On Behalf Of jlgulick at sfo.com
>
> Hey Nathan !!! Long time no see/hear/speak !!!
Good seeing you virtually :)
> It seems to me that 2 of the Dem Party's main blocs in Cali are on some
> kind of collision course. In the Bay Area (which of course you know
> intimately) you have, on the one hand, you have the socially liberal
> dot.com types, and the national Dem Party has been actively courting
> this bloc's allegiance to Dems (the Dems want Silicon Valley soft money).
> On the other hand, you have the largely people of color working class,
> some hooked into the AFL-CIO/Dem Party machine (catapulting Gray Davis
> over the top against Lungren), some not. The dot.coms are getting rich
> from e-commerce/etc. boom (especially if they own their own house), the
> working class P of C are getting squeezed (especially if they're renters).
> This is just a sketch lacking all sorts of mediating details -- what do
> you make of it ?
There are some serious ideological "Atari Democrats" -- the original incarnation of the tech progressives who argued for a progressive slant on technology - but they have made some moves that I think cost them being players in progressive Dem politics - as opposed to being merely big money players like any industry.
Back in 1996, there was an initiative to strengthen shareholder rights to sue firms for overhyping their likely success; a lot of seniors groups and labor pension folks supported it, but most progressives could swallow the scorched earth massively funded campaign to defeat it. It wasn't an issue that made most progressives hearts sing. But when it was clear that the initiative was going to pass, the technology committee running the campaign decided to dump their leftover money into the campaign to defeat a "tax the rich" initiative. That last minute infusion pushed that initiative to defeat as well, pissing off a lot of community activists looking to that money to fund mass transit and a host of other programs.
You are going to keep tech-oriented Dems coming out of the core Silicon Valley areas for a while, at least until the unions make more inroads into those industries, but the rise of the latino and labor alliances statewide has really squeezed those folks out of the ideological leadership. The tech folks will keep buying influence obviously, but I don't think most progressives are going to take them seriously otherwise. They made it clear that for all the talk about the need to invest in the future, they would choose their own pocketbooks first.
The Tom Amminano revolt in San Francisco was as far as I can tell largely a "fuck you" to the dot.com influence driving up rents while letting the infrastructure of the city rot. Silicon Valley lost population for the first time this year and it is largely due to the increasing unlivability of the area. No one in the old progressive tech community has really stepped forward to really challenge that problem, and I think that has taken them out of any serious discussion among even moderate progressive types.
The get-rich libertarians have largely taken over the tech industry, so it doesn't leave much other than the stray rich individual playing politics. But the politics in California is looking more Old Democrat now than techie Gary Hart style.
Which makes me for one very happy.
-- Nathan Newman