Opinion | Can Democrats Be the Party of the Future Again?

Until recently there was nothing dissonant about the fact that the heart of Silicon Valley is represented in the House by one of the most progressive members of Congress, Ro Khanna, a close ally of Bernie Sanders.A veteran of Barack Obama’s Commerce Department, Khanna first ran for office, as Politico put it, with the “overwhelming support of the deep-pocketed tech community’s C.E.O.s and venture capitalists,” and for years he maintained friendly relationships with men like Elon Musk, who blurbed his first book.He was elected in 2016, at the tail end of a period when technological progress and social progress still seemed intertwined.

Republicans distrusted Big Tech almost as much as they did Hollywood and the media, while Democrats positioned themselves as the party of the future.That period has now come to an end.Many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley have swung rightward, donating to Donald Trump and in some cases making their technologies more congenial to Republicans.Musk’s X has become a font of reactionary propaganda; as apocalyptic fires ravage Los Angeles, its algorithm is filling my feed with posts claiming, falsely, that the mayor slashed the Fire Department’s budget, and insisting that conditions for the inferno were created not by climate change but by diversity initiatives.This week Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would eliminate outside fact checking and allow for more racist, anti-L.G.B.T.Q.

and anti-immigrant rhetoric on the platform, arguing that the 2024 election feels “like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.” That’s an odd thing to say about the elevation of a man who is constantly trying to sue his critics into oblivion, but one that makes sense if you understand free speech primarily as freedom from liberal scolding.Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency industry, having used its unfathomable resources to help knock out of Congress economic populists like Senator Sherrod Brown...