Regardless of this November’s election results, Donald Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 presidential race signals a potential shift in the Republican Party’s power structure. The decision was more than strategic; it heralds the rise of a new, tech-savvy counter-elite that bridges Silicon Valley’s spirit of innovation with working-class interests.
From his “hillbilly” roots in rural Ohio to his venture-capital role with Peter Thiel, Vance embodies this emerging coalition. As a key Trump supporter in 2016, Thiel’s influence helped bring unconventional thinkers from the tech world into politics, though lasting realignment was hampered by Trump’s lack of the needed ideological infrastructure.
This time is different. Over the last four years, a rising power center in U.S. politics has consolidated, backed by an emerging tech elite and the new wealth of the Internet era. The fusion of conservative populism with the tech Right could reshape American governance.
If one thing unites the tech Right and rank-and-file Trump voters, it’s a recognition that the old system—the legacy media, academia, and federal bureaucracy—is profoundly broken. “The real debate today isn’t between the left and right,” Tablet editor Alana Newhouse notes. “It’s between those invested in our current institutions, and those who want to build anew.” Building anew requires a deep bench of policy talent that educational polarization has made too rare on the right. The tech sector is now filling that void, offering a new frontier for highly capable founders and entrepreneurs to bypass the legacy system.
The rise of the tech counter-elite is happening just in time. With accelerating AI progress and the threat of a bellicose China, U.S. institutions must transform to remain functional, let alone secure dominance for the next century. The U.S. government’s core machinery, built on New Deal and Great Society-era foundations, can’t be incrementally reformed to meet these challenges. It resembles a bloated corporation in need of disruption. Unwinding the long twentieth century will require building parallel, tech-native systems to grow and supplant what came before.
To get a sense of the tech counter-elite’s potential impact, go back to the early days of Trump’s first term, when, just before his inauguration, an unexpected name appeared on the shortlist for Federal Drug Agency commissioner: Balaji Srinivasan. I was working in downtown Washington, D.C. when the news hit my Twitter feed. I did a double take. That Balaji Srinivasan, the cryptocurrency evangelist and one-time chief technology officer of Coinbase? I retweeted the news, with a link to his 2013 Startup School talk on “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit,” which I described as “infamous.”
Moments later, my phone rang. It was Balaji (as he is usually called). We had never spoken before, and I had no idea how he got my number, but before I could ask, he interjected: “Infamous? Really? I think you mean famous. Infamous has negative connotations.” No one who knows Balaji will find this story surprising. At the time, his trademark manic style was directed at surviving the intense vetting process that goes with taking on any significant government role. He even deleted his extensive Twitter archive, leaving behind a lone tweet: “Don’t argue on Twitter. Build the future.”
As both a fan of Balaji’s and a critic of the FDA’s role in stifling medical innovation, I offered to write him a profile focused on his vision for the agency. Publications like Vox and Recode were already attacking, unearthing old comments in which he proposed replacing the FDA with a “Yelp for Drugs.” The observation reinforced the arrogant “tech-bro” archetype: the Silicon Valley founder who thinks he knows better than the policy experts, disregarding long precedent in favor of “disruption.”
But as I talked with Balaji, it became clear to me that his proposal had far more depth than the “Uber for X”-style slogan let on. This wasn’t surprising. While Balaji is now better known for his Bitcoin maximalism, his technical background is in biotech and computational genomics. Before his career as a technology investor, he co-founded (with his brother) Counsyl Inc., a genetic-consulting company, while still completing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Stanford. It quickly grew it into one of the country’s largest DNA screening companies.
Balaji argued that the FDA’s “pre-market approval” system was outdated in the coming era of personalized medicine, where the falling costs of genomic sequencing and advancements in gene-editing, like CRISPR-Cas9, are changing the landscape (a point also made by the late Manhattan Institute thinker Peter Huber in City Journal). The FDA’s reliance on clinical trials based on a “frequentist” theory of statistics—averaging treatment effects across thousands of participants—may miss crucial nuances. What if a new treatment has unexpected interactions with other drugs or benefits only those with particular genetic profiles, effects that could be washed-out in the aggregated data?
Balaji’s idea was to build a parallel system based on post-market surveillance, combining data collected from the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System and other sources with Bayesian machine-learning techniques and updating the efficacy of a treatment in real time. In principle, such a system might supplant aspects of the traditional drug-approval process, while allowing for the discovery of one-in-a-million therapies. Whether Balaji would have succeeded in implementing such a system, we’ll never know. A week into his presidency, Trump signed a ban on travel from a number of Muslim-majority countries, leading Balaji to pull his name in protest.
Flash forward to January 2020, when cases of a mysterious novel coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China, began growing at an exponential rate. In a now famous January 30 Twitter thread, Balaji was among the first to sound an alarm: “What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?” If so, he predicted, the result would be an acceleration of a number of pre-existing trends, from border closures to social isolation to remote work to masking to distrust in government.
The same outlets that attacked Balaji’s fitness for FDA commissioner had their doubts. “‘No handshakes, please’: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus,” read one February 13 headline from Vox. “Silicon Valley elites” and “tech billionaires,” the article surmised, are simply projecting their (privileged) anxiety over “Doomsday scenarios.” After all, according to one infectious disease expert Vox interviewed, the chances of anyone in the Silicon Valley area coming into contact with the virus were “astonishingly low.” Less than a month later, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, the U.S. went into varying degrees of shutdown, and Congress began prepping a $2.2 trillion relief package. Balaji’s core predictions proved accurate.
Imagine how differently America’s pandemic response might have gone under FDA Commissioner Srinivasan. Among the FDA’s biggest mistakes, for example, was its failure to approve rapid testing. Inexpensive Covid tests were developed within the first few weeks of the pandemic, and a factory was even set up to produce them at scale, but the FDA repeatedly blocked their approval, citing a lack of data. Testing capacity that university labs offered was similarly nixed. The first rapid tests weren’t approved until spring 2021, costing many lives. Balaji, in contrast, had advised both a decentralized approval authority testing and a broader “Right to Try” for new treatments and diagnostics.
Similar bureaucratic delays affected the vaccine. Thanks to its MRNA platform, Moderna was able to design an effective vaccine within days of receiving the virus’s genome sequence, delivering the first doses to the NIH for testing on February 24, 2020. It would take another ten months for the first shots to get distributed following delays in the FDA’s final review, which included taking a four-day weekend for the Thanksgiving holiday. By April 2021, vaccination rates were finally ticking up under the FDA’s emergency-use authority, though it would take until August for the first vaccine to gain full FDA approval.
Throughout the pandemic, Balaji and others in the tech world were staunch advocates for moving faster, including through the use of volunteer “challenge trials” to expedite vaccine approval. Had the vaccine been distributed just ten weeks earlier, calculations suggest the first doses to nursing homes would have saved upward of 40,000 lives. A Balaji-led FDA would likely have been faster still, tearing through bureaucratic red tape to enable vaccine production to ramp up as early as possible. If rapid testing and vaccines had been made available as soon as technically feasible, prolonged lockdowns, tens of thousands of deaths, and trillions of dollars in economic losses may well have been avoided.
Whether the Senate would have confirmed Balaji is another question. His eccentric political views would likely have made for an uphill battle, from his belief that the U.S. dollar is close to collapse to his theory that the Internet and blockchain technology are driving toward a world of decentralized “network states.” But perhaps no great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.
On the cusp of a major technological transition, a little more madness in government might even be a good thing. We could at least benefit from having more “weirdos and misfits with odd skills” in positions of power, to borrow a phrase from the British political strategist Dominic Cummings. Instead, our political establishment is preternaturally hostile to eccentric reformers, as it must be for its own survival and reproduction.
This is why Trump’s pick of Vance for vice president is so encouraging. It signals that the Trump campaign is serious about realigning the Republican Party around a true counter-establishment that, like Vance himself, bridges the rising cadre of conservative tech elites with the interests of everyday Americans. The story of Balaji’s stillborn foray into government suggests what this might look like. And while Balaji himself is unlikely to have a role in any Trump-Vance administration (he’s since moved to Singapore), a growing number of thinkers and builders on the right are cut from the same cloth.
Take one of Trump’s most prominent supporters, Elon Musk. Between SpaceX and Starlink, several of Musk’s companies have become crucial technology platforms for the U.S. government, demonstrating the value of his often-uncompromising management style. Musk has reportedly pitched Trump on a “government efficiency commission” to bring similar, results-oriented organizational principles into the executive branch. This could include leveraging AI-enabled automations to downsize the federal civil service and ensure that the agency functions we still need can resist politicization and scale.
Then there is the emerging crop of patriotic defense start-ups inspired by the success of Palantir and Anduril. As my colleague, Jon Askonas, has argued, these companies “are doing work of straightforward significance to America’s status on the world stage.” Reforms to federal procurement and contracting processes will thus be essential to ensuring that “Little Tech,” as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz call it, can thrive in the shadow of defense giants like Boeing and Lockheed and Big Tech incumbents like Google and Microsoft.
In his 2020 book, The New Class War, the historian Michael Lind argued that “Today’s populism is a counterculture, not a counterestablishment. A counterculture defines itself in opposition to the establishment. A counterestablishment wants to be the establishment.” Put differently, for populist currents to drive real reform, they must transcend charismatic leaders and budding demands for change in favor of the concrete institutions needed to effectuate power at scale. The building of that institutional capital was first put into motion by the 2016 election; it then dramatically accelerated following the institutional failures, hypocrisies, and cultural revolutions of the pandemic era. A true counter-establishment—which could claim the radical center of American politics—is now finally taking shape, underwritten by an ascendent community of tech iconoclasts.
Photo: J. D. Vance speaking at TechCrunch's Disrupt SF 2018 (Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch)