Just look at the political actors, players, walk-ons in Ganesh’ s latest Historical Re -Write its like crewel embroidery aided by gusts of Hot Air .

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…the American left…, …Defund the Police…,…White Fragility…, Politics being downstream of culture,…, Dave Chappelle making sport of them…,

Editor: Paragraph 2: Ganesh switches tracks & provides what passes for diagnosis, but still enmeshed in disarray.

How Republicans have allowed this state of affairs to flip since then should be the subject of an inquest. And it might start in Palo Alto. If Donald Trump loses the presidential election, his courting of the tech world, or its embrace of him, won’t seem the masterstroke that it did at the time. However lavish the campaign donations from that quarter, much of the Republicans’ perceived abnormality stems from the same place.

Editor: Paragraph 3: Ganesh resorts to jitter-bug cadences: a not so subtle attack on ‘tech bros’? Is Ganesh an Oxbridger?

Tech weirdness tends to consist of two things. One is intellectual obsession. The favoured issues of tech bros are often good ones — demographic decline is serious, free speech is threatened — but get much too much prominence for the median voter’s tastes. The other component is tonal. Rife in tech is an almost teenage eagerness to provoke that jars outside of podcasts and internet chat rooms.

Editor: Paragraph 4: Enter JD Vance & Peter Thiel and Mike Pence, offered in the highlighted comic sentience. Ganesh attempt to construct a viable argument by way of Pence reads like the non sequitur it is!

Both glitches come together in the person of JD Vance, the Peter Thiel mentee who it is hard to imagine as running mate before the tech-Trump entente. What the GOP ticket needed was another Mike Pence, another reassuring emissary to suburban moderates. What emerged was someone on whom Trump is the restraining influence. If this unnerves enough voters in enough states, no donation was worth it.

Editor: Paragraph 5 : Ganesh compares The Palo Alto cast of mind, with that of the Wall Street cast of mind: they are not actually explored, but mentioned, alluded to, this is, at best riffing on already established themes of Ganesh. The ‘as if’ is just that, it has no rhetorical weight … it is almost Straussian in its potted history of investors ,financial hubs and the casual dishonesty of political conformists of all stripes?

It might be useful to compare the Palo Alto cast of mind with that of Wall Street, that other funder and shaper of US politics. If only because financial markets are sensitive to events — an oil shock, a foreign coup, a crop blight — those who work in them have to be at least somewhat tethered to practical reality. There is little profit in abstract thought, and not much time for it either. (Hedge funds being a partial exception.) Reinforcing this hard-headedness is the fact that financial hubs are situated in big cities, where human contact is constant and the messiness of life part of the furniture.

Editor: I’ll just quote portions from the remaining paragraphs in order. Ganesh’s chatter loses its ability to charm the reader, after a barrage of self-congratulation, masquerading as political insight, that reveals itself as wan propaganda aided by his myopic view from afar !

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Pour in thousands of first-class mathematicians and engineers, and it would be strange if a sort of brilliant unworldliness didn’t take root. As a generator of wealth, US tech is phenomenal. As an actor in politics, it can be maladroit.

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No, the problem is absolutism: the taking of ideas, left or right, to the nth degree. Riots in the UK? “Civil war is inevitable”, judges Elon Musk, of a nation that didn’t have a civil war over the Corn Laws, the Somme or the loss of empire. This very Northern Californian millenarianism is weird, not to say wrong and often unfalsifiable.

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 To judge by some tweeted reactions from tech moguls to the Vance appointment (“WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY”) the right is now the self-high-fiving in-group with no clue how it comes across to uncommitted voters.

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You can be weird and win, of course. The Democrats strike me as about as overconfident as the Republicans of a month ago. The question is whether Trump’s chances are better or worse as a result of his much-celebrated support from the Valley. On balance, worse, I think. The Apprentice started airing in the pre-streaming Arcadia we call 2004. A man who owes his political breakthrough to linear television never needed his pioneering but odd new friends.

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