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It is true just about everywhere, but especially in America: Real power is having control over the flow of resources. Property. Money. Information. If you command the levers of production—who gets what, when, and how—you dictate what the future holds and who gets a say in it. Or in this case, you get to decide the future of the United States. On the verge of another presidential election, no one knows that better than Silicon Valley CEOs and investors, some of whom publicly announced their support for Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, this week.
Behind the calculated loyalties of Big Tech, says Jared Clemons, a political science professor at Temple University, we can begin to understand what is happening in the moment before us. “I try to not be hysterical about politics. I know that's really hard because you turn on the TV and it seems like the world is always falling apart,” he tells me. “But none of this started happening overnight.”
Clemons identifies as socialist but “not in like a crazy, conspiratorial way,” he jokes. He believes the best path forward is a collective future where we let go of the vestiges of a capitalist past, which Republicans and Democrats refuse to relinquish. He wants people to understand that the old ways of bureaucratic governance no longer serve us. (Clemons routinely unpacks complex issues like this on his YouTube series, #Poli-Side-Eye.)
“I think the danger in looking backward and saying, ‘Oh, there’s this point in which we had this thing, but now we don't have it,’ is that it makes you reactionary to me. It cuts off your imagination, because you're not thinking about what could be,” he says. “You're focusing on trying to recover something in the past. You’re never going to get that back.” Better futures, Clemons adds, are possible, but “we have to be willing to fail.”
JASON PARHAM: I want to start by following the money. This week at the Republican National Convention Trump announced that his pick for vice president was J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator whose short but swift rise in politics was majorly funded by Peter Thiel. Elon Musk also came out in support of Trump, as did billionaire venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Big Tech is backing the MAGA movement this election cycle. What’s your take on this?
JARED CLEMONS: The best way to understand the economy is through production—what we are producing, what we are circulating, how is what we are producing getting to people. What do we buy, essentially. If you analyze politics through that lens, I think it becomes a lot easier to understand, especially the incentives and the motives of the very wealthy.
What’s one of the first things Trump did when he got elected in 2016? Really, the only big policy platform he had were sweeping tax cuts, which was a huge giveaway to corporations and very wealthy people, particularly people who had a lot of their wealth in the stock market. Part of the reason that you’re seeing a lot of support for him now is because those tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2025.
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So it’s a clear money play for Big Tech?
It’s not just Big Tech, but also, the finance industry is really supportive of Trump. He’s always gotten a lot of support from Big Oil. They're all reading the tea leaves and they know that if he's in office, the odds are such that he'll probably have a very supportive Congress who will more or less rubber stamp it.
That's not to say that Biden is super antagonistic toward business, but he has said that if he were reelected, he would let some of those cuts expire, or even raise the effective tax rates for higher earners. This is just one example of the very wealthy doing what they always do, which is use their wealth and power to grab policy.
Is Big Tech backing Trump a red flag?
If you really pull back the onion, there are a lot of clear trends among the very wealthy and among corporations that you can really identify.
OK.
With them throwing their weight behind Trump, I don’t see it as a sign that we’re about to transition to The Handmaid’s Tale. What it indicates to me is that they understand more than the average person, the importance of the economy and money. And I don't blame everyday people for that. The news doesn't really report on any of these policies or anything in any type of detailed fashion. I always tell people, “If you really want to know what rich people are doing, get a subscription to the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times because they might lie to us, but they're never going to lie to each other.” They use those publications like a platform to give away their agenda.
After Musk came out in support of Trump, a lot of people online said that was the real reason he bought Twitter.
He’s an exceptional case, in that, most very wealthy people don’t like to be in the spotlight. You very seldom hear people talking about Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the country. We rarely hear anything from the CEO of Blackstone or BlackRock or really any of the huge private equity firms that are day in and day out crafting a lot of the policies. Elon Musk is also a stunt queen and an opportunist, so he is going to throw his weight behind whoever is going to benefit Elon Musk.
Concurrent with the mainstreaming of social media in the last decade, but especially so since the 2016 presidential campaign, politics and political governing has been especially beset by conspiracy theories and propaganda. Why do you think that is?
How philosophical can I get?
Please!
Two books are relevant here. In The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent is trying to understand to what degree does categorization and thinking about the world in terms of patterns matter for social life. What he argues is that, one thing that's characteristic of humans throughout most of recorded human history is that there is this impulse toward trying to make sense of the world through pattern recognition. Keep that in mind.
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There's another book called Why? by the sociologist Charles Tilly. One of the arguments in that book is that human beings think causally—our brains cannot accept ambiguity, especially when we think that something that is happening seems so apparent or should seem apparent. Oftentimes there are situations in which things are happening, but there isn't an easy explanation or maybe a readily available one. So we start to fill in the gaps because we have this impulse to know why. And we also have this impulse to like to identify patterns.
Totally.
Part of what conspiracy theories do is connect the dots for people. When the math doesn’t math, conspiracy theories are the way to fill in those gaps. But the United States has long had a very uncomfortable relationship with mass media.
That’s a nice way to put it. [Laughs]
Even going back to the muckraking days, there’s always been a kind of suspicion among most Americans, like, can we really believe what they're telling us? Whoever they are. And then the world is just so complex. Like, how can we really know what's going on in China? How can we really know what's going on in Israel? How can we really know what's going on in France? Like, we can never really know. [We could] believe that what we're seeing is actually true, but in an age in which AI is taking over, can we even really believe the images anymore? As more of our world is mediated through images, I think you're going to see more conspiratorial [thinking]. People need to fill in the gaps.
Like with the assassination attempt on Trump. Everyone seemed to have a theory on what really happened.
I’m not condoning any of this, but assassination attempts were pretty frequent in American history up until very recently. Almost every other president since the founding of the republic, there's either been an attempted assassination or they discovered plans after the fact that there were attempts to do something. It wasn’t until the Ronald Regan assassination attempt where you had both parties saying, “OK, maybe talking about each other in these very crazy ways is not the best thing to do.” We don’t want people going off, especially in a country where everyone is crazy about their guns. The violence is not new.
Not at all.
However, it has been a long time since we’ve seen something like this, given how it’s covered in social media. Since 9/11, Americans are still pretty paranoid about violence in a way that I think often can make politics a bit cloudy for people. When people often feel like violence is looming, they become distrustful of the other, which we know leads to xenophobia, racism, transphobia, and everything else. It makes people hysterical, and when you’re hysterical you can’t think rationally. You can’t function.
I came across a meme of Miranda Priestly, from The Devil Wears Prada, that said: “You took a bullet? In America? Groundbreaking.” It perfectly captured all the hysteria in a larger historical context. We’ve been here before.
America is a violent country. When leaders said, there's no place for violence in our politics. I'm like, have you ever taken an American history course? Again, I don’t condone any of what happened. But let's not whitewash history.
