I saw this rather revealing tweet recently:
Andreessen, if you don’t know, made his money during the dot-com boom, at Mozilla. He then formed a venture capital firm, Andreessen-Horowitz.
Now what’s interesting about this tweet is the word “guilt.”
Andreessen doesn’t want to feel guilt. He doesn’t like the idea that one should run society to try and do the most good for the most people.
Understandable, venture capital in the 21st century has mostly created firms which profit from using as few workers as possible and San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, has gone to Hell. Andreessen’s filthy rich, and he has to see homeless people every day. If he felt guilt about being having way more money than he’ll ever need while other people go hungry and live without heat, cooling and a dry place to sleep, he’d feel guilty pretty damn often or would have to spend a lot of his two billion to feel good.
But that’s not the point I want to make.
It is fashionable to go on and on about taking care of family and friends, and that’s a good thing up to a point.
But only up to a point. Societies work best when members care about people they’ll never meet. If we all look out only for those close to us, the actions we take to do so often hurt those who aren’t near us. Private equity buys firms, loads them down with debts and they go bankrupt, destroying the lives of workers. Bankers create asset bubbles which burst. They get bailed out and if they don’t are still worth millions from bonuses based on fraud, but ordinary people lose jobs, homes and healthcare. Insurance companies and pharma overprice their services, deny care and get rich. Ordinary people aren’t blameless either, we NIMBY and care about schools in our neighbourhoods but not in slums, and complain about the homeless and tell the cops to move them out but don’t want to pay for their housing. We look after #1 and we vote for truly evil people and a majority, it seems, would never vote for someone actually good. We want low taxes and cheap goods and segregated housing prices that never go down.
This is… stupid. Society is other people. If other people are sick, we’re more likely to get sick. If other people are poor, they can’t pay for whatever products or services we produce. If people are homeless we find that distasteful and unpleasant to be around. Unhappy people, of course, are not as fun to be around as happy people.
And so on.
The better off everyone is in society, the better it is for you and me, unless we’re rich enough to live in a bubble, rarely seeing anyone but servants and our fellow rich. But even a billionaire will sometimes see a poor person, if only from their limo or looking down from a chopter, and they might feel some guilt. (If Andreessen does feel guilt, well, that’s mildly impressive in a pathetic sort of way. I doubt most billionaires do. But he’s repressing hard.)
And then one day someone flips out and kills a CEO, and others start talking about how wonderful CEO killing is. Perhaps making other people poor and miserable and killing their relatives might be a bad idea even for the masters of the universe. Might just be a good idea to care about people Andreessen doesn’t know, because one of them might get past his security one day.
Or, I guess, we could have assassinations, bombings, riots and civilization collapse.
It really is one or the other. If oil company execs had cared about people they don’t know they wouldn’t have buried climate change and financed denialism. If insurance and pharma and hospital execs cared about people they don’t know, there’d have been no assassination because they’d be trying to make sure as many people as possible got the care they need instead of optimizing to make more money.
It might just be that only looking out after people you know and care about and not giving a damn about anyone else is not just morally right, but pragmatically right.
Or you can bet on your bodyguards and the security of your gated communities, I guess. That’s a good bet, till it isn’t.
For those advising an attempt to take over the Republican Party. I think candidly that that is even less likely than taking over the Democratic Party.
I live in, and am involved in local politics and environmental activism in, a region that, despite being in a very Blue State, is quite conservative, with some of the towns around here reliably voting for GOP candidates — in Massachusetts — at rates above 60 and 70% (other towns are more reliably Democratic, these differences are fascinating at a sociological level, and quite complicated).
I am in coalition with these conservatives on a critical important local issue where 90 percent of the populace agrees that a corporation is lawless and must be stopped. I grew up with some of them, and know them well, we are of the same small communities (this is also true of the liberals, the left, the non-engaged, the right-wing and left-wing online street fighters, many more — these are smaller towns for Massachusetts, with one exception).
Despite this coalition, or rather because of it, and dealing with them, I think it’s unlikely they are going to be a good candidate for entryism. For one thing, they are viscerally and often just off the wall in their hardcore anti-Communism and 1950s-era redbaiting.
The other thing is that they have as kind of their Ur-Principle the idea that Private Property Is Sacred (this is, as Ur-Principles so often are, is frequently and seemingly without dissonance contradicted by them in the actual practice of their lives). They do not distinguish between the person owning a small cottage and Elon Musk; for them, private property is private property.
A third factor is that fifty years of talk radio, cable news, and now Facebook and other social media have marinated them in a culture of querulous suspicion and anti-reason; they fall for just lunatic conspiracy stuff, and while some of them are just naturally intelligent enough that they fight through this and make real contributions to our local governments, it’s still their native idiom, if that makes sense (like, believing basically every election is stolen; despite the minimizing of certain interlocutors of Trump’s misdeeds, this is a real one, this baseless accusation of fraudulent or stolen elections — this is a corrosive rhetorical move, and one that makes the actual practical life of our bodies politic in the real world more difficult.
Nor is Russiagate apposite here; Russiagate was nonsense, but Hillary Clinton, of whom I am not a fan, did show up to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration; she did acknowledge the vote totals were correct, and that she legitimately lost in the electoral college; this is _categorically_ different than Trump’s conduct in 2020-21).
A fourth factor: they genuinely dislike Difference and a pluralistic and open society; many of them are openly bigoted towards LGBTQ people. We had a Klan presence here in southeastern Massachusetts into the 1950s, and that impulse didn’t just go away. Indeed, my own Town’s High School, from which I graduated 20+ years ago, had a significant problem with what can only be described as anti-Semitic and Nazi-sympathizing public behavior by the football team. We have the local evangelical holy rollers running for School Committee (in Plymouth, Mass.) talking about banning books, in just total disregard for the U.S. and Mass. Constitutions.
They are also obsessed with culture war nonsense. Just, like, obsessed.
The thing I should emphasize: the conservatives are often extremely intelligent, and will see any kind of entryist from a mile away. I should also note I actually quite like many of them at a personal level; I don’t think they are bad people (some are, but not most), just misguided and wrong on many issues (sometimes, they are right, and I take coalition with them where it presents itself; this is natural in the parliamentary environment of Town Meeting societies).
Finally, Republicans have their own Machine which is even worse than the Democratic Machine, which at least has to pretend to some notion of human well-being. The GOP Machine in my experience down here are connected to local business elites and are also canny, and just like, wildly amoral, and won’t give up the party without a fight.
So, taken together, and played out across the country, I think it will be extremely difficult to engage in any kind of Left entryist strategy in the Republican Party.
My own strategy is premised on local politics — I live in a directly democratic Town Meeting form of government, and if I want to write a statute for the Town, I can get myself and nine other inhabitants of the Town together and put it before the Annual Town Meeting. That’s a lot of power, so I exercise what power I am able to in order to advance the goals of the Commonwealth thought that guided the authors of the Massachusetts Constitution, and, at a larger level, the American Revolution.