Tech leaders struggling to disrupt Dems
There’s a prevailing belief in Silicon Valley that technology can improve almost anything. So in that spirit, some prominent tech leaders are launching plans to disrupt the Democratic Party, which has plenty of problems.
So far, they’re finding it may be easier to diagnose those problems than hack the party.
While many tech leaders agree with Democrats on social issues, some of them are tired of serving primarily as an ATM for politicians who cruise through the Bay Area for fundraisers.
They’re frustrated that those politicians then march the same failed path that has led
to minorities in Congress and in state legislatures across much of the country east of California. For some, the election of Donald Trump was the final insult, and they decided to take matters into their own hands. That means rebooting the party and the ideas it stands for.
“I think disrupting Democratic Party politics — not just for the sake of disrupting, but to better represent its constituents — is a good thing,” said James Rucker, the San Francisco co-founder of Color of Change, which works for racial justice. Rucker is advising Win the Future, which is described on its website as a “people’s lobby” and prefers the nickname WTF. “I’m not convinced that investing directly in the party will get us anywhere.
“People are looking to get engaged,” said Rucker, who also is a board member of MoveOn.org Civic Action, “and the current infrastructure isn’t capable of leading that.”
Tech leaders including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus and Sam Altman, leader of incubator Y Combinator, are starting to develop ideas on how they might offer better solutions than the political pros.
While these efforts are still largely in the formative stages, they’ve already been ripped privately by party’s establishment and publicly in the tech press. (“Is ‘Win the Future’ the dumbest idea in the history of Silicon Valley?” a Venture Beat headline asked.)
But they have to be taken seriously, given the money and influence behind them. Plus, tech workers have been innovators of progressive ideas. MoveOn, the 5 million-member, liberal online organizing site, was started nearly two decades ago by the owners of a Berkeley software company who were frustrated with the political system. Rucker was a technology consultant who co-founded Color of Change with activist and now CNN commentator Van Jones.
To learn why Trump won the election, several of these executives have traveled outside the Bay Area bubble to talk to people. They got an earful about why Democrats have whiffed.
“What I heard over and over was profound dissatisfaction with politics right now,” said tech entrepreneur Adam Werbach, the former Sierra Club president who is a cofounder of Win the Future. During a tour of colleges around the country, Werbach regularly heard “that the Democratic Party totally didn’t serve them.”
Altman, who has registered as both an independent and a Democrat over the years, has been traveling around California in recent months.
“One of the things that surprised me,” he said, “was that (home) affordability was an issue everywhere. That’s not just a San Francisco thing.”
The tech leaders returned home with big ideas and a lot more questions. Spurred on by what they heard from voters, they are even musing about finding and funding a challenger to Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is up for re-election next year. But that’s not their priority.
Armed with $500,000 in initial funding from Hoffman and Pincus, Werbach envisions Win the Future as “a virtual political party that’s there to help Democrats to win.” Its website said it will be a “people’s lobby where the members set the agenda” that’s within the parameters of being “pro-social, pro-planet, and pro-jobs.”
Translation: Win the Future hopes to be an online platform to generate support for new ideas the Democratic Party might not generate.
However, there were several stumbles at the start this month. Pincus drew criticism for telling tech news site Recode that the group aspires to be “pro-social (and) pro-planet, but also pro-business and pro-economy.” Progressives howled, worried that a wealthy tech executive was overlooking working-class voters.
Rucker conceded that while the group’s initial efforts “may have been a little rough ... I think that would be a good conversation to have. What does it mean to be pro-business?”
He added that Pincus “would be a great person to lead that conversation.”
Altman, through his new political venture United Slate, has fleshed out his policy goals more definitively. His top 10 priorities lean toward the Sen. Bernie Sanders side of the progressive spectrum. Among them: “Move to a Medicare-for-all system over time by gradually reducing the age of eligibility” and “set a target of 90 percent clean energy in the country by 2050.”
On taxes, Altman’s plan “prefers to tax wealth and not work.”
“We should also consider a nationwide land tax. Land ownership seems to be the fundamental way that inequality builds up over time; in general, I’m in favor of taxing wealth, not work,” he wrote. “People like me should pay more taxes.”
But is a 32-year-old Silicon Valley millionaire really the best person to talk about income inequality and affordable housing? Altman said some people asked him that during his statewide tour, “but not as many as I thought would.”
He said that he’s only a few years removed from “eating ramen.” And as for affordability, Altman said two of his siblings are living with him in his San Francisco home, because “they’re victims of this housing crisis, too.”
Over the past several months, Altman said, he’s met with more than 500 people from the political world — “like 10 at a time, I have them over for dinner.”
Invariably during these meetings, Altman is asked if he wants to run for office, a question he shrugs off. Apparently he didn’t shrug it off convincingly enough, as word spread that he was considering a run for governor next year when Gov. Jerry Brown is termed out.
Altman isn’t running, but he is recruiting candidates to run for governor, lieutenant governor and Congress. He asks every candidate a simple question: Paint me your optimistic vision of the future, and how will you get there?
He’s been disappointed in the answers. And the political system that inspired them.
“People just want to talk about, ‘Here’s my fundraising strategy. Here’s my Excel spreadsheet,’ ” Altman said. “It’s like they haven’t thought about that question before.
“It’s pretty disappointing,” Altman said, “that the system has gotten so far away from what it should be.”
“I think that disrupting Democratic Party politics ... is a good thing.” James Rucker, Color of Change