Andreessen: I think the Valley before me, from the '50s through the '70s, was normie Republicans. They were businesspeople, C.E.O.s, investors, and they would have been, I assume at the time, big fans of Nixon, big fans of Reagan. That era was basically over by the time I arrived. I met a few of those guys, but when I got there in '94, it was in the full swing of Clinton-Gore, the restoration of the Democratic Party and recovery of liberalism as a mainstream political force.
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As a result of that, the most natural thing in the world for somebody like me was, "Oh, of course, I'm a normie Democrat. I'll be a normie Democrat forever."
Normie Democrat is what I call the Deal, with a capital D. Nobody ever wrote this down; it was just something everybody understood...
Then in your obituary, it talks about what an incredible person you were, both in your business career and in your philanthropic career. And by the way, you're a Democrat, you're pro--gay rights, you're pro-abortion, you're pro all the fashionable and appropriate social causes of the time. There are no trade-offs. This is the Deal.
Then, of course, everybody knows Republicans are just knuckle-dragging racists. It was taken as given that there was going to be this great relationship. And of course, it worked so well for the Democratic Party. Clinton and Gore sailed to a re-election in '96. And the Valley was locked in for 100 years to come to be straight-up conventional blue Democrat.
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Douthat: When did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party?
Andreessen: The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn't take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise.
And just to give full context there: I had met Obama in, I think, '06 or '07, when he was a new senator. And he seemed great. It's the perfect package. It's literally everything that you could possibly dream for in a president. He has all the right social views, and he seems like an inheritor of Clinton-Gore. He says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He's clearly in love with tech.
You may recall the 2012 election. It was literally the story of social media saves democracy, like it was literally that Barack Obama, the good guy, uses advanced technology, including the internet and social media to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney. And this was, like, wall-to-wall positive press coverage.
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And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama's re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change.
The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in '15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.
Douthat: Those changes you're talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era?
Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it's the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.
They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we're not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.
We're also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.
And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.
Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want?
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Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it's very analogous....
It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from "Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society" to "Capitalism is evil and should be torn down."
And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: "When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?" And that was the thing.
By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: "[expletive] it. We're burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil."
Douthat: But they're working for you. These are people who are working for you.
Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won't name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, "I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us."
They're professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you'd get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you'd have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there's way too many white men on the management team. "Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don't you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we're not emitting any carbon."
So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they're spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.
But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there's this big middle of "go along, get along" people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they're just trying to follow along with the trends.
So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of "go along, get along" people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, "Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda." What people say from the outside is, "Well, you should just fire those people."
But as a C.E.O., you can't fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can't go hire kids out of college, because I'm just going to get more activists. And so that's how these companies became captured.
