Can MAGA Unite with the Tech Right?

This summer, J. D. Vance, continuing his effort to connect with young American men, appeared on comedian Theo Von’s podcast. After joking with Von about Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s supposed fondness for sparkling orange Celsius energy drinks, Vance turned to an “AI moratorium” moving through Congress. The proposal would have barred states from enacting AI-specific regulations, while leaving general protections—like fraud statutes—untouched. “I could kinda go both ways on this,” Vance said. On the one hand, the ten-year moratorium would stop states like California from imposing woke rules on the fast-moving technology. On the other, states like Tennessee should have the power to regulate AI to protect the publicity rights of country music artists.

Vance was being diplomatic. Outside the rarefied air of a Theo Von podcast, however, the debate had grown heated. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick praised the moratorium—by then, shortened to five years—for “counter[ing] attempts by Gavin Newsom to impose a divisive, race-based AI agenda nationwide.” Meantime, activist lawyer Mike Davis, on Steve Bannon’s War Room, blasted the measure as an “AI amnesty” for “trillion-dollar Big Tech monopolists.” In the end, the moratorium was stripped—by a 99–1 vote—from the Trump administration’s omnibus bill, with Bannon and Davis reportedly instrumental in the outcome.

As the Wall Street Journal observed, the episode “exposed the deep divisions between the pro-tech and MAGA wings of the Republican Party.” The moratorium fight was not merely a personality spat, like the falling-out between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but a clash of visions. One side, the tech Right, champions growth and discovery; the other, the populist Right, stresses heritage and cultural values. This rift is likely to resurface in future AI battles, as well as in disputes over tariffs, immigration, autonomous vehicles, cloud seeding, lab-grown meat, prenatal testing, and longevity research.

According to techno-optimist researcher Adam Thierer, the moratorium dispute signals a shift in how many conservatives view innovation. In hindsight, the divide has been hardening for years. Clashes abound: Vivek Ramaswamy ousted from the Department of Government Efficiency for pushing a merit-based H-1B system; Bannon posing with Lina Khan, the Biden administration’s aggressive antitrust enforcer; columnist Ross Douthat asking Peter Thiel whether he is building tools for the Antichrist.

Meantime, as the Right squabbles, darker forces gather on the left. The Democratic Party, despite its 2024 defeat, remains captive to its most strident activists and consumed by identity politics and redistribution. Many progressives express sympathy with political violence, as was disturbingly evident in reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September. Their worldview is increasingly dour, apocalyptic, illiberal—hostile to growth and technological progress, no less than to Christianity and national pride.

The challenge for the Right is to overcome its internal friction on technological progress, which is real enough but hardly new. Today’s techno-optimists and populists channel, in twenty-first-century form, the two great forces that the political theorist Frank Meyer taught lay at the heart of American conservatism: libertarianism and traditionalism. Each side needs the other, and each can make the other stronger. They “have their roots in a common tradition,” in Meyer’s still-apt words, and “are arrayed against a common enemy.” They must work together or forfeit the future.

Technological conservatism” may sound oxymoronic, but the challenge that it names is old. Conservatism locates wisdom in the established social order. Technology, however, changes how we live. It erodes the conditions in which old wisdom formed, often making that wisdom seem obsolete. This is what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”: a world in flux, where inherited practices—such as traditional religion—no longer align with many people’s daily lives, moral intuitions, or information environment.

Traditionalist religious communities aside, this isn’t a problem to be solved. Technological progress will continue. Like so much else, liquid modernity is a matter of trade-offs. Conservers of tradition can no longer simply hand down “the way things are” to subsequent generations; they must continually rebuild the link between past and present. Family, education, community, gender roles, rites of passage, work–life balance—all must be adapted to modernity without succumbing to it.

American conservatism has this dynamism built in. It does not serve a landed gentry, an established church, or a senatorial class. It conserves freedom, carrying forward the principles of a revolution and the instincts of a pragmatic, mercantile, frontier people.

Balancing tradition and disruption can seem daunting, but American history offers a blueprint. Jefferson praised the virtue of the yeoman; Hamilton, the ambition of the financier. We’ve been having some version of that debate ever since, through the Jacksonians and the Whigs, William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan, Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan. This great American dialectic—liberty and order, culture and progress, yesterday and tomorrow—has long been most visible on the political right.

Post-liberals—critics of liberal democracy, like Adrian Vermeule or Patrick Deneen, who seek a more communitarian, virtue-centered order—disdain this distinctly American conservatism. They deride those who uphold the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as “right liberals” peddling “Zombie Reaganism.” Whatever this stance may be, it is hardly conservative. In seeking to upend the balance between freedom and virtue that has defined American conservatism, the post-liberals do not conserve; they aspire to remake the world.

By contrast, libertarian futurists and accelerationists sometimes speak as if innovation itself were sufficient to sustain a civilization. But technological disruption without cultural ballast can corrode the very institutions—family, community, nation—that give freedom purpose and direction. To exalt invention while dismissing inherited wisdom is no more conservative than to exalt virtue while suppressing liberty.

Old wisdom can still illuminate new problems. In the early 1960s, Frank Meyer gave intellectual shape to “fusionism”: the idea that American conservatism rests on two impulses—one stressing freedom and the other virtue and order. The alliance was always fragile: traditionalist Russell Kirk disdained libertarians, while libertarian F. A. Hayek titled one of his most famous essays “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” Yet each side, Meyer argued, defended a pillar of the Western tradition. And while their disputes gave the Right vitality, the alliance’s glue was not theory but a common enemy. Meyer warned conservatives constantly to “keep in mind the vision of life against which we are jointly engaged in fateful combat.”

Back then, the foes were collectivist liberalism and Communism; today, the foe is woke progressivism. The tech Right and the populist Right now stand basically where Meyer’s libertarians and traditionalists once did. They must together oppose a toxic ideology that has, in Meyer’s abiding phrase, “pervaded the consciousness and shaped the actions of the decisive and articulate sections of society.”

The Right’s divisions aren’t trivial. But the Left is doing almost everything to ensure that, despite them, the Right’s factions have no choice but to work together.

The 2024 election should have jolted Democrats awake. They lost more ground with black men. They barely held Hispanics. Zoomers are trending less progressive than millennials. The working class—which Democrats claim to care about—now votes Republican.

Left-of-center intellectuals have proposals to remedy the Democrats’ waning popularity. Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson outline an “abundance agenda”: cut red tape, build homes, lower energy costs, fix child care. Matt Yglesias adds a sanity checklist: crack down on antisocial behavior; judge people by character, not race; ditch woke language games; resist ideological capture in schools.

But none of this, these thinkers admit, can happen unless Democrats sideline “the groups”—the coterie of activist nonprofits that claim to represent identity constituencies but push a hard-left agenda embraced only by the highly educated and highly ideological. These groups dominate a party whose leaders seem to have no enemies to their left. From environmental “degrowth” advocates to anti-Zionists, trans radicals, and unions, they have no interest in the reforms that Klein, Thompson, or Yglesias propose. With few exceptions—occasional platitudes or gestures from figures now out of power, like Barack Obama—Democratic leaders have ignored centrist reformers and carried on with business as usual.

And so the Left has embraced its most radical instincts. Its symbol is the torched Waymo on a Los Angeles street. Its candidate is Zohran Mamdani, the socialist nominee for New York City mayor, who has campaigned on sweeping rent control, state-run grocery stores, and a slurry of anticapitalist, antiwhite, and anti-Israel rhetoric. Asked about Mamdani’s call to “globalize the Intifada,” Democratic National Committee chairman Ken Martin replied that he wants a “big tent party.”

As Justin Vassallo, writing at The Liberal Patriot—a Substack devoted to helping Democrats correct course—puts it, “a discredited theory of politics still commands the [Left’s] operation.” Democratic leaders keep appeasing their vanguard at the expense of normal voters, doubling down on failed and unpopular policies on crime, the border, child gender medicine, and more. The party remains trapped in “echo chambers,” Vassallo writes, and subject to “a pernicious form of groupthink”—above all, an identity politics that most people despise and that threatens to tear the country apart.

Beneath the partisan miscalculations lies something deeper: a spiritual crisis. Progressives are disproportionately mentally unwell. And how could they not be? Their worldview rests on racial guilt, oikophobia (hatred of one’s own culture), climate dread, and irreligion. Small wonder that Democrats face plunging voter-registration and fertility rates alike. The death spiral is both figurative and literal.

The Left loathes both wings of the Right. In echo chambers like Bluesky, progressives make clear that wokeness remains their lodestar, guaranteeing continued hostility toward both the tech Right and the populist Right. That, in turn, gives the Right’s disparate factions a strong incentive to preserve their fragile coalition and press ahead.

But politics is rarely rational and never stable. Democrats may be intensely disliked—in one CNN poll this year, their approval rating sank to a record low of 29 percent, and the next census will punish them as misgoverned blue cities and states bleed people and power; no Clinton-like uniter is on the horizon. Yet Republicans’ approval in the same poll was only 36 percent. And as the Biden administration discovered with inflation, a single misstep can inflict immense political damage. The Left retains many paths back to power, the most obvious being a right-wing crack-up.

The labels “tech Right” and “populist Right” are obviously ideal types that simplify a messier reality. All successful political coalitions are fractious and complex. The tech Right is riven by industry rivalries (ask Jeff Bezos about social media) and clashing egos (ask Elon Musk about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman). The populist Right is roiled by insurgents, influencers, and zealots (ask anyone in Trump’s cabinet about Laura Loomer). Some “Republican” groups don’t fit neatly anywhere: the unpredictable Make America Healthy Again movement, post-liberal Catholic integralists, post-constitutionalists. And looming over it all is Donald Trump, a man uninterested in ideological consistency.

Still, it’s clear that, loosely speaking, a tech Right and a populist Right exist and that these two camps must hang together or hang separately. Their shared stake in civilization outweighs their opposing interests.

Conservative supporters of technological progress seem to grasp this. The Left increasingly treats tech as predatory—“extractive” rather than generative. President Biden, long considered a party moderate, wouldn’t even meet with Apple CEO Tim Cook, reportedly wary of being seen as too close to tech-industry donors, whom many progressives regard with suspicion. So, facing nothing but contempt from the Left, Big Tech made its uneasy peace with the Right, its leaders lining up at Trump’s second inauguration. Altman admits that Trump is a friend of the AI industry. More tellingly, the San Franciscan has blasted Democrats for turning “completely” against the “culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.” He now calls himself politically homeless. But he recently echoed conservative themes when he said that he believes in “techno-capitalism” and “the American miracle,” which “stands alone in world history.”

The populist commitment to keeping tech in the coalition is shakier. Vance plainly wants to bridge the gap, but others are starting to fear, if not panic over, the future. Some speculate that AI might be demonic. Sounding restrained by comparison, Senator Josh Hawley says merely that AI companies are “coming for your rights.”

For the coalition to remain intact, each side must understand what it gains from the other. Tech must accept that the populists are the Republican base. They bring the votes, and their attitudes must be taken seriously. They are wary of “accelerationism”—the rise of an uncontrollable AI “superintelligence.” The industry must answer populist anxieties with a compelling vision and remain open to reasonable legal guardrails. The moratorium, floated without any plan for federal rules, went too far.

For their part, populists must remember that innovation, growth, and prosperity are core conservative goods. At the grass roots, conservatism isn’t about T. S. Eliot, agrarian aesthetics, or the Latin Mass. It’s about rising living standards: families able to afford a house, a car, vacations, some comforts, and children doing better than their parents. The tech industry generates wealth (which does, in fact, trickle down) and, in the years ahead, promises cheaper energy, better health, and abundant housing. Populists who move to tear down tech risk harming the very families they seek to protect.

A further point: every strong political movement needs an elite—smart and capable leaders who can inspire followers, win debates, craft policy, and drive institutions. The tech Right is a fertile source of such counter-elite talent. They could succeed where the leaders of Harvard, the New York Times, and Disney have failed. If the contest for shaping societal narratives comes down to investor Marc Andreessen versus disgraced NPR executive Katherine Maher, the choice should be easy.

Artificial intelligence represents a true stress test. The tech Right and the populist Right must find a broadly shared view of AI’s promise and risk. If they fracture here, they will fracture everywhere.

Tech must show how AI serves conservative ends. Not only will AI spur medical breakthroughs and—together with robotics—make homebuilding faster and cheaper; it will also help Christians, conservatives, and Christian conservatives live intentionally. By streamlining the creation of immersive video, it can erode Hollywood’s leftist grip on culture. By offering tailored lessons in classical subjects, it can help parents opt out of the progressive pseudo-religion taught in schools. By providing generally reliable guidance on complex subjects, it can weaken the left-wing hold on the medical, legal, and journalistic establishments. In short, AI can help conservatives stand their cultural ground and resist the drift of liquid modernity.

Foreign competition over AI looms, too. The Chinese Communist Party is pouring resources into the field, with state support spread “across the entire A.I. stack,” as one RAND researcher observes, “from chips and data centers down to energy.” The CCP is promoting its models abroad, as it angles to shape AI’s global standards—bidding for a closed and authoritarian AI future. For a preview, consider that Chinese AI models are trained on CCP-approved data sets that draw heavily from state-run media.

The thoughtful conservative, then, faces a dual task: to ensure that we are beholden neither to Chinese AI nor to woke AI. Either would warp large language model (LLM) outputs. The Chinese seek heavy censorship; the woke aim to “decolonize the algorithm.” A Chinese victory would carry the added danger of secrecy, with Beijing likely to treat an AI mishap just as it handled the outbreak of Covid-19.

To beat both China and the Left, the Right should support AI development, warily but broadly. If conservatives try to crush AI, the CCP wins. If they simply tune out, AI ethicists—progressives with fancy degrees—will rig the LLMs to reject “problematic” prompts (such as, “Teach me about the Western canon”). Red states face the delicate task of resisting blue states’ woke-AI agenda without smothering the field in regulation or running afoul of the First Amendment.

Trump’s recent AI executive orders show that, despite the moratorium debacle, his administration remains firmly on the right side of the issue. To stay ahead of China, the orders promote U.S. chip and software exports and streamline permitting for data centers. To counter wokeness, they require that LLMs used by the federal government be politically neutral. This last measure is high stakes. If mishandled, it could slow model development through vague compliance burdens, degrade accuracy (Is denying the 2020 election outcome what Trump has in mind as “neutral”?), or invite First Amendment challenges (the government must take care not to dictate what public-facing models say). But done correctly, the anti-woke mandate could—by reestablishing a governmental norm of color-blind equality—take its place in history alongside President Truman’s order integrating the military.

The day that Trump signed the executive orders, the administration also unveiled an AI Action Plan that, if followed, could help the U.S. secure long-term AI dominance. (On the left, more than 90 activist outfits, speaking for “the groups,” are now at work on a “People’s AI Action Plan” focused on equity and the climate.) The administration’s plan is full of good ideas: cutting funds to states that try to stifle AI development; expanding compute access for startups and researchers; creating regulatory sandboxes (controlled testing environments where companies can experiment under lighter rules); accelerating AI use in government—especially the Department of Defense—and in sectors like health care; funding workforce training; and much more. In a speech promoting the plan, Trump even signaled support for preempting state AI laws, provided that a federal framework replaces them. “The people of OpenAI, Google, Meta, and countless startups are proving once again,” Trump said, “that America is impossible, just impossible, to beat.”

The tech Right and the populist Right need not merely coexist. They could sharpen each other. Tech leaders could nudge the MAGA movement toward its better angels—on tariffs (generally harmful), high-skilled immigration (beneficial), respect for court orders (essential), and the national debt (alarming).

Populists could press tech to serve families and the country. Some have begun to sketch a pro-family tech agenda—better parental controls, platforms that better serve IRL (“in real life”) communities, tech for household autonomy (generators, 3-D printing, Starlink), more open-source software, more right-to-repair hardware. All to the good. But actually, it is up to the tech industry to impress us. We’ll know that tech is pro-family when a Steve Jobs–level figure rolls out an iPhone-level breakthrough—that amazing instrument you didn’t know you needed—with a pro-family bent.

As for serving the nation, tech’s record is mixed. Remember when Google’s employees forced the company to cut ties with the Pentagon? The industry has long had a utopian streak—a desire to serve humanity writ large. That instinct is healthy, up to a point. Socialists claim that the profit motive is flawed. Yet for-profit firms remain accountable to the market, while groups that claim to serve “humanity” often end up accountable to no one. Beware, in particular, the unmoored utilitarianism of the effective altruism movement. (See “Impoverished Altruism,” Spring 2025.) Every conservative worth his salt knows to distrust abstract rationality, the creed of the French Revolution once upon a time—and of those who want to “bomb the data centers” now.

Bannon, for his part, wants AI made by people with “the best interests of our country [and] her citizens at the forefront of their mind.” On this, anyway, he has a point.

“The history of the West,” Meyer wrote, “has been a history of reason operating within tradition. The balance has been tenuous, the tension at times has tightened till it was spiritually almost unbearable; but out of this balance and tension the glory of the West has been created.”

The tech Right and the populist Right could usher in another American century. It is a matter of marrying freedom with order, of striving both to invent and to preserve, of respecting the past while reaching for the future.

Top Photo: Vice President J. D. Vance is working to bridge the gap between the two key constituencies on the right. (Annabelle Gordon/Sipa USA/Alamy Live News)