So who are Silicon Valley’s young conservatives? Short answer: important people. Because liberal or conservative, Silicon Valley has wealth and a near-monopoly on technological innovation, which sounds a lot like the makings of real political power. But what no one knows is whether these young conservatives will seize on a moment to affect real change as the GOP rips itself apart. Or will they turn on, tune in, and drop out?
So like we said, Bay Area ideology is weird—particularly the conservative variety. “Silicon Valley loves to think of itself as a pirate ship,” says Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley politics. “And that expresses itself politically in not easily categorizable ways.” Two main strands: those who think government can improve itself by taking a few lessons from the Valley, and those who think government should just get the heck out of their way. Typically, the more conservative you are, the more likely you are to fall into category two.
Young conservative techies are generally less visible than their liberal counterparts. (Let’s leave Peter Thiel, venture capitalist and champion of Donald Trump, out of this. He’s not their standard bearer: “Thiel is an iconoclast. He’s not leading a movement,” O’Mara says.) Why the quiet? If you think government regulation is cruddy, you’re probably not dying to get involved in the process of picking regulators. “I think there’s a distrust of government, and the slow, stodgy people in DC,” says Jennifer Burns, a historian at Stanford who studies American conservatism.
Also, though, Silicon Valley’s young conservatives are kind of a secret. “Even being associated with the Republican party is a liability. I’m isolationist about it,” says one of these secret-keepers, a 32-year-old woman who lives and works in San Francisco who did not want to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “I worked on the Meg Whitman campaign when she ran for governor, and I’ve had a number of people say, ‘Are you sure you want to put your campaign experience on your resume?'”
