Does ‘the Future’ Belong to Trump?

For a while, it seemed, the future had disappeared from American politics. Bill Clinton sold us his bridge to the 21st century. George W. Bush plotted a rebranding of the conservative party and then reimagined American empire. Barack Obama campaigned on hope and change in what was called, at the time, the first Facebook election.

But by the time Donald Trump descended that golden escalator to announce his candidacy for president in 2015, toward the end of a long and anemic economic recovery, the country had succumbed to a mood of pervasive reactionary nostalgia. One party was selling a retributive story of national decline, and the other, in response, declared that the country was “already great.” As president, Joe Biden made historic investments in green tech and industrial renewal, but — perhaps because of his own age or mumbling mutedness or Scranton sentimentality — the rhetoric was all lunch-bucket throwback, without even a side dish of science fiction.

By the bleary-eyed end of the pandemic emergency, it was hard to find almost anyone, anywhere in the country, offering a truly positive vision of the future; in the wake of mass death and Covid disruptions and public-health resentments, national prospects looked, to most Americans, zero-sum at best. You might have seen the economic data depicting a national economic “miracle,” but what you felt was surely more “vibe-cession.” Even the grandiose architects of the A.I. revolution appeared, to much of the public, like apocalyptic doomsayers. And the crypto bros? Simple scammers and obvious frauds.

Large majorities of Americans still believe that the country is on the wrong track, but more now believe that the country’s best days are ahead of it than believe it is in decline, according to polls. And though the partisan splits are predictably volatile, they are also striking: 67 percent of Republicans now believe the country’s brightest days lie ahead. The staffing of the incoming Trump administration suggests a generational shift, as well, with enough millennials selected by the president-elect to put talk of America’s “gerontocracy” somewhat to bed. When Trump assumes the White House in January, he will still be carrying a reactionary torch. But thanks to an influx of technologists and bro-ligarchs, and especially the influence of Elon Musk, he’ll be returning to Washington carrying the banner of a new futurity, too.

In 2016, it seemed to be just Peter Thiel who dared campaign so boldly for the outsider Republican; the other major tech chief executives only grudgingly made their way to meetings at Trump Tower, after the election, with some later working to silence him on their platforms. This time, it seems, many of Silicon Valley’s titanic figures have been riding with Trump all along, at least a couple of them directly into the White House. For the price of $277 million in campaign donations, Musk seems to have gotten what he paid for — a program inspired by what Silicon Valley calls accelerationism but one that looks to liberal normies more like anarcho-capitalism and hands-off techno-oligarchy. Even Jim Cramer is calling it the “best government money can buy.” Perhaps it will be enough to finally get Thiel those flying cars he felt he was long ago promised. At the very least, an accelerationist experiment is about to play out in government, through some mix of deregulation and kleptocratic patronage. We are all about to see what, exactly, that yields.

“It felt like a boot off the throat,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared just after Trump’s recent victory. “Every morning I wake up happier than the day before.”

Andreessen isn’t heading to Washington, at least at the moment, but he is probably the most prominent technologist, behind Musk, cheering on Trump’s election as a major “timeline split” for the country. His view, before the split, was pretty dark. “We are being lied to,” he began last fall in a MAGA-ish call to arms he named “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” — “told to denounce our birthright — our intelligence” and “told to be miserable about the future.” Later in the manifesto, he wrote that “our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life.” After the election, he put it somewhat more hopefully: “America is an economic coiled spring,” he wrote in November, since “growth has been brutally suppressed since before I was born.”

In truth, the U.S. economy has been lapping its peers for decades now, with growth rates far above our European peers’ and per capita wealth several multiples of our greatest geoeconomic rival, China. As recently as October, The Economist called the U.S. economy “the envy of the world,” and though most in this country would presumably disagree, seven of the eight most valuable companies anywhere on the planet, based on market capitalization, are American. The American stock market now commands more than 60 percent of all global stock-market capitalization, up from less than 40 percent as recently as 2008, and eight of the world’s 10 richest people are American, as are 15 of the richest 20. To Andreessen, this is what a protracted war on entrepreneurialism, merit, greatness and dynamism has yielded — the United States wrapped in a safetyist straitjacket and struggling to free itself. Remove the strictures, he says, and American growth should double. Maybe triple or quadruple.

These are imagined trajectories to match China’s miraculous past decades. What would such liftoff look like for America? And what policy changes would it require?

For decades now, corporate conservatives have attacked liberals as anti-business, then watched as Democratic administration after Democratic administration outperformed the Republican ones in G.D.P. growth and job creation. The terrain of those arguments was typically confined to tax policy and what it tells you about hierarchies of status in America — whether Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remark deserved more support or more criticism, for instance, or whether in the aftermath of the financial crisis it was an insult to the country’s entrepreneurs to suggest, as Obama did, that they didn’t themselves build America’s roads and bridges. In Trump’s first term, tellingly, he managed one major legislative achievement — tax cuts for the rich.

This term, he’ll be working to extend them, but tax cuts are no longer such a singular goal in MAGA-land. As self-conscious “world-builders,” Trump’s accelerationists are still preoccupied with status and exquisitely sensitive to criticism. But they are also more explicitly focused on the regulatory state, which they tend to believe has no legitimate authority over their own ambitions, and the need to roll it all back to unleash a new age of American dynamism. In certain ways, this brings them into a kind of ideological alignment not just with “conservative futurists” or “abundance agenda” liberal intellectuals but elected progressives, too, from Bernie Sanders to Ro Khanna, who have already expressed some support for Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency — and only, it seems, half-trollishly.

But if accelerationism demands a kind of radical deregulation, what, exactly, is being sacrificed on the altar of Ayn Rand? On the campaign trail, Musk complained about the regulatory hurdles he had to clear before launching SpaceX rockets, but the D.O.G.E.’s mission is so standard-issue that its potential cuts might have been transcribed from Paul Ryan (or for that matter mimeographed from the desk of a libertarian Republican dashing off to work in Reagan’s Washington).

Trump’s choice to lead the National Institutes of Health, the Stanford epidemiologist and Covid contrarian Jay Bhattacharya, has trumpeted the need to accelerate biomedical research by embracing a culture of unapologetic risk-taking (a longstanding cause for libertarians and accelerationists). Last month on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, Andreessen ignited an online firestorm by putting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, formed in the wake of the financial crisis, in his cross-hairs (and by mischaracterizing its mission to suggest it was created to defend incumbent banks rather than protect consumers from financial scams).

For accelerationists, bigger opportunities loom in those areas where there isn’t yet much red tape to cut: A.I., to some extent fintech and perhaps especially crypto. As recently as 2021, Trump told Fox Business that Bitcoin “just seems like a scam” and “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.” This campaign, he promised to create a “strategic national Bitcoin stockpile” and make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” In the meantime, the president-elect and his sons unveiled their own token and have now chosen the venture capitalist podcaster David Sacks to be the new administration’s crypto and A.I. czar.

This wasn’t the only way for American politics to return to the future — a cyberpunk gray zone shaped by techno-libertarians who never understood the cautionary-tale aspects of those stories. But when the party of outsiders and disrupters becomes the face of the status quo, it leaves the door open for others to walk through. Here they come.