In January 2017, Sergey Brin rallied beside progressive activists at San Francisco International Airport to protest Donald Trump’s travel ban. Eight years later, the Google co-founder sat with right-wing nationalists at Trump’s second inauguration.

Brin is far from the only tech mogul who has (apparently) warmed to Trump in recent years. Mark Zuckerberg once bankrolled liberal causes. Now, the Facebook founder dines with America’s favorite insurrectionist at Mar-a-Lago. In 2016, Marc Andreessen argued that Hillary Clinton was the “obvious choice” for president, and that any proposal to choke off immigration “makes me sick to my stomach.” Last year, Andreessen endorsed Trump.

And, of course, Elon Musk has gone from being an Obama-supporting climate hawk to quite possibly the single most influential advocate for — and patron of — far-right politics in the United States.

Silicon Valley’s apparent rightward shift was already causing consternation in blue America last year. But Democrats’ outrage and anxiety over the red-pilling of Silicon Valley has only increased since Inauguration Day — when Brin, Zuckerberg, Musk, Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook all sat with Trump’s camp in the Capitol Rotunda.

Some Democrats view Big Tech’s rightward lurch as a political crisis, one brought on by their own party’s policy mistakes. In this account, Democrats needlessly alienated a powerful industry by embracing an anti-corporate economic agenda that is both politically costly and substantively misguided.

Others in the party, meanwhile, insist that the Biden administration’s attempts to tame Big Tech’s power were both good politics and good policy. In their telling, voters hate corporate monopolies and love antitrust enforcement. And the extraordinary wealth and power of large tech companies constitute a threat to democratic government — a reality that Silicon Valley’s present chumminess with Trump only underscores.

From this vantage, the tech industry’s interests and the general public’s were always irreconcilable. And as Silicon Valley grew wealthier, it was bound to gravitate toward America’s more pro-business party. The Biden administration’s error, therefore, was not doing too much to antagonize Big Tech, but too little.

This debate collapses together several distinct questions. Some of these are ideological — such as whether the Biden administration’s approach to antitrust enforcement was worthwhile on the merits. Today though, I want to focus on two factual questions at the center of the intra-Democratic dispute over Big Tech:

• How and why did the tech industry’s politics change during the Biden era?
• Would it be politically damaging — or beneficial — for Democrats to maintain (or build upon) Joe Biden’s approach to regulating the tech industry?

I think the answers to both these questions are more complicated than either progressive or pro-business Democrats allow.

Why tech moved right

To understand why Silicon Valley has moved right in recent years, it’s helpful to consider what had previously tethered the industry to the center-left.

Many in the tech world argue that Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party were long bound by an implicit “deal”: Democrats would support the development of new technology, celebrate entrepreneurs, and take a light touch approach to regulating the digital sphere — in exchange for tech moguls backing socially liberal causes, progressive taxation, incremental expansions of the welfare state, philanthropies, and Democratic candidates.

This was a pretty good bargain for the typical tech founder — since it effectively entailed the Democratic Party embracing nearly all of their preferences. Survey data on the views of Silicon Valley moguls is limited. But a 2017 study of tech entrepreneurs’ politics found that they were left-leaning on almost all issues — including taxation and redistribution — but quite right-wing on questions of government regulation and labor unions. This distinct ideological profile has been dubbed “liberal-tarian.”

Given that Democrats have always been the party more supportive of regulating industry and promoting organized labor, the party’s alliance with tech was long fraught with some tension. But in recent years, both sides began souring on their supposed contract for a variety of reasons. But three were especially significant:

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