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In the New York Times opinion section, James Pogue, an interesting Los Angeles journalist, writes:

How Long Can the Alliance Between Tech Titans and the MAGA Faithful Last?

By James Pogue

Mr. Pogue is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the tech world and the new right.

Jan. 18, 2025

On Sunday evening, the night before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, scores of “luminaries from across the New Right” are expected to gather for a dinner and gala called the Coronation Ball at the Watergate Hotel.

The event is being hosted by the young right-wing publishing house Passage Press, known for publishing the “neo-reactionary” writer Curtis Yarvin — one of the earliest of those luminaries, most famous for advocating a monarchy “run like a startup.”

By the way, Passage Press’s biggest selling author is, well, me.

Today, this upstart coalition of thinkers may be best described simply as the intellectual wing of Trumpism. “Celebrate the inauguration of Donald J. Trump,” the publishing house announced, “with the people and organizations that will shape the culture in his second term.”

The ball will celebrate more than the re-coronation of a president. It seems intended to mark the ascent of a new counterelite with aspirations to supplant the existing establishment in everything from high politics to business and culture. But this is a loose alliance, colored by rivalries and complex divisions. It has brought together people who previously had little in common. Word had it that Marc Andreessen, the billionaire venture capitalist, would be at the ball. Steve Bannon, avowed enemy of the Silicon Valley billionaire class, was to be a keynote speaker.

… It’s a gap in worldviews that went overlooked in the heady days of the campaign. When Elon Musk endorsed Mr. Trump, putting a great deal of personal money and energy into the project of MAGA populism, he joined figures like the venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks and the crypto exchange founder Tyler Winklevoss in what represents one of the most surprising and disruptive alliances in American political history. Tech emerged as an alternate power center to the Republican establishment. Silicon Valley money filled in for dollars lost from the traditional donor class. As the presidential transition took shape, tech figures stepped in to supply “elite human capital,” as they put it, to staff the new administration. All the biggest tech companies made sure to offer a $1 million tribute to help fund the inauguration.

I hear that Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will sit together at Trump’s inauguration.

It’s kind of funny that just as Anatoly Karlin and Richard Hanania announced their new doctrine that conservatism can’t win because Elite Human Capital (always capitalized) is against it, Elite Human Capital (as measured in billions of dollars of Actual Financial Capital) flowed toward it.

But, of course, there’s a fundamental divide in the Republican coalition that Karl Marx would have called capital vs. labor. Once the Democrats stop being so publicly, so vociferously anti-white, anti-male, and anti-straight, as they let themselves become during the Great Awokening, the old, old issue of who gets a bigger piece of the pie — the owners or the workers — will return in force.

Still, the two sides of the GOP coalition need each other, one to bring intelligence and the other to bring votes, but the class tension will be inevitable once the Democrats start acting a little less obnoxiously.

But the core of the aspiring Trumpian aristocracy are still reactionaries and nationalists aching to restore an American way of life thought to be lost after decades of “globalist” technocracy. They are often deeply skeptical of the idea that the innovations promised by tech companies represent progress, and they describe America as “not just a country, not just an economy, but a people with a common history,” as Jeremy Carl, a deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the first Trump administration and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, told me. The tech figures who came to the movement in 2024 were often sympathetic to Trumpian nationalism. But they tended to be more interested in making money and launching a new era of “American dynamism.”

Over Christmas, a bilious debate over the federal H-1B visa program — which brings in approximately 85,000 foreign workers, most of them Indian and most of them working in tech — unfolded on Mr. Musk’s X. …

My compromise would be that H-1B gets cut in quantity, but the tech lords get to redesign it to make it better in quality.

Mr. Musk, whose companies benefited from the visa program, initially threatened to go to “war” on the subject, “the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” But he seemed shaken by the backlash from the MAGA base. Thousands upon thousands of erstwhile fans were rising up online to denounce him as a traitor or a globalist, more concerned with his profit margins than the fate of the nation.

The trouble between the two camps will now be an unavoidable undertone at the inauguration. “Be there,” Passage Press teased online for its inauguration event, “as MAGA meets the Tech Right.”

… If a true conflict emerges, Mr. Trump himself might well end up siding with the part of the coalition that offers vast supplies of cash and new friends socializing and scheming with him down at Mar-a-Lago.

The coalition is achingly close to achieving a long-held conservative dream — of fashioning a high-low alliance powerful enough to supplant the liberal establishment and remake America. It is a project that might well collapse if one side or the other gets too much of what it wants, and ends up driving the other away.

So there is a new sense of gravity when you talk to people who want to hold the coalition together. In 2017, the rough equivalent of the Coronation Ball had been the gaudy DeploraBall. Now people would be wearing black tie.

I warned the left that doxxing Lomez wasn’t going to work out well for them.

“Before we were the outsiders looking in, and now we’re walking in the front door,” the podcaster Jack Posobiec told Politico. “Because this is a regime change.”

Earlier this month, Breitbart published an article that seemed calculated to make the dissonance between MAGA and the Tech Right into a real, and perhaps irreconcilable, split. It included translated snippets of an interview in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera in which Mr. Bannon — who retains a huge amount of influence in both the incoming Trump administration and the wider MAGA sphere — presents himself as an uncompromising chief of the “nationalist-populist” core of Trumpism.

In the article, Mr. Bannon “declared war” on Mr. Musk, and by extension the whole set of tech barons who had gained such influence in the Trump sphere. “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” he said, calling him a “truly evil guy.” “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”

This challenge was widely seen as a new cycle in the H-1B visa wars. But when I called him, Mr. Bannon articulated a very different and bigger reason for his challenge. I asked him if he saw the same deep-level philosophical tension I did. “A tension?” he asked. “I would almost argue it’s an unbridgeable gap.”

He named a roster of major figures on the tech right whom he saw as enemies: Mr. Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the neo-monarchist writer Mr. Yarvin, and Balaji Srinivasan, an investor and technologist who promotes the idea of “network states,” new countries run on blockchain.

Mr. Bannon accused the tech barons of promoting “technofeudalism” and “transhumanism”— bending human life into technologized and unnatural new forms. “This thing is all tied together,” he said. “They have a very well thought through philosophy and a very well thought through set of ideas, and they’re trying to implement that. And to me, everybody’s afraid, everybody’s scared because of their power.

… The political theorist Patrick Deneen, in his book “Regime Change,” makes a point about the American right that has been plainly true for decades — that for most of modern history it has not actually been a conservative movement. He calls Republicans of the Liz Cheney or George W. Bush mold “right-liberals” and argues that their “unwavering support for a free market, ideally unhindered by regulation and political limits, frequently resulted in economic disruptions and dizzying change that undermined the stability of the very social institutions that conservatives claimed to prize.” …

When I spoke to Mr. Carl, the former Trump administration official, he brought up an infamous interjection into the visa debate by Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote a very long post on X in December describing an American culture that “has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long” and extolling “nerdiness.” “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the Math Olympiad champ,” he said, “or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” …

Mr. Carl is the author of a book called “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.” So it’s pretty obvious which side he falls on in these debates. But he’s intent on keeping the coalition together. “That post was silly,” he told me. Even so, he didn’t think Mr. Musk or Mr. Ramaswamy should be viewed as enemies. …

“I think the Tech Right is going to win in the short-term,” said Razib Khan, a geneticist and tech consultant who is friendly with many figures in both the MAGA and Tech Right spheres. As he saw it, the talent and money were mostly on the side of tech.

“The Tech Right is pro-American,” he said. But it’s pro-American in the sense that they see America as “an empire that takes over the world and goes interplanetary.” This was too rationalist of an approach for many on the MAGA side, which is shaped in large part by Christian faith and, at least for some, a belief that America should be a homeland for “heritage Americans” of Northern European extraction. They are “not excited about the American Empire,” he said, or racing into space. They care more about the values of a “pre-1960s America, the values of a Western civilization.”

Both sides see their path as the best approach to make America more dynamic — the MAGA intellectuals through a hoped-for “refounding” that would restore a sense of national identity and purpose, and the Tech Right through drawing the best talent from a worldwide pool, and letting competition and capitalism rip.

Mr. Trump himself has kept something like a kingly remove from the early squabbles of the aristocracy emerging in his shadow. His vice president, JD Vance, might be able to act as an intermediary between these rival wings. A former venture capitalist married to the daughter of Indian immigrants, he nonetheless adopted the populist-nationalist style of politics.

“He probably leans more towards the populists,” Mr. Khan said, “but the dude cooks vegetarian food and hangs out with Indians all the time.” Mr. Vance has a foot, and many friends, in both worlds — and a strong political interest in bridging the gap. “I feel like he’s the one that can keep the energy going, and go between the two,” Mr. Khan said. “And I don’t think either side will totally win.” …

Ideally.

But it’s a tough coalition to hold together, especially because it only emerged because the Establishment left went nuts after Obama’s re-election and berserk after Trump’s first election.

But that trend may not continue. I was talking to a fellow in the entertainment industry who said the reaction among executives (almost all Democrats) was much more muted after the 2024 election than after 2016 when they were passing out safety pins to make employees feel safe. (Seriously.)

This time, he said, the feeling at the upper levels of the Industry seemed to be that, well, in the wake of October 7 and all that, it wouldn’t be so bad if Trump cleared out the Woke left for them for 2 or 4 years. And then their type of sane Democrats could come roaring back in 2026 and 2028.

Also, keep in mind that nobody really understands what’s going on in the minds of the various more ethnically exotic groups that swung toward Trump in 2024. There aren’t many famous Latino-American conservative intellectuals (at least not yet) for James Pogue to interview about the differences between Salvadoran and Honduran voters or whatever.

In an upcoming post I’ll speculate about what’s going on in the thinking of the weird groups that swung more toward Trump in 2024, but, warning, it will be speculation.