Indeed, as researcher Greg Ferenstein suggests, the new oligarchs favor an active state that will subsidize worker housing or even a guaranteed minimum income, and keep their businesses off the hook for providing decent benefits to their ever expanding cadre of gig-economy serfs. He points out that the former head of Uber, Travis Kalanick, was a strong supporter of Obamacare and that many top tech executives—including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—favor a government-provided guaranteed annual wage to help, in part, allay fears about what happens to most of the workforce as their industries and jobs are “disrupted.”
Geography plays a role here as well. With the biggest concentrations of wealth now in the most “progressive” regions—the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Seattle—moguls must operate in an environment dominated by fervent anti-Trump social-justice and green advocacy. Many big tech employees—nearly 40 percent in the Bay Area, by some estimates—are noncitizens, with little reason to be concerned about how the wealth in these corners is, or is not, spread across the nation.
So it’s no surprise that woke employees at Microsoft, horrified by the brutalism of Trump’s immigration policies, have decided not to cooperate with ICE. Not to be outdone, Amazon workers compare their company’s cooperation with immigration authorities to IBM’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. Similarly Google workers are refusing to help with drones used to combat terrorists, while Apple is actively working to make it difficult for police to break into phones used in committing crimes, including in the aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist massacre.
So powerful, and self-referential, are these companies—and their highly compensated workers—that they are increasingly willing to deny even the idea of national interest when that does not suit their political notions. Unlike businesses that worry about competition or mass opinion, these oligarchic companies can demonize half of the country with impunity. At the end of the day, even Trumpians depend on these systems unless they want to look at Chinese alternatives.