So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides.
And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.
https://siliconvalleyindicators.org/data/governance/civic-en...
https://www.newsweek.com/big-tech-employees-donate-overwhelm...
At least in recent years independents (in Congress) have caucused with Democrats, but not Republicans. This is evidence that the Dems are slightly broken up already.
To get more fine-grained, each party has sub-divisions (e.g. "Freedom Caucus" in the Republican party). The real problem is that these sub-divisions basically don't cross over to allying with the other party on particular issues. If they ever do do that, and do it consistently (not as one-off decisions from individual representatives) then the US will effectively have a more than two party system.
But even if that happens, the actual people getting elected will almost always only have an R or a D after their name. First past the post, as it is done in the US, can't really sustain more than two competitive parties.
So let's do it. Start with South Africa's constitution as a model.
Unless non elected-officials win a revolution.
If the US ever abolishes the electoral college you'll see Democrats campaigning in rural Texas and Republicans in Silicon valley California because EVERY SINGLE VOTE COUNTS. It would get both parties out of their comfort zone.
A large part of why Trump got so far and why the debt is so bad is because this institution intended as a forum for states and statesmen has become a shitty version of the the house of representatives it was intended to check because 17th amendment changed the franchise from the state as an institution to the state as a collection of people.
To look at the “tech industry,” look at company-directed activity, primarily lobbying expenditures, corporate PAC donations, senior exec political donations, and especially the same categories at industry groups like trade associations. That picture is far more balanced between the parties.
BTW I would suggest looking elsewhere for your political info, Newsweek does terrible reporting on this stuff. The article you quote makes a basic mistake, confusing 98% of donations going to Democrats with 98% of employees giving to Democrats. Most Netflix employees did not make any political donations at all in 2020 (or indeed, ever).
That trend is only going to strengthen as the Republican Party stakes out positions which are unpopular outside their core supporters.
Citizens United removed limits on “outside expenditures,” but disclosure is still required. Netflix reported no outside expenditures in 2020, for expample (also viewable at Open Secrets).
Facebook is an exception. They really let their brand collapse on multiple levels. Looking at the rest of FAANG (MAGMA? whatever) the situation is pretty different. Nobody at Microsoft is ashamed to tell their families that they make dashboards to help visualize uptime metrics for cloud services. Nobody at Apple is ashamed to tell their friends that they can't talk about whatever they do for work.
If you mean the division of contemporary politics that is associated with advocacy for the rights of workers and diminished power for the managerial and capital owning classes then they most certainly do not do that at all.
Wider data seems to suggest it's not that simple: https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
>And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.
I don't know firsthand, but the impression I've gotten, especially more recently, from silicon valley is that Facebook and Zuckerberg is the sacrificial goat the rest of the industry hopes to lay their sins on and drive into the desert. How much of the hatred for facebook employees is perpetuated, or at least was seeded, by tech itself rather than the general population? Do Uber employees get the same reaction? More politically apples-to-apples, do Google, or specifically Youtube, employees? If not, could it be because they use Facebook to distract from their own actions the rest of America wouldn't approve of if they were more in the media spotlight, and didn't have the scapegoat to point to?
I do think that tech workers have something, morally, to gain from lambasting FB. But the wider US sphere of influence does, as well. US tech makes the US super strong, and super rich. If we just forget about Google's sins, we can keep being rich and powerful.
Tech workers, politicians, heck even normal people receiving Google accounts, all have something to gain by denying reality.
The truth is, even if some of this could be explained by social pressure, I really think most people in the world just don't care as much as you think they do.
More than anything most people just seem annoyed by tech companies.
Actually, now that I think about it, the most unwelcome I've ever felt for working in tech was in California.
I also love the tacit admission that Clarence Thomas is acting as a partisan, rather than an unbiased member of an ostensibly apolitical institution.