The ideological relationship between New Right and New Tech
How should we expect the interplay between what is arguably the two most important new forces of American politics – Trumpism and ‘Siliconism’ – to shape American understandings of democracy, power and the globe? How are they likely to transform American approaches to privacy, war, peace or power? And what, crucially, will they mean for American understandings of that key category, ‘liberal governance’? Will they grow into opposite poles of a new American political landscape? Or may the ideological landscapes of New Right and New Tech potentially overlap in surprising if complex ways? In other words: what to make of an American political future shaped by the combined forces of New Right insurgency and New Tech disruption?
These were the questions explored during Vibeke Schou Tjalve’s visiting researcher stay at the Center for Right Wing Studies (CFRS) this summer. Part of the Berkeley University near San Francisco, California, the CFRS is located right in the hub of America’s increasingly influential tech-land – Silicon Valley – and as such a central place from which to study a US political agenda whose political trends, Right and Left, are increasingly shaped by the frontier mentality of the American West: a place less fond of institutions, regulation or law than the ‘tamed’ American East - and decidedly more inclined to put its faith in the rugged forces of individualism, experimentation, competition and riot.
With its climate-friendly, LBGT-embracing and immigration-open ‘global village’-agenda, the new Tech heartland of Northern California is often cast as the embodiment of progressive politics - since the election of president Donald Trump, indeed even as the New Right’s most powerful and likely challenger. Question is though, if the roots in Californian counter-culture which undoubtedly drives the American Tech world, may not – in complex and undoubtedly unintentional ways – rhyme with themes on the New Right agenda: skepticism of state and regulation, disdain for the established and institutional, commitment to disruption, and fetishization of both plutocratic capitalism and direct democracy populism.
One important inroad to begin answering that question, is to explore the importance of geographical roots. Both the New American Right and the ever more powerful conglomerate that is American New Tech represent ideological impulses born outside of the Washington commitment to liberal institutionalism and legislative governance. Understanding this ‘westward move’ in the topography of contemporary American politics – that is, understanding the geographical and cultural space that has born, bred and shaped New Right and New Tech outlooks – was a central empirical ambition of the meetings and interviews build into this WoR research stay.
Beyond that ambition, the research stay was an important part of a broader WoR aim: to plug into, and help build, stronger international networks around the study of the Right and the future of international order. Founded in 2008, and propelled by the rise of the Tea Party Movement, the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies is one of the few American research centers to focus specifically on the Right – and one which we hope to establish closer contact with in the future. Both its chair, Dr. Lawrence Rosenthal, and its academic coordinator, Christine Trost, put impressive amounts of energy into establishing a stimulating academic environment for visiting scholars who do research and the Right, and for linking historically and theoretically informed work on lineages of Right wing ideology with contemporary sociological and political analysis.
