In America’s new era of political realignment, the Republican party is not the only one experiencing a grassroots political coup. A new breed of capitalism-loving and urbanized liberals are demanding an entirely new role for the federal government.



With heavy support from Silicon Valley, these new tech Democrats want the government to embrace economic disruption, with unlimited high-skilled immigrant visas, expansive trade deals, and performance-based funding that encourages charter schools to abandon teacher unions and adopt the management model of a modern startup.



“The replacement of working-class whites with upscale professionals has turned the Democratic coalition into an alliance with a built-in class division,” wrote Columbia journalism professor and New York Times columnist Thomas B Edsall on the migration of professionals from the Republican party to the Democrats.

“While constituting a minority, the relatively upscale wing clearly dominates party policy and provides the majority of the activists who run campaigns, serve as delegates to the convention and have become the core of the party’s donor base.”



Ronald Reagan’s California is long gone, now increasingly defined by a Democratic Party that dominates America’s biggest cities. Photograph: Michael Evans/Zuma Press/Corbis

Home to the nation’s technology industry, California itself was once Ronald Reagan territory. Yet as the Democratic party’s base in unionised manufacturing towns dwindles, its leadership has taken over the big cities: House minority leader Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, Hillary Clinton in New York and Barack Obama from Chicago.

Academics have documented this migration for well over a decade, but Democrats had wrongly assumed that their educated, urbanized counterparts would be just like their older midwestern brothers. They aren’t.

On nearly every major battle within the Democratic Party – high-skilled immigration, Syrian military intervention, Keystone XL pipeline, and charter schools – education is the dividing line between the capitalism-loving, global-citizen Democrats and regulation-happy, America-first Democrats.

Hillary Clinton’s splintered support is no longer obscuring a deeply divided party. On most major issues, Clinton supporters are tech Democrat pure-breeds, while Bernie Sanders, her rival for the Democratic presidential campaign, appeals to the blue-collar Occupy-Wall-Street European socialist. It is this new tribe of techno-Democrat that is undermining the Republicans’ position as the pro-business party.

The government’s role is to provide a platform by which individuals can build compelling futures for society Reid Hoffman

The tech lobby is a big supporter of the Democratic party because the industry relies heavily on governmental support for education, research and immigration. The communications industry has now eclipsed labor unions as one of the largest donors to liberal candidates, and as a result, on nearly every major issue, the Democratic party leadership sides with the tech industry, notably whenever it conflicts with labor unions.

Unlike their capitalism-loving libertarian counterparts, these tech Democrats aren’t rabid individualists. They want the government to encourage everyone to maximize their contribution to society, by competitively funding citizens to be as educated, entrepreneurial, healthy and civic-minded as possible.



“The government’s role is to provide a platform by which individuals and organizations can build compelling futures for themselves and for society,” explains Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and an early Barack Obama supporter.

Democratic lawmakers are much more likely to author laws that support upskilling, environmental responsibility, volunteering and initiatives to protect disadvantaged groups if they represent a district with a higher proportion of skilled workers, an analysis showed (see methods section for details).

Needs for security and certainty generally yield culturally conservative but economically left-wing preferences Report by the Journal of Personal Political Psychology

This overhaul isn’t confined to the Democrats. Both the Tea Party and these new tech Democrats are causing a similar modernization agenda in their respective takeovers. Traditionally, each political party had had its fear-of-change coalition, with conservatives fearing cultural disruption and liberals fearing economic disruption.



“Needs for security and certainty generally yield culturally conservative but economically left-wing preferences,” explains a team of researchers in the Journal of Personal Political Psychology. That is, psychologically, the same need for certainty that predicts anti-gay attitudes in conservatives also predicts support for wage laws and regulation in liberals.

Market regulations and the kinds of policies supported by labor unions are meant to guarantee citizens and workers some measure of predictability from the whims of the free market. An influx of high-skilled labor and a flood of Uber drivers can hurt salaries of existing workers.

Additionally, while equality-obsessed, older Democrats put their faith in government agencies to manage public services, and small-government-loving libertarians prefer the free market, Silicon Valley holds a unique faith in citizens as the solution to problems. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates have given hundreds of millions of dollars in support of charter schools, which are often union-less, startup-like organizations run by a local parent or community entrepreneur.

Both libertarians and these new tech Democrats embrace the unpredictability of competition as a worthwhile risk for potential innovation. The Democratic version is less about free market fundamentalism, and more about leveraging community resources and talents, also manifest in Uber drivers replacing public transit with carpools, or scientists looking for alternative energy breakthroughs.

This characterizes a very old division within the Democratic party. In the 1840s, a cadre of upstart city-dwelling liberals calling themselves “Young America” split with their party elders over the role of free trade and innovation. They were the original self-identified “Progressive Democrats”.

Young America forged a rare alliance between the hot tech industry of the time – the railroads – and its low-tech counterpart, the agrarian south, to overhaul America’s protectionist free trade stance. Railroads wanted cheap steel and farmers wanted to sell their goods abroad.

The sharing economy is once again forging a similar alliance between the entrepreneurial alliance low-skill workers and the hi-tech industry. Sharing economy CEOs are overwhelmingly Democratic. The hard-charging CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, said that he’s a huge fan of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), saying: “The democratization of those types of benefits allow people to have more flexible ways to make a living.”

Surveying San Francisco’s “gig economy” workers, the results show a political profile much closer to that of tech workers than unionized labor, in both their support for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders and their desire for high-skilled immigrants.

As the economy makes all industries more reliant on technology and entrepreneurial work, Democrats may still be the party of “labor” – but a much different kind of labor. And with these changes could come an entirely new Silicon Valley approach to government.