Hacker News Reader

Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Tech company employee donations are overwhelmingly democrat: https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm... They are indeed putting their money where their mouth is, at least as far as political donations go.

The notion that tech workers are not substantially more liberal than average contradicts both my first-hand experience and the available data. This isn't surprising, or evidence of some anti-conservative agenda, since tech workers often exist at the confluence of both geographic distributions and educational backgrounds (usually bachelor's degree or more) that are more liberal than average.

But still, I'm really curious as to how you justify the claims you're making in this comment.

View on HN

Tech company employee donations are overwhelmingly democrat

A center-right party.

If you (and the above commenter) do believe that democrats are a center right party then sure, the claim that most tech workers aren't liberal holds water. But that is a very non-standard delineation of political leanings, and making claims based on said boundaries will understandably generate friction with the overwhelming majority that recognize Democrats as a liberal party.

In other words, the claim that tech workers are not liberal says a lot more about the perspective of the person making the claim than it does about tech workers. Tech workers are much more liberal than the general population. How many would qualify as liberal under this political delineation? Probably a single digit percentage.

It's more accurate to see the Democratic party as a center-right party fighting with a smaller emerging center-left party within it. The Sanders platform for instance would have been completely run of the mill in Europe, but it's considered extreme compared to the traditional Democratic proposals.

Your typical tech worker will tend to be neoliberal, espousing socially liberal values but having much to lose economically and practically from touching the existing power balance or decreasing inequality in any meaningful way. The highest paid tech workers will tend to work for FAANGs that increase global inequality or at least contribute to entrenched interests.

> Your typical tech worker will tend to be neoliberal, espousing socially liberal values but having much to lose economically and practically from touching the existing power balance or decreasing inequality in any meaningful way.

You say this, yet the overwhelming majority of tech workers - especially those at FAANG companies, as per the donation data - choose to find the party that favors increased taxation, regulation, and government spending. At Netflix 98% of political contributions went to democrats. This is a staggering disparity. How you manage to conclude that this is indicative of neoliberal views (decrease public spending and regulation, less taxes) is a puzzle to me. Again, this seems to be an attempt to categorize tech workers as conservative by categorizing views common to both conservatives and liberals (e.g. preferring a capitalist economy over a command economy) as conservative.

There is truth to what you've said. The word neoliberal tends to be bandied around too generously as a general criticism of centrist Democrats and I am no exception here.

>Again, this seems to be an attempt to categorize tech workers as conservative by categorizing views common to both conservatives and liberals (e.g. preferring a capitalist economy over a command economy) as conservative.

This is the exact crux of the matter if you consider the premise of most left-wing parties. They will naturally see the Rep-Dem divide as Capitalism and Capitalism-Lite. Looking at the continuation of policies under Clinton-Bush-Obama (especially in foreign policy) this is not entirely without merit. This is often humorously depicted as a drone shooting civilians but with a gay pride flag sticker on it. If you were to plot those policies on some sort of graph and compare them to left-wing parties, I think the comparison would probably be clearer. I don't know if anyone has done that yet.

Ultimately, this is due to a confusion around the term liberal itself. Since the other party skews to the right compared to the OECD average, the Dems become qualified as left-wing instead of center-right, although it is true that this has fluctuated historically if you look at FDR. A coastal Democrat tech worker will think that they support gay marriage or drug legalization and believe that pretty much makes them broadly left-wing while at the same time working for a surveillance capitalist business. In the end you get places like Silicon Valley with homeless people roaming the streets next to some of the wealthiest humans in history. Yet most tech workers there would fully believe themselves to be progressive and working for a world fundamentally different to the one today, with power balances completely different.

Again, if you're categorizing acceptance of capitalism as a conservative view, then easily 90%+ of the country is conservative under this... let's just say alternative political boundary.

A tech worker (or anyone) who supports gay marriage, drug legalization, increased taxes, more government spending and a host of other liberal views is indeed a liberal as per the definition used by the overwhelming majority of people. Anti-capitalism isn't a mainstream liberal view. It is a far left view. Extremely few liberals, both in the US and abroad, support the replacement of a capital economy with a command economy. It's been interesting hearing about why you choose to categorize one of the most liberal demographics in the country as conservative. But for the sake of not repeatedly going down this tangent with so many other people as you go through life, I hope you understand that this is not at all the perspective most other people have. And making statements based on this perspective comes off a absurd to many, many people.

Those are not the arguments I am making though. I am not claiming that liberals and conservatives are the same. I am fully aware of the perspective you are describing, so allow me to clarify.

In the American context, parties are skewed to the right compared to the Western average. This means that center/center-right parties like the Dems are perceived as left-wing whereas far-right parties like the Reps are perceived as right-wing. Sanders would be an example of a populist center-left politician by average Western standards, but he is qualified as far-left. His rise to prominence has led to clear tensions within the Democratic party structure.

Even among the far left, few parties today even question capitalism but rather advocate for a hybrid system, so it is not a question of being strictly anti-capitalist. Even taking this into account, there is a clear chasm between a typical liberal Dem voter and a center-left/centrist voter in the Western average, and a clear sense from the modern left-wing that Dems and Reps are more similar to one another than to them. This debate is burdened by the fact that the word "liberal" tends to mean "center left" in the US and Canada but but is used in the classic sense elsewhere. Note that the OP you originally replied to did explicitly say that FAANG friends WERE liberal! But this got lost in translation as based on your American-inspired perspective an American liberal is supposed to be indistinguishable from the left-wing, whereas this would be seriously questioned elsewhere.

Essentially the point I'm trying to make before we got lost in the specifics is that not seeing the Dems as center/center-right is indicative of a very specific American perspective. At the end of the day, tech workers overwhelmingly profit from inequality, a very free market, outsourcing, capital accumulation, and other classic neoliberal facets, while at the same time maintaining socially-liberal values other matters. They stand to lose greatly from a different partition of society, since by definition they are already among the chief beneficiaries.

This idea that America is so heavily skewed conservative that the average American liberal is really a conservative by international - or as you put it "western average" - is not so clear cut. Fiscally the US government revenue as a percentage of GDP is not far off from many European countries, ~27% as compared to 32% in Canada and 33% in the UK and 28% in Switzerland. There are outliers like Denmark at 53% and Sweden at 49%, but the US is much closer to other western countries than you seem to believe. Likewise the ACA (aka "Obamacare") is much more similar to how healthcare works in most other western countries. The government subsidizes healthcare and citizens buy health insurance from private companies. Single payer systems like the NHS are the exception among western countries, not the norm. And on social issues like legal abortion and gay marriage the US is often ahead of other western countries, sometimes by decades. Abortion was illegal in Ireland until 2018, for instance. This insistence that a liberal in the US is conservative with respect to a "western average" is at best an exaggeration.

Furthermore the average Silicon Valley tech worker is also substantially more liberal than the average American Democrat. I say this having spent 5 years working in Silicon Valley, and another 4 years in university in Silicon Valley. The statements you're making about tech workers - profiting from inequality and free markets - applies just as much to Canada and most Western European countries. Arguably it applies even more to export-oriented European countries like Germany with economies that are much more dependent on globalized trade. And absent from your comment is tech workers' responses to these developments. I've seen many more people striving to tackle inequality in tech than elsewhere. The "different partition of society" is something much more popular in Silicon Valley tech companies than the rest of the country. Sanders got more donations from Silicon Valley than Clinton in the democrat primary in 2016, for instance. The average tech worker is substantially more liberal than the average person I met in Europe.

The characterizations you're making starkly contrast with both my firsthand experience, and the available empirical evidence. Your (and the above commenters') assertion that tech workers are not working to tackle inequality, environmental challenges, or other liberal causes seems to be rooted in an assumption that no wealthy demographic would every support those things, rather than conclusion based on evidence or experience. How long have you worked at a Silicon Valley tech company? How much firsthand experience do you have with the people you're characterizing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com