispossessed or whatever and raise them up.

[00:30:27] They are the places where the people who come here are educated and well-off

[00:30:32] that are going to make a bunch of money and they're reaping the benefits of this culture, right?

[00:30:39] I mean, am I wrong about that?

[00:30:40] No, and I think that's the uncomfortable thing for Blue City progressives and Blue City everybody.

[00:30:47] The very shades of blue to address is that, you know, that if we really, if we go back to, you know, say,

[00:30:54] if you're calling to, you know, for racial justice and saying that Black Lives Matter

[00:30:59] and marching in that cause, you know, any U.S. historian will tell you that, you know,

[00:31:05] the root causes of racial justice are not simply cultural, they are systemic.

[00:31:10] They have to do with, among other things, housing segregation over time, de jure and de facto,

[00:31:17] the racial wage gap that has to do with education and public education.

[00:31:22] Not to minimize this very, this is much more important, but I think that, for example,

[00:31:27] this is something that when people are like, well, why hasn't social media, you know,

[00:31:31] cleaned itself up and why is it still, why is, you know, Facebook act the way it is

[00:31:34] and why you have all these deleterious effects, like if they actually did those things, that would

[00:31:38] absolutely under, completely undermine their ability to make money the way they're making money.

[00:31:43] And if you take that to a societal level, if you really were, you know, to affect social justice,

[00:31:49] they were to require some very, very uncomfortable choices, individual and society-wide.

[00:31:56] And this is not something individuals are going to sort of opt in and, you know,

[00:31:59] you'd have to make it something systemic and that is, would be something more, much more profound.

[00:32:05] So, yeah, I think that's, I think that's right.

[00:32:07] I think that's kind of at the, at the core of this, you know, the big thing that, that,

[00:32:13] that no one really wants to grapple with.

[00:32:14] And meanwhile, and I should also add on identitarian politics, sure, it's, it's emerged in the left.

[00:32:21] It's emerged even as, if not more strongly on the right.

[00:32:25] I mean, we're talking about, you know, podcast bros versus childless cat ladies or whatever,

[00:32:31] you know, I mean, you have all these caricatures, but also these very real,

[00:32:34] you know, the, the, one of the characteristics of American politics in the, the modern era

[00:32:40] and exacerbated by the, the people who, and particularly by the era of Donald Trump,

[00:32:45] but I think it extends far beyond Trump is that political affiliation has come to overlap with

[00:32:50] and signal all these other characteristics and has come as a, and has also risen to become central

[00:32:58] at a time when other types of affiliation, civic, religious, geographic, kind of understanding of

[00:33:04] who you are.

[00:33:05] This is, I am this because of where I go to church or where I live or what I do, the bowling league

[00:33:13] that I belong to.

[00:33:14] Those all go away.

[00:33:15] And so politics starts coming forward and taking a much bigger role in American life.

[00:33:21] Last week, we talked to Dan Savage about some of that.

[00:33:24] And, you know, perhaps you can quibble with some of the ways in which progressives got ahead

[00:33:29] of where the public is ready to go when it comes to say, trans women in sports or whatever is,

[00:33:33] you know, the, the issue that Trump hammered them, Kamala on and, you know, and other issues

[00:33:38] like that in the campaign.

[00:33:39] But on the other hand, the way that Trump and others are sort of framing it is, is almost

[00:33:44] overtly fascist at this point in terms of identity politics.

[00:33:47] It's pretty troubling and disturbing.

[00:33:49] Well, it's really, it's really effective politics to be clear.

[00:33:51] I mean, this is why this sort of culture war politics has been, obviously Trump, Trump always

[00:33:56] is practicing a kind of more undistilled, intense version of what's been going on for some time.

[00:34:02] I think of, you know, Dan Quayle and, you know, complaining about political correctness

[00:34:07] and that cultural elite.

[00:34:09] So, but, but to take it, to take it back to tech and big cities, on the one hand, we have

[00:34:14] this elegant portrait that you've given us of the ways in which tech companies have managed

[00:34:20] to create these bubbles within cities and haven't really made themselves a part of cities

[00:34:27] in ways that they might have in kind of a mature way as partners with government.

[00:34:31] On the other side, Blue City progressive leaders are also themselves, you know, maybe partly

[00:34:37] as a result of that, pretty hostile towards big tech, you know, seeing it less as a partner

[00:34:42] that's there to maybe help them or help us in living in Blue City solve things and more

[00:34:48] just kind of, you're causing this inequality, you're causing this inequality.

[00:34:51] Maybe we want some tax revenue out of you, but that's about it.

[00:34:55] You know, they haven't really always in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York,

[00:35:00] you know, go down the list, presented themselves as civic partners.

[00:35:05] Some of this, perhaps there's an emergence of a kind of progressive worldview that sees

[00:35:10] any kind of market solution nowadays as like the neoliberalism of the Obama or Clinton years

[00:35:15] and we need to move past that.

[00:35:17] And, you know, although we have seen that, you were talking about the housing bar, we've

[00:35:21] seen that skepticism towards markets really cause a lot of our problems in the sense that

[00:35:26] we haven't allowed nearly enough housing to be built in these cities that have grown

[00:35:30] so quickly.

[00:35:31] And had we done so starting, you know, 20, 30 years ago, loosened up some of our zoning

[00:35:35] regulations, we wouldn't be in quite the mess that we're in right now when it comes to affordability.

[00:35:39] So, you know, we've reaped the benefits of sort of anti-capitalist ideology, a rigid kind

[00:35:46] of, you know, nobody should make a profit.

[00:35:48] And if you make a profit, that can't be a part of the solution.

[00:35:51] So, I guess, how could cities be better partners in this dysfunctional relationship?

[00:35:58] How does this dysfunction get solved?

[00:36:00] I'm asking you to be historian, political analyst, and relationship counselor.

[00:36:06] Oh, all three.

[00:36:07] Prognosticator, too.

[00:36:08] All three at once, all three at once.

[00:36:10] You know, I think part of this has to do with a kind of intensely emotional nature of the

[00:36:14] relationship of tech with its employers, with its employees, with its customers, with the

[00:36:23] places that it inhabits.

[00:36:25] And this is what I mean by this.

[00:36:27] Tech from, you know, Silicon Valley companies and other companies, I'm using Silicon Valley

[00:36:32] as shorthand for the tech industry, American tech industry here, have from the get-go presented

[00:36:37] themselves, well, not from the get-go, but certainly from the 1970s forward when you have the personal

[00:36:41] computer and video games, these companies were presenting themselves as thinking different,

[00:36:46] as kinder, gentler capitalism.

[00:36:48] Remember Google's de facto motto, don't be evil, saying we are not like your granddad's

[00:36:55] big business.

[00:36:56] We are not like the rest of corporate America.

[00:36:57] We are making the world a better place.

[00:36:59] We are driven by values.

[00:37:01] We're great places to work because you're, and if you work here, you are doing things,

[00:37:04] you're doing good things, all good things.

[00:37:06] And for a very long time, politicians of both parties were completely on that message too.

[00:37:12] Oh my gosh, tech can do no wrong.

[00:37:14] We don't have to go back too far in time to, you know, every time, the rare time a tech

[00:37:21] CEO would come be called up for a hearing on Capitol Hill.

[00:37:24] I'm going to put Microsoft in its antitrust battles of the 90s off on the shelf for the

[00:37:28] time being.

[00:37:28] But everybody else got, the carpet was rolled out.

[00:37:32] And, you know, you are fantastic.

[00:37:35] And yeah, could you just pay a little more in taxes?

[00:37:37] But you know what?

[00:37:38] We love our iPhones and you're just so wonderful.

[00:37:40] And then that started turning.

[00:37:43] That turned about 10 years ago.

[00:37:44] And it coincided with the political rise of Donald Trump.

[00:37:49] And the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and then also the Brexit vote in 2016.

[00:37:55] I think that's the moment of real, a real kind of the love fest ends.

[00:38:00] And it also is happening at the same time that these tech heavy cities are experiencing the

[00:38:06] downsides of rapid growth, are experiencing, you know, the housing crunch.

[00:38:12] This is really, this is all kind of crunching at the same time.

[00:38:15] And so, you know, when you're deeply in love, when you have this, like, it's kind of like

[00:38:19] a high school boyfriend or girlfriend.

[00:38:21] You're like, I love him so much.

[00:38:22] And then when you break up, I hate them.

[00:38:24] I feel like there's a little bit of that dynamic going on.

[00:38:29] And there also is this presumption that can't, tech, you're supposed to be better than everyone

[00:38:33] else.

[00:38:34] Can't you be better?

[00:38:35] Can't you just do better?

[00:38:36] Right?

[00:38:37] And that is something, you know, this kind of moralism of, you know, you're Google.

[00:38:42] You should be better than this.

[00:38:44] You're Amazon.

[00:38:44] You have a smile on your packaging.

[00:38:46] You should be better than this.

[00:38:48] You're customer centric.

[00:38:49] Well, where are your customers?

[00:38:50] You know, what does that mean?

[00:38:51] And at the end of the day, they're corporations then whose leaders are there.

[00:38:59] What their job is, is to increase value for their shareholders.

[00:39:03] That is their job.

[00:39:05] And so this kind of self-regulation that the tech industry has enjoyed since the 1990s.

[00:39:11] Oh, you guys are great.

[00:39:13] You're, you know, kinder, gentler capitalism.

[00:39:14] We're just going to let you regulate yourselves because we trust you.

[00:39:17] Well, that doesn't work.

[00:39:18] And going back to Sandeep's question about, is it too big?

[00:39:21] Is it so big it's failing, right?

[00:39:23] Look, these are the rules of business.

[00:39:24] We could go on and on about the progressive era and railroads and Andrew Carnegie and steel.

[00:39:29] And, you know, the same stuff happens.

[00:39:31] You get a certain bigness and you need someone else to put guardrails on it.

[00:39:34] And that's government.

[00:39:36] So to answer your question, David, I think part of this is just let's get more realistic

[00:39:40] about who's at the table.

[00:39:42] And also tech people need to get over there.

[00:39:45] Oh, every government bureaucrat is just doesn't understand anything about we do.

[00:39:49] And they're oppositional and they don't get it.

[00:39:51] And so there needs to be there does need to be some reconciliation of sorts, because that's

[00:39:57] the only way.

[00:39:59] And in collaboration and and sitting down at the table with executives from a large technology

[00:40:05] company, it does not mean that a, you know, a centrist mayor of a blue city should get voted

[00:40:11] out of office.

[00:40:12] And I think that's something that, you know, or sort of, oh, they're just their corporate

[00:40:16] shills.

[00:40:17] You know, there is this binary that has been driving this politics.

[00:40:21] And it just the consequence, nothing gets done.

[00:40:23] And these are very, very big.

[00:40:25] These these companies are not going to go away and they're going to continue to be a big

[00:40:28] presence.

[00:40:29] I'm going to start with an anecdote and then I'm going to try to tie some of these threads

[00:40:32] together and I'm going to make an effort that maybe will turn out to be bullshit, but

[00:40:37] I'm going to give it a shot.

[00:40:38] So first of all, so 2013, December of 2013, new mayor is elected in the city of Seattle.

[00:40:45] I happen to accompany the mayor of elect to his sort of get to know you meeting with with

[00:40:50] Amazon, right?

[00:40:51] The biggest employer in the city of Seattle.

[00:40:53] And we walk in this room.

[00:40:54] There's probably about 15 senior Amazon execs and government affairs people in the room.

[00:41:00] And the thing I so vividly remember from that meeting is on this big table, this big conference

[00:41:05] table, they roll out a map of the cities of Seattle and they show in the kind of South

[00:41:09] Lake Union neighborhood.

[00:41:11] It's a it's a big map building by building.

[00:41:13] You know, the buildings are outlined and there's a set of them, you know, in the South Lake

[00:41:18] Union neighborhood, a small cluster of them that are green.

[00:41:21] And they were like, these are the buildings that we rent and occupy right now in the city

[00:41:27] of Seattle.

[00:41:27] But around that, there was a ring of yellow buildings.

[00:41:31] And they were like, these are buildings we have lease arrangements with, but we have not

[00:41:37] yet occupied.

[00:41:38] And there was another ring around that one, a big ring of red.

[00:41:43] And they were like, these are the buildings we are targeting to expand to in the next 10 years.

[00:41:49] Right.

[00:41:50] And on the one hand, that was informational.

[00:41:52] Right.

[00:41:53] Hey, we're telling you about all we have all these great plans to like be part of big part

[00:41:57] of Seattle.

[00:41:58] And on the other hand, I took that as a little bit of a threat.

[00:42:03] Right.

[00:42:03] Like like or or at least a like, hey, dude, you're the mayor, but we're the we're the growing

[00:42:09] emerging power in this town.

[00:42:12] Right.

[00:42:12] And you got a deal.

[00:42:14] You got to understand that.

[00:42:15] Right.

[00:42:15] Because we're your whole frickin economy.

[00:42:19] You know, at the time in 2013, we were coming out of the Great Recession and real estate

[00:42:25] in Seattle had really started turning around about 18 months earlier.

[00:42:28] And by at that point, the entirety of the growth in commercial real estate in Seattle was attributable

[00:42:33] to one company, Amazon.

[00:42:36] Right.

[00:42:36] You know, if you had taken them out of the equation, we would have still been that negative

[00:42:39] in terms of commercial real.

[00:42:41] So so that message was not lost.

[00:42:44] Right.

[00:42:44] At City Hall coming out of meetings like that.

[00:42:48] So now to try to tie some of this stuff together.

[00:42:50] Right.

[00:42:51] I said so that that just that's where I started thinking about about like how much power do

[00:42:56] these companies have and how do you kind of relate to them?

[00:42:58] But Margaret, you talked about kind of kind of the identity politics of the right, which

[00:43:04] I think is a really important point.

[00:43:06] And I do think Trumpism 1.0, right, when Trump comes to power in 2016, the beating heart of

[00:43:12] Trumpism was nothing if not the kind of real legitimization of a politics of white identity.

[00:43:18] Right.

[00:43:18] That's what it was about.

[00:43:20] And, you know, Charlottesville.

[00:43:21] Right.

[00:43:22] When he was like, oh, yeah, there were some Nazis there or whatever.

[00:43:24] There were some bad people.

[00:43:24] But there's just a bunch of good white people who are just trying to, you know, you know,

[00:43:27] stand up for their rights.

[00:43:29] And we shouldn't be, you know, they're fine people, too.

[00:43:31] Right.

[00:43:31] Right.

[00:43:31] But to complicate matters, Trump 2.0, the dude is building a multiracial working class

[00:43:38] coalition.

[00:43:39] Right.

[00:43:39] That's electing him.

[00:43:40] It's you can't really call it a white identity politics anymore when it's not entirely white

[00:43:48] anymore.

[00:43:48] Right.

[00:43:49] And so it's and bringing it back to tech, it seems to me in that first period, 2016 era,

[00:43:55] Trump comes to power.

[00:43:56] Or the tech companies and the people who ran them really felt compelled to align themselves,

[00:44:02] as you said, with the values of their workers, which are these sort of progressive resistance,

[00:44:08] urban archipelago.

[00:44:10] You know, Trump may have won this election, but it's not going to it's not going to we're

[00:44:17] not having it in our in our blue bastions and our blue cities.

[00:44:20] Right.

[00:44:21] Trump 2.0.

[00:44:23] I'm not sure.

[00:44:24] To me, it looks like the big tech companies are saying we got too progressive and too

[00:44:28] political.

[00:44:28] And now our employees are hectoring us about Gaza and shit.

[00:44:32] And we don't like that.

[00:44:33] So shut the hell up.

[00:44:34] And we're going to fire some people at Google for, you know, we used to encourage political

[00:44:39] activism.

[00:44:40] And now they're they're saying in this new era of Trump, it's not a fluke.

[00:44:43] And we got to accommodate the guy.

[00:44:45] And Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, is not letting them editorial, you know, even

[00:44:48] before the election, editorialize against Trump.

[00:44:51] And Zuckerberg is going before Congress and saying it was a real mistake for us to, you

[00:44:57] know, he called it censorship to work with the Biden administration on misinformation

[00:45:02] and disinformation.

[00:45:03] So so it does seem to me it's like a different era in a brave new world now.

[00:45:08] Yeah. And look, most in the tech community, you know, after Trump's election in 2016, were

[00:45:13] very fearful, fearful on a personal level because they had voted and many of them, you know,

[00:45:19] vocally supported and donated to Hillary Clinton.

[00:45:22] But also feeling like this is going to be dangerous to our business.

[00:45:25] I mean, tech is if you're going to have a hard crackdown on immigration, the tech sector

[00:45:28] has the highest proportion of foreign born workers of any industry and on and on and

[00:45:33] on. Like this is going to be bad for business.

[00:45:35] Well, what happens in the intervening eight years?

[00:45:37] It's been a really good eight years for tech businesses, a really good eight years.

[00:45:42] So I think part of the calculus is, oh, huh, this, you know, the market didn't penalize

[00:45:48] us for this.

[00:45:48] And also and going back to say, you know, someone like Mark Zuckerberg saying it was a mistake

[00:45:53] to, you know, work with the Biden administration.

[00:45:55] You know, they got no wins for doing that.

[00:46:00] And, you know, it was a diversion, you know, hit to their public image.

[00:46:06] But also the stock price wasn't meaningfully impacted in the long run.

[00:46:09] In fact, they're doing just as well.

[00:46:11] That it was kind of this validation of, oh, we just need to go back to, you know, go back

[00:46:17] to basics and, you know, go heads down.

[00:46:20] And let's not pay attention to these people complaining.

[00:46:22] And then when you have, you know, protests about not just, you know, Gaza, but these

[00:46:26] are things that actually have material impact on the business.

[00:46:28] You know, Google employees are protesting Google doing work with benefit the Israeli government.

[00:46:34] That's what, and, you know, so it's going to the business.

[00:46:38] So I think that's part of what's happening here is this kind of moral, this impatience

[00:46:47] with all of the things that have been roiling the industry and recognizing, too, that they

[00:46:54] have, you know, ample supply of talent.

[00:46:57] There was, you know, when the tech market was really, really tight at the height of the

[00:47:02] COVID pandemic, when there, you know, it was really, you really wanted to hold on to every

[00:47:06] employee you had because they were growing so quickly, they couldn't even hire fast enough.

[00:47:11] Their, you know, employees might have had a little more leverage to push back.

[00:47:14] And now, now not so much.

[00:47:17] So there's, yeah, I think there's a lot of, and at the end of the day, this is all about

[00:47:21] business.

[00:47:21] I think this is, you know, Silicon Valley has always voted and companies and executives

[00:47:26] have always leaned towards the party or the individuals that seem to have been most friendly

[00:47:30] to them.

[00:47:32] And that was true in the 1980s with the Reagan administration.

[00:47:35] The relationship soured and with the George Bush one administration, because Bush was business

[00:47:41] friendly, but didn't really care terribly much about giving tech special.

[00:47:44] Benefits, not to the same degree Reagan had.

[00:47:47] And so they were ripe for the picking when Bill Clinton came in and said, I'm a new kind

[00:47:51] of Democrat.

[00:47:51] I love y'all.

[00:47:53] And wooed them.

[00:47:54] And Al Gore, you know, was the techie in chief.

[00:47:57] And now we have Donald Trump saying, I'm not going to regulate crypto.

[00:48:01] And I'm going to get rid of Lena Kahn, who's the, you know, FTC chair, who's, you know,

[00:48:06] bringing these suits against these large companies.

[00:48:08] And I think, and also feeling like, well, we, you know, it was, we've done pretty well.

[00:48:14] Let's, let's not, let's not rock the boat.

[00:48:16] So, you know, I want to ask if just to, to sum that, I mean, is tech going to get a little

[00:48:22] bit more Trumpy right now?

[00:48:24] And given that the relationship then that blue cities have with tech is always a little

[00:48:29] bit contingent as you're suggesting on the fact that, look, you know, they ultimately

[00:48:35] have their business interests, you know, at heart.

[00:48:38] They're not like true political allies necessarily.

[00:48:42] So, you know, how should, how should progressive or not so progressive, how should blue city leaders

[00:48:47] kind of think about that relationship?

[00:48:48] Given that, you know, they're worried about, there's some benefits, but the, but tech is

[00:48:53] also worried about, you know, are they going to take away the H-1B visa program and hurt

[00:48:59] tech that way?

[00:49:00] So, and, and which could hurt blue cities and tech companies.

[00:49:05] So yeah, how should, how should blue city leaders kind of think about that?

[00:49:10] Yeah, I think it all remains to be seen, right?

[00:49:13] I mean, that's the, the best advice a historian can, can give you is predictions are dangerous

[00:49:18] business, don't make predictions.

[00:49:19] We just don't know what's going to happen next.

[00:49:20] That's history.

[00:49:21] History is very clear on that.

[00:49:22] This is a podcast though.

[00:49:23] This is not peer reviewed.

[00:49:26] I think David and I both learned that in our history 500.

[00:49:29] Yeah, exactly.

[00:49:30] Exactly.

[00:49:30] This is what happens when you bring me over.

[00:49:33] But, you know.

[00:49:34] No good social science makes predictions.

[00:49:36] Only, the only valid thing is to study the past.

[00:49:39] Yeah.

[00:49:39] We predict, we predict what happened in the past.

[00:49:42] There you go.

[00:49:42] There you go.

[00:49:44] So I, so I think you all will probably agree with us that it remains, it's either let's

[00:49:49] see what happens.

[00:49:51] Like, is tech going to become more Trumpy?

[00:49:53] Are the people who, the tech leaders who are now vocally Trumpy, who I should say, most

[00:49:58] of them are people who have been conservatives all along.

[00:50:01] You know, a figure like Peter Thiel, who the Facebook board member, investor, the one person

[00:50:07] who was a kind of loud and proud, I'm speaking at the Republican convention in 2016, Trump

[00:50:12] ally.

[00:50:13] He's been conservative since he was an undergraduate at Stanford.

[00:50:16] Like, he's never changed.

[00:50:18] David Sachs, another very prominent tech investor and Trump supporter.

[00:50:21] He's been same, same, same.

[00:50:23] So you aren't seeing people like changing.

[00:50:25] You're just seeing a different cast of characters.

[00:50:27] But.

[00:50:31] He's never, never really been a progressive.

[00:50:33] No, he's never really been a progressive.

[00:50:35] And he, you know, didn't endorse Trump, but he also, you know, didn't, you know, he's

[00:50:39] kind of playing it cool.

[00:50:41] That being said, let's see what happens.

[00:50:43] If, you know, if there is an immigration crackdown that extends to, you know, making

[00:50:48] it not only difficult for the tech industry to hire and retain the talent it needs, but

[00:50:54] also just puts a chill, such a chill on the global market so that, you know, everyone's

[00:51:00] like, well, that's nice.

[00:51:01] I'm going to be, I'll see you in Toronto.

[00:51:03] I'm not coming here.

[00:51:04] You know, where you have an, where it becomes really difficult to attract talented people

[00:51:09] from around the world who, by the way, are the secret to Americans' tech dominance

[00:51:13] is the fact that we have all of these extraordinary people who were born in other places.

[00:51:19] Um, that's one thing.

[00:51:21] If the high tariffs, I mean, for export oriented economies, which most of these tech hubs are,

[00:51:28] um, I mean, look up and down the West coast, you know, these are tech hubs.

[00:51:32] They're also ports.

[00:51:33] They're also, you know, they're shipping stuff out of here.

[00:51:37] Like, and so if there is, and the Pacific trade and China trade.

[00:51:41] So if, if that, if that slams both on the consumer side and on the business side, that's

[00:51:47] going to be detrimental.

[00:51:48] And, you know, I think it remains to be seen the juries out.

[00:51:52] And I think for the, you know, the interest, I think it's an important point about kind of

[00:51:56] whiteness defending whiteness was a Trump theme or sub theme in 2016, again, coming in after

[00:52:02] Obama, the election and reelection of a black president is not an insubstantial factor in

[00:52:08] the rise of Trump and Trumpism, um, allowing all the, the nastiness that has just been bubbling

[00:52:14] just under the surface of American society all along, to be clear.

[00:52:17] Um, uh, we can do a separate, uh, podcast on the 1920s and talk about that.

[00:52:22] Cause that's, that'll make everyone's hair stand on end.

[00:52:24] Um, but you know, allowing all that to come out.

[00:52:27] But I think this multiracial coalition, you know, let's see if it's an actual coalition.

[00:52:32] Let's see if it's durable.

[00:52:33] Let's see if this is something that is, uh, just very particular to this post pandemic

[00:52:38] economy.

[00:52:39] Um, the, uh, perpetuation of people feeling the, the economic pinch and also feeling a

[00:52:45] real economic and material threat from immigration.

[00:52:50] Um, which is certainly, I think a big explanatory and seeing these sort of the way the votes are

[00:52:56] going around in the border regions where you're seeing kind of previously bluer places at the

[00:53:01] southern, um, southern part of the United States kind of turning, turning redder.

[00:53:06] Let's see, you know, it, it kind of, it's all going to depend on what he's able to deliver

[00:53:12] or not.

[00:53:13] Yeah.

[00:53:13] I think that's a great cautionary note.

[00:53:15] I will just say though, you know, the, the bromance between big cities and, and big tech,

[00:53:21] you know, which we were already saying even before this election result has already gotten,

[00:53:26] you know, kind of strained or kind of rocky.

[00:53:30] I do think if, if big tech is going to, you know, it's going to work to accommodate Trump

[00:53:37] 2.0 here.

[00:53:39] And they're going to be like, okay, we got to protect our business interests.

[00:53:43] So we got to, you know, make peace with Trump so that he doesn't take away our H1Bs that,

[00:53:48] you know, the pipeline of talent and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:53:51] I think that that relationship between big blue cities and big tech is just going to

[00:53:57] get rockier, right?

[00:53:58] Like that's my guess.

[00:54:00] I mean, but the other factor, you know, again, let's see how, what plays out, but what was

[00:54:04] very clear in the election that just passed too, was this, you know, bubbling up of frustration

[00:54:09] that extends beyond tech and these blue cities with, you know, quality of life, with grappling

[00:54:15] with housing shortages, grappling with, um, kind of just the cities.

[00:54:20] What has happened to cityscapes in the last 10 years?

[00:54:23] Strength disorder.

[00:54:23] Yeah.

[00:54:24] Yeah.

[00:54:24] And, and that, you know, kind of the real, um, you know, the very real deterioration, um,

[00:54:31] that has affected people across the income spectrum, um, in these large places.

[00:54:35] And, and so that's, you know, the, I think those things are also kind of happening.

[00:54:39] That's the water.

[00:54:40] All of this is swimming in too.

[00:54:42] So, um, yeah, we'll see.

[00:54:45] Margaret and Mara, thank you so much.

[00:54:46] This is really fun.

[00:54:47] Thanks for having me.

[00:54:48] That's it for this edition of the Blue City Blues podcast with tech historian, Margaret

[00:54:53] O'Meara and political consultant and analyst Sandeep Kaushik.

[00:54:57] I'm David High.