Checks and Balance: Can the tech elite and MAGA come together?

USMAGAAIMAGAMAGAMAGADOGEHBIRAIRA looks at the arrival in Washington of the tech elite, which until recently preferred to keep its distance from the swamp. Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and co. have turned up for several mandatory sessions in front of a House committee in the past, where lawmakers berate them for making everything worse. But they generally preferred to send lobbyists to act as emissaries to a foreign land. A few things have changed this: the importance of crypto and to West Coast venture capitalists has made it impossible for Silicon Valley to assume the federal government is irrelevant. There has also been a rightward shift among prominent techies, who are fed up with being scolded by the very online left.As this week, there is a divide between techies and other parts of the movement. is not really a conservative movement. Because it seeks to turn the clock back, it has more in common with the paleoconservatism of Pat Buchanan than with Reaganism. It is also less attached to institutions than 20th-century conservatism was. But the right-leaning techies are hardly conservative either. They see opportunities in disruption. Most types, by contrast, wish to minimise it by preserving jobs in industries like mining and manufacturing because of their importance to the working class.In addition to that divide, there is mutual snobbery at play here. C.P. Snow, a British writer, wrote about the two cultures in the mid-century British elite: one venerated literature, the other science. Neither understood the other well. Something similar is going on in American public life.Get a tech titan off-the-record and they will imply that elected officials and government insiders are, well, a bit dumb. They are not risk-takers; they cannot seem to solve pretty obvious problems; they have not built anything. Get an elected official or bureaucrat off-the-record and their view of the tech titans can be just as scathing. These are people and companies who excel at making life marginally easier for 20-somethings living in San Francisco (DoorDash, Uber); whose products have destroyed the economics of newspapers (Google); have made everyone dumber (Facebook, Instagram, X); and who have sucked up to the Chinese Communist Party (Apple, Tesla). is different—which helps to explain why Democrats find him so maddening. Like some of the other right-wing techies, he is an apostate, having supported Democrats until fairly recently. That makes him harder for Democrats to dismiss. He has built two huge companies (SpaceX and Tesla) that do amazing things. And while X has become worse for users since he bought it, it still just about works, despite having a much smaller staff than before he took over. What happened to Twitter is probably a guide to what (the Department of Government Efficiency) will recommend to Donald Trump.Yet the lesson of previous government-reform commissions is that there is a difference between identifying what is going wrong, which is similar to an engineering problem, and actually solving it, which requires political skill and trade-offs. The argument over is a preview to this contrast—but even tougher political problems await the president and the new Congress. Should they prioritise deportations, or tax cuts? Should those tax cuts be funded by gutting the Inflation Reduction Act ()? If so, how will the states and districts that receive dollars be compensated? Will the Supreme Court grant the president authority to ignore Congress when it comes to spending money that the legislative branch has given the executive branch to spend? Does Mr Trump actually want to cut government spending anyway?These are not engineering problems. They require political smarts, coalition management and a degree of cunning or leadership that Mr Trump did not display in his first term. Still, if these two cultures can come together, moderate the excesses of one another and work productively, the results could be interesting.