West of Government

Arriving late in the afternoon for a two-months research stay in Berkeley, California, last June, I had barely put down my suitcase before I made a beeline for the 6pm vinyasa class at the Yoga Tree on Telegraph Avenue.

I went there to cure a permanent back pain, brought to the brink of the unbearable by the twelve-hour Copenhagen–San Francisco flight behind me. To my surprise, the evening turned out a kind of kick-start glimpse into the wider phenomenon I had come to Berkeley to study: American distrust of government.

Over the next couple of months I took two or three yoga classes each week (my back kept hurting) and sampled a handful of local institutes (with one on every second corner and a general policy of ‘two first weeks for free’, shuffling around was tempting).

Nothing else I read or saw that summer conveyed the American distrust of authority and love of self-governance with quite the same ease as these California sermons. Week after week I lay on my mat in the blue evening light, taking in key commandments of their radical religion flowing in melodious chants from the mouths of the talkative class instructors. Life is a journey: its purpose is movement, transformation, exploring. And, at the heart of the liturgy, freedom of movement begins with autonomy.

To plunge in, the repeated hymn of our sessions sounded, we must set ourselves free from the power of others.

This yoga fieldwork took place as Donald Trump settled in to his second year in office and opened my eyes to some puzzling headlines in the daily newspaper feed. The original purpose of my research stay was to try and dig deeper into the kind of contempt for international institutions that had risen to power with Trump and the so-called ‘national-conservative’ Right: tracing its ideas and reasons, mapping its roots and sponsors.

That bohemian-cosmopolitan California – intellectual home of student uprisings and anti-war movements – wasn’t exactly Trump-Land, I well knew. Mainly, I had come to benefit from the academic environment at the university’s Center for Right Wing Studies. Now, a series of news stories and magazine pieces had turned these overly rigid categories of Left and Right, nationalists and internationalists, upside down.

“Silicon Valley warms to Trump after chilly start” ran a surprising headline in the New York Times. During the Trump presidential campaign, the US media had widely covered Trump’s companionship with Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir billionaire. But Thiel was a self-declared libertarian who had long described Silicon as a place of claustrophobic political correctness. It made sense that he would consider Trump’s anti-Washington, anti-establishment agenda refreshing. But as far as I recalled, most of Silicon had come down down hard onPeter Thiel for that endorsement.

Googling on though, I found more. “Musk and Trump bromance”. “Meet the Right Wing Power Players Beneath Silicon Valley’s Liberal Facade”. And, in a piece from the tech magazine Wired, “How Silicon Utopianism Brought You The Dystopian Trump Presidency”.

An affinity of ideas

Sitting in my office at the Center for Right Wing Studies, these headlines made me rethink the research question with which I had arrived: how to make sense of that American distrust in international institutions that Trump’s election had brought to the White House?

That there is an obvious link between new technologies of communication and the rise of nationalist and far-right agendas across Europe and the US was not news to me: the role of Facebook, Google and Cambridge Analytica in securing both the Brexit and Trump campaign outcomes was a well-covered fact. The investigative reporter Carole Cadwardr had done impressive and near Pulitzer-winning work on the complex links between data-mining and social media targeting in The Observer – including pointed questions to a Silicon Valley whose financial greed (selling your data is profitable!) or opportune naivéty (we simply ‘connect people’) gave the impression of being a willing handmaiden to anti-globalist figures like Steve Bannon or Nigel Farage.

But what the headlines I now came across suggested, and what my everyday encounter with the vibes of California ideology confirmed, was something more than financial opportunism or political naivité. It involved a deeper, more substantial affinity of ideas between the worlds of American New Right and American New Tech. While certainly of different political colors on issues like climate, migration or gender, both had a fundamental dislike of conventional, centralized government.

The wording might have been different. But in many ways, Trump and Silicon opposed both East Coast bureaucrats and EU/UN regulators with similar zeal and fervor.

As my random search for news stories also made clear, this affinity was not one with which Silicon felt comfortable. On my office laptop, I watched through the Senate hearings on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica connection, which had taken place just a month before my arrival in Berkeley. The shamed and sweaty face of Mark Zuckerberg told a story of tech titans clearly baffled at the irony that their technologies of ‘connectivity’ had been used by the national Right to fuel agendas of walls and tariffs.

And yet. The Silicon fist fight with Margrethe Vestager and the European Union over issues of regulation and taxation that also took place in this period – did this not smack of much the same impatience with ‘tedious international rulemaking’ as that repeatedly hailed by Trump? Was not the Valley’s faith in ‘disruption’ – a faith encapsulated in Zuckerberg’s much beloved Facebook slogan ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ – of a kindred spirit with Steve Bannon’s self-proclaimed Leninist mantra ‘destroy the state’ or ‘burn down the establishment’?

Amidst the food trucks at a Berkeley Fourth of July celebration, my eye caught a newsstand headline: “Elon Musk offers submarine to caved Thai boys”. Circumventing the state’s efforts and international collaborations already in place at the cave, Musk hoped that Tesla and SpaceX/Boring could solve the problem.

The offer was no doubt altruistic. It was also, I realized, completely in tune with the theme of a Silicon anti-government impulse. Impatient with conventional forms of bureaucracy, deliberation and state-to-state diplomacy. And committed to the forces of personal leadership and human ingenuity.

That the offer intersected with the Fourth of July celebration and its themes of independent self-governance – no doubt entirely coincidentally – was fitting.

Peace, love and freedom from government

Back in the office, I decided to dig deeper. On my desk lay the only book I had brought with me to Berkeley: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s much acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Sorrow on the American Right. Published against the backdrop of a five-year field study of the Louisiana Tea Party movement in 2016, the melancholy and strangely beautiful aesthetics of its front cover image – an abandoned Louisiana factory – told a powerful story of Trump-land. The American South. The American Mid-West. Home of the deserted, unemployed and disappointed. The ‘left-behinds’, to whom ‘globalism’ has come to mean little but poverty, drugs, and exploitation. In other words: obvious heartland of the current American run on the ‘liberal world order’ and its institutions.

New Tech California was pretty much the opposite: inventor and beneficiary, not victim or waste product, of a digital global economy. Busy. Plugged in. And stratospherically wealthy. Even so, was there an angle from which California too should be viewed as the ‘heartland’ to contemporary US rejections of global governance? Hostile to the idea of global regulation for very different reasons than the American South or Mid-West, yet on the issue of resistance towards international bureaucracies, likely to find common ground with it.

Outside my office window on the corner of Haste and Bowditch, People’s Park was in clear view – paved with hippie-graffiti that has survived since the seventies, and as such a living visual testimony to its role in walks for civil liberties and free speech. What caught my eyes now, though, was mainly the dozens of homeless people to whom the park has come to serve as home.

The schisms of that image perfectly mirrored my sense of 2018 California as a place of paradox.

Walking to my office each morning, I passed sign after sign on the front of private lawns. “Love Not Hate”, they declared – and from yoga instructors to colleagues or coffee-shop workers, kindness was indeed a phenomenon I met often in Berkeley. Yet the mentality of this place was distinctively different from those of East Coast cities like Boston, Philadelphia, New York or Washington D.C., places I had stayed in for periods in the past and with which I felt more familiar. This was the American West, and however clichéd, the ideals of movement and autonomy were indisputably more pronounced. Home of civil liberties struggles – yes. But the key word here was resistance – freedom from, not with government – even when ‘rights’ were pursued arm in arm.

Hence the kind and caring yoga instructors, who would wear ‘Justice’ or ‘Love All’ T-shirts, but buy 15 dollars kale smoothies and walk straight past the homeless in the park.

Joan Baez and venture capital

Then I went to Moe’s bookstore. With its distinctive red and white striped entrance marquise, a rebel past as a student activist hideout when things got too heated and a current collection of books well beyond 200,000 titles, the place is something of a Berkeley institution (according to the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘India has Taj Mahal. Berkeley has Moe’s).

Opened in 1959 by Moe Moscowitz and located just a couple of blocks off campus, the three-storey space itself tells a story of California’s distinctive and in some ways paradoxical ideological make up. A bronze bust of Moe poking his tongue out, centrally placed on the entrance floor, tells up front where you are at: in the heartland of American counterculture.

On the walls, a variety of black and white photos from the beatnik, jazz and civil rights era. Folksy singers. Stone-throwing activists. On the shelfs, books on Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Neil Young – or on local schi-fi authors Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin, whose world-known dystopian novels all speak to California dichotomies.

The search for autonomy – the fear of slavery. A longing for friendship and fellowship, yet a fear of control or mainstreaming. On another shelf, a sign that reads ‘Anolog Books Sold Here’, and yet there is a larger selection of books on Artificial Intelligence, tech entrepeneurship or venture capital than bookstores of similar leftist-intellectual ambitions elsewhere. Even the quickest glance across titles and memorabilia at Moe’s, and one is reminded that Californian counterculture means something entirely more complex than the shallow concepts of ‘multicultural’ or ‘left wing’ permit. Dreamy and ruthless, pacifist and violent, rural-nostalgic and high tech-futurist – all at once.

Silicon Valley, Foer explains, is the child of California counter-culture: it despises the ´tyranny of bureaucracy´ and the ´mindless submission of the herd´

I asked for help to find recent titles on my newborn theme of interest: the political ideology of Silicon Valley. Ideally something on its historical roots.

After half an hour in the sections on technology and innovation, I came up with a single, useful title: World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Written by journalist and former editor of The New Republic Franklin Foer, its introductory questions and storyline were spot on.

Silicon Valley, Foer explains, is the child of California counter-culture: it despises the “tyranny of bureaucracy” and the “mindless submission of the herd”. From this deep antipathy grows its love of technology: to the Paolo Alto mind, an informal, non-state road to connectivity. While ‘the computer’ might at first have been born as the instrument and invention of big institutions, Silicon had built itself on a vision of harnessing computers as tools for personal liberation and communal connection.

This was it, though – I could find no further literature, on how and why New Right and New Tech might meet around the issue of anti-bureaucracy sentiments.

In the back of my mind, a long-buried interest in the distinct ideological roots of the American West was resurfacing. If there were no new books, might diving into history help?

An older, unusually forthcoming employee came to my assistance: try the basement floor. Full of used books, and with a considerable section dedicated to ‘Americana’. I bought a large cup of coffee, took it downstairs, and, like the handful of fellow hopeful students and researchers already there, hunched over row after row in hope of finding long lost gems.

Some titles I already knew: Richard Slotkin’s modern classic Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier or Anders Stephanson’s equally acclaimed Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right, for instance. Years back, I had used these in a course I taught on American national history and identity. My focus then, though, had been on the ways in which the nineteenth-century American experience of westward expansion paved the way for its role as global ‘liberal’ missionary in the twentieth century to come.

What seeing their covers now – all pioneer caravans and gunslinger cowboys – reminded me was that the frontier ideology explains not only the American pursuit of world order but also its antipathy towards that world order as one of world government. Was not the Silicon Valley outlook – universal in ambition, yet fiercely resistant to all forms of top-down regulation and restraint – a child of this frontier attitude? And wasn’t the frontier link to Trump, and well before him, to Goldwater, Nixon or Reagan, equally obvious?

Other titles I had not previously come across. Kevin Starr’s multi-volume work on ‘The Californian Dream’ described a history of impressive striving, radical sentiments and deep dilemmas. A place of ruthless, capitalist fortune seeking: goldmines, fruit empires, film dynasties. And – home to Hollywood – a cultural factory, in which the ideals of imagination and self-invention were perpetually reproduced. The 2012 essay collection West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California nicely completed the picture, explaining the dream as one of belonging as much as autonomy. But belonging as community and companionship – not the ‘state’ or the more formal ‘society’.

These essays explained precisely how the current American tech giants – most of them raised on California ideas and outlooks – were the children of both dreamy utopianism and ruthless realism. Anarchists, libertarians and collectivists. Letting the wisdom of these works sink in, I began to see California as a sort of radical version of US political impulses at large. The pursuit of communal paradise, but also the escape from institutional ‘corruptions’. With that pattern, I was reminded of thinkers whose role in shaping American political culture I had come across in the past: John Calvin and Charles Darwin.

Puritans and Pioneers

That story begins precisely where Alexis de Tocqueville too began his famed analysis of American democracy: with the very first Puritan who landed on Massachusetts’ shores. Imagine a bearded, dark-suited, serious-looking man boarding a ship in April 1630. With him, a group of equally serious settlers – women, men, children.

This is John Winthrop, a man whose name American children continue to be taught and whose solemn gaze protrudes from the walls of most museums on US history. The ship was The Arbella, and its modest wooden frame perfectly mirrored the ascetic, anti-pompous agenda of the souls aboard. Setting sail for the eastern coast of North America, Winthrop and his settler community brought what would turn out to be a deeply influential cargo: the idea of the New World as a place which, in order to save the Old World, would have to escape it.

They believed they were on a mission for God, called upon to build a ‘model society’ – a City Upon a Hill that would serve as shining example for the sinners remaining at home.

The modest clothing and austere looks served a purpose – they reflected a goodbye with Europe and its symbols of hierarchy and power: tainted, decadent, corrupt. Based on John Calvin’s radical Protestant ideals of personal conscience and congregational autonomy, the Puritans wanted to replace the vices of Catholic, royalist Europe – greed, envy, deceit – with the virtues of egalitarian self-governance.

Here, nothing but the exercise of personal judgement would be King. Any catalogue of early Puritan art underscores the thematic. Settlers working the land in the free. Settlers joined in prayer amongst the tranquil, unspoiled settings of the outdoors. Settlers whose priest sits among them, not above them.

Europe could keep its gold-ravished kings and cathedrals: America was to be pure, equal, unpretentious – free!

The American Declaration of Independence, the US constitution and early American foreign policy were all built on these fundamentally Calvinist foundations: skeptical of Old World hierarchies, their “entangling alliances“ and “wars of interest and intrique” (as early US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams once famously put it). Soon, though, Washington D.C. too became full of institutions – and the American search for Eden, purity and freedom pushed further West. Fast forward two centuries, then, and enter another man who hardly imagined the reach of his vision: Charles Darwin and the idea of history as evolution produced through untamed competition. Arguably, no single nation has been as fond of Darwin as the young American one, or translated his ultimately biological ideas into the realm of the human and social quite as freely. To the US of the late nineteenth century, Darwin was used to make sense of the American frontier.

The logic went something like this. America had arrived at a superior – or, to stay in the language of Darwinism – a ‘more fit’ form of government than Europe: democracy. It had done so because the very experience of travelling westwards – out of the shadow of the East and beyond its reactionary, corrupting institutions – had produced a new type of human being: inventive, creative, original. One of the ‘translators’ of Darwin into this period of rising nationalism, a geographer called Frederick Jackson Turner, pompously put it like this: “in the primitive wilderness of the Western frontier”, in this “continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society”, a new human breed, with “intolerance of administrative experience and education” and deep “antipathy to control”, was being born. The frontier, both Turner and his generation believed, was what had produced the American spirit of democracy – a spirit fundamentally skeptical of centralized government.

Look up John Gast’s iconic painting American Progress from 1872 and you’ll get a sense of the vision. Not only because of what is in the painting, but because of what is not. It depicts the vast open lands of the American prairie and the scattered groups of settlers moving across it. In it are the heroes of American civilization, bringing with them technological innovation: trains, telecommunications. And above them floats the spirit of freedom: a white, dreamy, translucent woman. Absent are the symbols of Empire, European style: libraries, court rooms, parliaments, cathedrals.

The message of this profoundly sanitized and idealized imagery is clear. The force of progress is the march of the mind, not of institutional planning.

The return of the West

What my readings in the basement of Moe’s suggested to me was that these Puritan and Darwinist parts of American political culture have been reactivated. No period and no part of the American ideological landscape was ever blindly in love with the idea of ‘big state’.

Yes, political figures like Woodrow Wilson, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama have been more inclined to embrace words like ‘liberal world order’. But even Wilson feared the idea of world government – and his congress never ratified US membership of the League of Nations. Nor has the US ever ratified conventions like the Geneva Criminal Court. Over the centuries, though, East Coast political opinion – home of the White House and Capitol Hill – has been slightly more inclined to view government institutions as the stewards, not opponents, of liberty. Not in the shape or form of European political opinion, which is based on a very different historical experience and in many countries revolves around the idea of the state as the parent of freedom.

Nevertheless a form of republicanism, which, while always fearful that government may be corrupted and turn into despotism, considers institutionalized checks and balances the least bad option for keeping corruption and decay at bay. This East Coast tradition never took hold in the West – and now, once again, American politics is moving westward.

That the current US president very explicitly digs into the Puritan-Darwinist, go-west pool of ideological baggage, is obvious. The darkly dystopian language of his inaugural address and its depiction of a world whose exploitations of US goodwill has left nothing but “American carnage” in its trail are right out of Puritan playbook.

This is true of the wider team Trump – the national-conservative writers, bloggers, pundits and politicians who now dominate so many Republican debates. Unlike the religious Right of the Bible Belt, this national right is steeped in the counter-culture of the West. It fetichizes disruption and adores the self-made man. It abhors elites and prefers the crowd – the people (and not the institutions) ‘that build America’.

And while the detailed theological or political arguments against the traditions of a centralized church and state in Europe may be gone (though books like Pat Buchanan’sA Republic, Not an Empire (1999) orSuicide of a Superpower (2011) continue to deliver variations), the rhetorical tropes of Puritan ideology linger.

Nowhere is that echo clearer than in the metaphor of ‘the swamp’. What the Vatican, the British Crown or the Anglican Church was to the Puritans, the ‘self-serving’ or ‘corrupt’ ‘establishment’ – be it D.C., the International Criminal Court or the tentacle bureaucracies of the UN or EU – is to figures like National Security Advisor John Bolton.

The Silicon Valley use of Puritan-pioneer tropes should be equally obvious. Yes, it gives these tropes a different spin.

But to see the connection, one does not need a months-long field trip. Take a one hour bike ride through the streets of Palo Alto or San Francisco and you'll quickly see how this California heartland draws on both the Puritan search for Eden and escape from institutional corruption, and on the pioneer-Darwinist ideals of inventive individuals and unrestrained entrepreneurship.

Yes, California is now the hub of support for issues often associated in Europe with ‘the left’: free abortion, open borders, gay and queer rights, a concern with climate change and environmental sustainability. But as every yoga sign, counter-culture outfit or open-office-space building also tells you, this is not a place in sync with Europe’s support for state-financed welfare or the extensive and stabilizing rule of law.Unions once saw their fiercest, near-civil war-like battles in California: innovation, not stability is what is valued. And the values of frontier evolution – personal autonomy, perpetual self-invention, life and industry as never-ending movement – remain the religion of classrooms, boardrooms and yoga retreats. It makes sense, then, that an extensive 2017 survey of political opinion amongst Silicon CEOs, comes down with a contradictory conclusion: the Valley may be ‘Democrat’ in most of its commitments, but with one major exception: it is thoroughly against regulation – national or international.

Science, not politics, is key

Does that then mean that all arrows in contemporary American politics point in the same direction: revolt against government – and with that, against the institutions of global governance too?

As anyone with in an interest in American culture and politics will likely agree – and what my months in Berkeley made clear to me – the matter is complicated. Many and often contradictory impulses are at play. There can be no doubt that the backlash that American tech monopolies have experienced over the past couple of years – from big data (like the case of Cambridge Analytica) to trolling or fake news to social media as platforms of violent mobilization (as in the case of Myanmar) – has given them pause. Scattered signs of second thoughts do rumble across Silicon CEOs – that a critical piece like How Silicon Brought you the Dystopian Trump Presidency can even be published in a magazine like Wired, a long-time bible of the Valley, speaks to such second thoughts in itself.

The article not only explains how Silicon’s unabashed faith in the inherent goodness of technologies of communication and lack of imagination in foreseeing darker ends has contributed to a new kind of targeted, big data-based campaigning. It also raises the question if it might not be time for an increasingly political Silicon to reflect on whether happy-go-lucky disruption has come to mean anti-social destruction.

Written from within the annals of the California outlook, in other words, it sees the new right-new tech overlap on issues of distrust in government and explicitly asks if this is, after all, really the California spirit? In that same vein, Mark Zuckerberg’s once die-hard faith in Facebook’s direct democracy has recently succumbed to global critiques and publicly announced the need for some sort of governmental help, oversight or regulation.

That Elon Musk, given his impatience with government bureaucracies, has called out for some sort of international regulation of AI goes to show that endings are still open.

And yet. The ideological impulses against conventional forms of democracy and governance run deep in the world of American tech. In a very basic way, Silicon questions whether conventional, representative and parliamentary democracy is really able to address the problems of humankind – not least the problem which much of Silicon cares the most about, which is halting climate change and preventing environmental catastrophe.

Some analysts wonder if this in itself will induce support for the Trumpian agenda of ‘doing away’ with the establishment. This is certainly the angle of a libertarian tech CEO like Peter Thiel: “The only thing that matters”, Thiel explains, “is that politics never be allowed to interfere with technological progress, because it's the latter, not the former, that will be humankind's salvation…. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom".

Thiel is a radical. But in the Californian culture around him, many agree that government regulation, whether anchored at the national or international level, will be but a hindrance to solving the climate riddle.

Science they believe, not politics, is key.

As such, there is a gigantic split between Silicon and Trump-nationalism on the question of whether climate change is real: Musk, for instance, publicly ‘broke’ with Trump after the Trump administration’s exit from the Paris Climate Agreement. He wanted Trump to sign on globally to the reality of the climate problem and to commit the US to solving it.

Like Trump, Musk and Silicon view institutions and bureaucracies as a hindrance, not a resource, to problem-solving. In that same vein, much of Silicon shares the Trumpian view of Capitol Hill democracy as elitist, reactionary and futile. Instead, they dream of new, more tech-driven form of direct popular self-governance. These visions are not equal to the forms of populist democracy envisioned by Trump and the national-conservative Right. But they overlap in their opposition to current political institutions – and they grow out of some the same historical roots.

Despite his awe of frontier America, even blindly social-Darwinist Turner had his doubts that a world of pure pioneerism was one to be wished for. Towards the end of his iconic lecture on The Frontier in American History (given to a society of historians in 1883 and still widely known), he paused:

“What will become of the West”, he asked, “if her prosperity rushes up to such a majesty of power, while the great institutions [of the East] linger?”

I left Berkeley thinking this is our question too. Whatwillbecome of those ‘great institutions of the East’? Not only the staying power of a new American Right, but the decision-making of California – end station and closing gate of Turner’s frontier – will be key to shaping an answer.